The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

I was picking up my car at Custom Sounds on South Lamar today when one of the guys who works there asked me a question I get all the time. “Why is your hot sauce different levels of heat some times?” A perfectly legitimate question that I get asked all the time so I figured there were several other common questions we get at Pluckers that we should answer for you.

OK, so the answer to the hot sauce question is that because we make all of our wing sauces from scratch, there can be a slight taste difference when making large batches. We use fresh cayenne pepper in our Buffalo sauces and similar to jalapenos or habaneros, cayenne peppers can be different levels of heat at different times of the year. Unfortunately, there isn’t a cayenne pepper heat level machine…well, actually there is a machine that does that but we’re too cheap to buy it. Anyways, we put the same amount of cayenne into the sauce and if the pepper is hotter, the sauce is hotter. So if you are afraid of the heat, start with the Medium and then move up to the Hot. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

What did the “MD” stand for in your old name “MD Pluckers” and why did you change it back to “Pluckers”?

A few years back, we got a letter from some outfit called Cluckers in San Antonio. For some reason they thought that our name sounded “deceptively similar” to their name. That is legal jargon for “change your name or I might sue you!” Being that we only had one restaurant at the time and very little money, we figured it was easier to find a way to change our name a little than to risk a lawsuit. So we came up with what we thought was a clever way to avoid any problems, just put our initials in front of it….get it? MD is short for Mark and Dave. As the creepy little Guinness guys say “Brilliant!”. One problem, we were too stupid to think that M.D. is short for “doctor”. So for the next few years, people would ask us who Dr. Pluckers was. After awhile we realized that we didn’t give a shit about Cluckers or their lawsuit and that MD Pluckers was stupid, so we changed the name back once and for all to Pluckers.
Is the story on the back of the menu really true?
If you are a loyal reader of this blog, then you already know the answer. If not, check out an earlier post to read some Pluckers history.

Do you Pluck your own chickens?

This may sound like a dumb question, but people ask it all the time. The answer is obviously no. However, when we first opened, Mark and I bought a chicken wing cutting machine and would cut all of our wings by hand. We thought it was a good idea to buy this 17-year old circular saw looking thing for $300 and to save money cutting our own wings. For the uninitiated, all wings have two joints, one that is called the drummette or drum and the other is called the flapper. You have to cut the two apart to have what people typically think of as one chicken wing.

Looking back on it, it was amazing that one of us didn’t lose a finger. It took us about one day to learn that we couldn’t trust an employee with this machine and it took us almost a year to realize that our own fingers were worth more than 5-cents extra a pound when we were exhausted working 18-hour days.