BATTLE OF THE WING (SAUCES)

There will be two matchups when the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Kansas City Chiefs in the season home opener on Sunday. One will be on and the other off the field. Tailgaters will be concocting their favorite sauce to slather on chicken wings, whether they are flats or drumettes, in honor of the team they are rooting.

For Chiefs fans, it’s an easy choice. Kansas City is known for its thick tomato-based barbecue sauce that ends up on everything from pulled pork to brisket. Sweetened with molasses and brown sugar, it’s both a sticky glaze and dipping sauce for wings.

But in Pittsburgh, no one flavor rules supreme. So to help choose a sauce for Sunday’s game, we asked one of the city’s best wing men — Matt Cercone of Big Shot Bob’s, who has created more than 150 distinct sauces since opening in Avalon in 2007 — to suggest a signature Pittsburgh sauce.

His best seller also is the first sauce he created — a hot and tangy hot sauce/barbecue sauce mix he dubbed The Talk of Beaver Falls. Tasty, but we’re talking the Steelers. So we attempted to sweet-talk out of him the recipe for the almost-aspopular Black and Gold sauce. He tosses wings in a mustard-based Carolina gold sauce that has a mild Cajun seasoning.

“You can’t get that out of me,” Mr. Cercone said with a laugh when he answered the phone call, and not just because he happened to be in the delivery room with his wife waiting for their daughter, Carmella Rose, to be born.

So we taste-tested our way to a Pittsburgh sauce instead and we think it is a pretty reasonable facsimile, and can compete with the Kansas City sauce head-on.