4 Things You Should Be Checking in the Sauces in Your Kitchen
If you own a restaurant, you probably taste a sauce to check its flavor. But are you also evaluating how it reacts to heat, how much you can create w...
When more than 350 restaurants start with fried chicken, the difference lies in how each one manages to turn it into its own unique offering.
Chicken Week 2026 features dishes that take fried chicken in new directions with different flavors, textures, and presentations. There are spicier, creamier, and sweeter versions, some influenced by other cuisines and others that use ingredients to transform a familiar dish into something unique.
The rest comes down to finding the combination that makes your dish stand out from the rest: a sauce, a contrast of flavors, a pickle, something crunchy, or an ingredient you didn't expect to find.
Here are some of the highlights from the first edition of Pollo Week 2026.
If several of these flavors sound familiar to you, it's no coincidence. We've already featured them in our blog posts on street food in New York and London, because part of our job is to help you see what's happening out there and how it might start to make sense on your menu.
| Trend | What does it mean? | Examples found | What You Can Create with Alimentos Delcasino |
| Sweet + Spicy | Spicy flavors are increasingly paired with sweet elements that help balance them out and work especially well with crispy chicken dishes. | Sweet chili, spicy honey, jalapeño honey, Buffalo honey, peperoncino honey, rocoto honey. | Delcasino Spicy Honey for dipping, glazing, or finishing chicken wings, tenders, burgers, or sandwiches. You can also explore this contrast with fruity flavors using our Fruity Hot Sauces, such as Mango Jalapeño, which combine fruit, sweetness, and heat in a single sauce. |
| Mayonnaise with Personality | Mayonnaise serves as a base to which you can add ingredients and create new flavors without having to make a sauce from scratch. | May: Sriracha, jalapeño, rocoto, ceviche, chipotle, sweet basil, pepper, truffle, black garlic, and aioli. | Start with Horeca Mayonnaise and customize it to suit the flavor your dish needs. You can add chipotle, jalapeño, garlic, herbs, citrus, pickles, or spices to create different sauces from the same base. |
| Ingredients That Create Contrast | Pickles and toppings help balance out creamier or more intense dishes by adding acidity, freshness, and different textures. | Pickled gherkins, pickled onions, sweet-and-sour radishes, coleslaw, crispy onions, and onion rings. | Make your own pickles or pickled onions with Delcasino White Vinegar and use them as an ingredient in your dish, not just as a side (SEE RECIPE). You can also make coleslaw with Horeca Mayonnaise (SEE RECIPE) or turn that same base into a tartare with pickles, onions, and herbs. (SEE RECIPE) |
| Global References | Flavors from other cuisines are starting to appear on the menu. | Tonkatsu, gochujang, miso, sriracha, chipotle, tzatziki, soy sauce, ginger, sesame, Nashville, panko, and ceviche-style. | A sauce you already have on hand can take you in a whole new flavor direction. At Entre Panes, we turned our Teriyaki Delcasino into a Yakitori Sauce (SEE RECIPE) by adding herbs, soy sauce, spices, and other ingredients. The idea isn't to completely change your cooking style—it's to take a familiar base and turn it into a new recipe. |
| Sauces and more elaborate dishes | Many dishes aren't based on a single flavor. They combine creamy, sweet, tart, smoky, or spicy elements to create dishes with more layers and a distinct identity. | Cherry tomato jam, bacon jam, black garlic mostanesa, and guasacaca. | Use our sauces as a starting point to create your own recipes: Acomer Sweet Corn Sauce with bacon, paprika, and cilantro(SEE RECIPE) ;Horeca Mayonnaise with bacon, onion, garlic, Delcasino soy sauce, and heavy cream; or Delcasino BBQ sauce combined with fruit, spices, or Spicy Honey. A familiar base can be transformed into something completely different with just a few ingredients. |
Chicken Week 2026 sends a clear message: when everyone starts with the same ingredient, the details begin to make all the difference. A sauce, a pickle, a crunchy element, or an unexpected combination—and that also raises a question for restaurants:
How many new ideas can come from the foundation they've already laid in the kitchen?
That's where Alimentos Delcasino comes in. Our product portfolio lets you start with familiar sauces and bases to develop new combinations, adapt flavors, and create dishes that fit different parts of the menu—without having to start from scratch.
Because creating something different doesn't always mean changing everything.
Delcasino Foods.
You come up with the idea; we'll provide the sauces.
