a sauceNashville hot paste
also: hot oil · the paste · cayenne paste
Ordered by rung: mild, medium, hot, extra hot, and a top rung each shop names for itself.
A cayenne paste, spooned onto fried chicken the moment it leaves the fryer. Fat carries it — lard or a ladle of the frying oil itself — which is why it soaks in rather than sitting on top, and why the bird turns deep red. Some shops add sugar, garlic or extra hot sauce. Some apply it before breading instead of after. Recipes are kept close.
The story Cited · wp-hot-chicken
Spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville's African-American communities for generations; anecdotal evidence puts the dish as early as the 1930s, though the current style of spice paste may only run back to the mid-1970s.
The origin generally accepted belongs to the family of André Prince Jeffries, who has run Prince's Hot Chicken Shack since 1980. Before that it belonged to her great-uncle, Thornton Prince III. Jeffries says the development was an accident: Thornton was a womaniser, and after a late Saturday night his girlfriend cooked him a fried chicken breakfast with extra pepper as revenge. He liked it. By the mid-1930s he and his brothers had their own recipe and had opened the BBQ Chicken Shack café.
By 2015 an estimated two dozen restaurants in the Nashville area served hot chicken. Bill Purcell, mayor of Nashville, sponsored the Music City Hot Chicken Festival and called his table at Prince's his "second office". KFC began selling Nashville Hot Chicken across its US restaurants in January 2016 after a Pittsburgh-area trial it called the most successful product testing in its recent history, and ran it in the UK from 22 May to 18 June 2017. Buffalo Wild Wings offers Nashville hot-style wings.
Inference — the paste is the only sauce in this set that is applied with a spoon and a gloved hand rather than poured or shaken, and that is what keeps it off supermarket shelves in its own form.
How it is done Tradition
Fry the wings. While they drain, whisk cayenne and the shop's other powders into hot fat — lard, or oil dipped straight out of the fryer. Spoon it over with a gloved hand and squeeze it lightly into the crust. White bread underneath catches what runs off; pickle chips go on top. Sauce and bird are never separated, so there is no dip and no bowl.
Today Harvested · fdc-franks-redhot-nashville-hot
Sold across Nashville and, since 2016, by chains that bottle or powder an approximation. Frank's RedHot sells a Nashville Hot Wings Sauce whose label reads 340 mg sodium and 2 g sugar in a tablespoon as of 16 September 2026 — vinegar-led, with canola oil fourth, which is a bottle's answer to a paste. The shacks' own pastes have no label, no sodium figure and no Scoville number, and are held as secrets.
The particulars
| base | other |
|---|---|
| heat | very hot |
| region | Nashville, The United States |
| confidence | medium · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | house · Nashville, TN |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | ? |
| vinegar | ? |
| butter or oil | ? |
| tomato | ? |
| sugar | ? |
| soy sauce | ? |
| mustard | ? |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | cayenne pepper, lard or frying oil, sugar, garlic or additional hot sauce in some shops |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. kind is 'house'. Recipes, cooking methods and preparation steps are described as closely guarded secrets proprietary to each restaurant, so there is no label and nothing to weigh. The ingredient line is what the cited description names, in no label order — the ranks are null rather than guessed. For a bottled approximation with a real panel, see Frank's RedHot Nashville Hot Wings Sauce, FDC 2621729: distilled vinegar, aged cayenne red peppers, sugar, canola oil, water, molasses, salt, spices; 1 tbsp serving, 340 mg sodium, 2 g sugar. That is a different object and is not recorded as this one. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
Nashville hot chicken spice paste, as described
- cayenne pepper
- sugar (some restaurants)
- garlic (some restaurants)
- additional hot sauce (some restaurants)
Ingredients only, and barely that. The source says recipes, cooking methods and preparation steps are often closely guarded secrets proprietary to the specific restaurant; cayenne is the one ingredient it names for a typical paste. The fat that carries it is not specified there, so it is left off this list.
Frank's RedHot Nashville Hot Wings Sauce, as labelled
- distilled vinegar
- aged cayenne red peppers
- sugar
- canola oil
- water
- molasses
- salt
- spices (including black pepper, paprika)
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- modified corn starch
- xanthan gum (thickener)
- natural flavor
Ingredients only, in label order, from the USDA branded-food panel. A bottle's answer to a paste: vinegar first, oil fourth, and nothing in it that goes on with a gloved hand.
Not to be confused with
- Buffalo sauce — What carries the cayenne. Buffalo sauce carries it in butter and vinegar; this carries it in frying fat and goes on with a spoon.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Hot chicken · link
- Prince's Hot Chicken Shack · link
- Hattie B's Hot Chicken · link
- Frank's RedHot Nashville Hot Wings Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 2621729) · link
- Cayenne pepper · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.