Party Wings

Good in the oven. Better on the grill. Best in the BBQ

Repeatable quality wings your guests will flap over

Sources for items needed in this recipie:

Thermapen - It really does read temps in seconds
Skewer Set - Stainless steel - 2 Prongs - no more rotating wings
Silicone Stretch Food Bands - no more twine
Chicken wing sauce - Just a thought, find what works for you

Intro

These wings will fly off the platter once your guests get a whiff. The feathers might even fly when there’s only one left. You’ll be struttin around the coop plucking all the praise they cluck. Who knows, the chicks might even egg you on to hatch a dozen more. You’ll not go a fowel following the procedures outlined here and establishing yourself in the pecking order of chicken wing masters and crowing your success.

Selection

Try to avoid ‘enhanced’ chicken. The package will say in small print ‘Contains x% solution’ or some such thing. Avoid it if you can, but don’t knock yourself out. Foster Farms does not enhance, and the are readily available in the area.

Foster Farms offers two selections – Party wings and Chicken wings. The Chicken wing product has whole wings including the tips which need to be removed, and the drumette needs to be seperated from the wing. Party wings cost pennies more but the sections are already separated and there are no tips included – we ain’t making dim-sum afterall.

Plan on purchasing one tray of wings per 2 to 3 people depending on if it’s a meal or an appetizer, and the normal consumption rate given the setting planned.

Trimming

Both wing sections benefit from trimming.

The drumetts have a blob of fat about the size of a dime which is easily removable with kitchen sheers.

The wing section on the other hand, is more difficult to trim. The outward facing skin of the wing is thick with cellular pockets of fat its removal will benefit the wing. Again using kitchen sheers, experiment with how much you want to remove, and don’t be afraid to remove a good deal of the skin from the wing section – they’ll be just fine.

Skewering

Using a skewer makes life a lot easier. Plucking wings off a grate one-by-one is no fun. Heat escapes, the wings stop cooking, and this recepie gets to be a lot more work – get some skewers - when it comes time to sauce them, you’ll be glad you did.

Double skewers are even better because you can turn foods over without the food turning and causing trouble. If you don’t have doubles, two singles work almost as good

If using the double skewers, you don’t need to run both points of the skewer through the wing to get the benefit – only one point will do, while the other prong stops the wings from rotating with gravity while turning.

In this case, you will want to tie the points of the skewer with twine or use  high temperature silicon cooking  - folded over three times works for me.

Flavoring

Use your favorite poultry rub, and experiment with adding heat – cyan, chipottle or others. Cyan adds pure heat and no flavor. Chipottle adds both heat and some flavor, so experiment to find what works for you.

Start by adding only a light dusting of rub to your skewered wings – this is not for flavoring so much as it is for layering your flavors and for giving the wing sauce something to stick to when the time comes.

Cooking

As the title suggest, you can do these wings in a kitchen oven, but they really improve when cooked on a grill with charcoal. And they double improve when cooked in a BBQ.

Cook at 225 for 2 hours

You’re going to dunk the skewers in a tray of Franks, Texas Petes, or any other favorite hot wing sauce. To do this, form a tray of tin foil big enough to dunk the skewer into, but not so big that you waste a lot of sauce – about 3 inches wide by 12? inches long, and an inch high. There will be some wasted hot sauce when done, but it’s cheap when purchased at places like Smart and Final.

Once you put the wings on, get to making your tray and filling it with your sauce. Make sure to do this on a cutting board or plate because you’ll need to move it to and around your cook area.

After 1 hour, you’re ready for your first dunk. Dawn your rubber hot gloves or try it with tongs alone. Dunk each skewer of wings on both sides and place back into cooker.

Yum! That light sprinkle in step 1 was well cooked into the wings, and gave some ‘grab’ for the wing sauce. In 30 minutes, we’ll do it again. By that time, the sauce from the first dunk will be well baked onto the wings, and ready to accept another dunk layer.

After ½ hour, it’s time for the second dunk. Remove the skewers one at a time, and immediately probe the temperature with your Thermapen so you know how far you are from done.

Dunk them just the same way you did the first (with handling improvements you learned from the first dunk). This time though, before you replace the skewer in the cooker, you’re going to apply a healthy dose of your rub. This is important.

It’s important for two reasons - you’re layering and blending your flavors, and you’ve regenerated and refreshed some of the flavors of the rub that the heat has cooked away.

If all goes well, your cook will be done in another ½ hour, for a total cook time of two hours. But it all depends on your cooker, and as with everything you BBQ, your cook will improve.

If they’re done early or done late, don’t worry. They’ll still be better than any wings you’ve ever served, and they’ll improve greatly so long as you learn something from each cook.

Cooking in the oven or grill

If you use the oven, follow the same temperature and time guidelines outlined above. On the grill over charcoal, keep it indirect, and be very attentive not to over cook while still getting a couple of dunk coatings of hot sauce cooked onto the wings.

Doneness

You should always observe government recommended doneness temperatures but I prefer to pull wings a close to 160 as possible and the juices will run clear by then – that’s all I’m saying.

Also note that a pink coloration at the bone is perfectly normal with smoked chicken and is an no way an indication of being undercooked. Semi translucent meat or unclear fluids are.