This Pickle Buffalo Sauce Is My Super Bowl Secret Weapon

I found a new Buffalo sauce and I’m never going back to Frank’s RedHot again. If you regularly read Sporked, then you know what we do. But if you stumbled here from some shared link, let me get you up to speed: We taste foods—lots of foods—and then let you know which ones are good and which ones you can skip. I recently tasted some new Buffalo sauces in order to update our ranking of the best Buffalo sauce, and during that taste test I experienced true Buffalo joy. It’s all thanks to a dill pickle flavored Buffalo sauce.

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I’m kind of picky when it comes to Buffalo sauce. All too often a bottled Buffalo sauce tastes like stale oil or old butter. It can taste musty when Buffalo sauce should be bright and zippy and fresh. This dill pickle Buffalo sauce has fixed all that. 

Behold, my new love: Cleveland Kitchen Dill Pickle Buffalo Everything Sauce. It’s creamy. It’s tangy. It’s spicy. And it has genuine pickle flavor, which doesn’t clash with the Buffalo sauce flavor but instead enhances it. It makes sense that the pickle flavor is so good—Cleveland Kitchen primarily makes fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut (which we included in our best sauerkraut ranking), and pickles. That’s why I think this sauce works so well. It’s not made by a sauce company that’s trying to shoehorn in pickle flavor. They start with real, actual pickle brine and layer the Buffalo sauce flavors on top. 

In fact, Cleveland Kitchen pickle brine is the first ingredient on the label, followed by cayenne pepper puree, vinegar, avocado oil, water, buttermilk powder (for that creaminess), and some other less interesting stuff that grocery store products are made with. The brand even boasts that it’s made with “high-quality ingredients to support gut health.” Everyone’s gut could use some support, especially after partaking of a Super Bowl spread. 

I’m not the only one gushing over this Buffalo sauce. Reviews on Amazon include things like, “Not too dilly and not too faint of dill. Good buffalo flavor. Perfect. Chef’s kiss,” and “Better than my best homemade sauce.” It even inspired someone named Jeffrey who typically doesn’t leave reviews to pen this: “I’m not one for reviewing grocery items, but this deserves a review. This is everything you could want in a sandwich condiment, a finishing sauce for chicken, a burger condiment, or even mixed into a dip. This just has that something special. It’s creamy, it’s tangy, it has a wee bit of heat. But boy is it good!!!”

In this case (and possibly in this case only), Jeffrey and I agree. You gotta try this stuff! And the Super Bowl is the perfect excuse to splurge $6.50 on a bottle.