The unexpectedly complex world of chicken wings
Tom Trainor has some thoughts on chicken wings.
“In the high-end food world, there’s always wine and food pairings, but honestly, you could pair a chicken wing with any beer and have a great experience. So it’s really the food of the people.”
Trainor is a Director of the Northeast Barbecue Society (nebs.org), a governing body for competitive barbecue in New England and surrounding states. He said that from a competitive barbecue perspective wings are a great medium for the “People’s Choice” awards at competitions. “Because they’re so approachable,” he said, “and because they’re such a fast cook, I think — part of what makes them popular. Everybody loves wings. Most of the time, in your people’s choice categories, if you’ve got public-facing events, inevitably, they’ll just ask the teams to cook wings. They’re affordable and they’re such a blank slate. A chicken wing can really be anything you want it to be. You can go spicy, you can go savory, you can go a little bit sweet, you can go into the barbecue end of things, you can go [into flavors] like garlic parm. Sometimes you don’t even need a sauce. You could just do a dry rub. Salt and pepper wings are as good as anything.”
This is as true for home cooks as for competitive ones, he said.
“The other thing is you don’t need high-end equipment to make a good chicken wing. You can cook a good chicken wing on a $100 Weber kettle. You can find a million YouTube videos on how to cook wings in a Vortex. [A Vortex is a grilling accessory used to create convection heat in a grill, as well as hot and cool zones.] You can knock them out in an hour and they are phenomenal. At least once a month in my backyard I’m cooking wings.”
Dean Ciggaras agrees. He is a competitive barbecuer, owner of Blue Nose Pit Masters (bluenosepitmasters.com), a barbecue catering company, and one of the organizers of an upcoming barbecue competition in Henniker at the end of October.
“Wings are a very fun thing to eat,” Ciggaras said. “I think we all know that. The wings can be like almost candy, if you know how to do them right. And, you know, I think we’ll all agree that if somebody orders a six-wing appetizer, it’s never enough, right?” He compared eating chicken wings to eating crawfish in the South. “Four to five pounds of crawfish? For who? For me! It’s that kind of thing. Plus, the creativity you can do with them in fairly quick order: There are so many different flavor profiles that you can put to them — Hawaiian, Asian fusion, maple syrup, traditional Southwestern. Profiles, you name it, you can have it. Straight up salt and pepper, a little lemon zest — a really good one is to just marinate it in Greek dressing.”
According to Ciggaras, the ideal chicken wing is tender and juicy on the inside, with a crispy exterior.
“The crisp on a wing,” he said, “you can achieve it, but it’s a fine line of getting that crunch versus just getting the bite-through. You’re looking for the bite-through in a competition, not necessarily the crunch. Crunch is nice if you can achieve it, but it’s not the end of the world. The flavor profile is what you want to shine through.”
“Bite-through” is a term in competitive barbecue that refers to rendering the fat out from under the skin of the chicken wing, which allows for crisping up the skin so that each bite will be distinct and the whole skin will not come off in one piece.
Ciggaras said one way of getting that combination of textures is to cook the wings slowly to begin with: “If you slow cook them at 250 degrees and then ratchet up the [heat] — if I cook a ton of wings, I may take them off [the heat] and put them on an open fire for 20 seconds apiece just to crisp them out.”
Achieving that perfect wing texture has been a career-long challenge for Kevin Anctil, the owner of Smokin’ Spanks Barbecue (smokinspanks.com), a Litchfield-based barbecue food truck. “There are a few things that you need to get right if you’re going to have a good wing,” he said. “I mean, I’ve had fried wings. Fried wings were my favorite for a long time until I figured out how to do them on the smoker that I was able to do with the fryer. When I fry wings, I do a double fry. I fry them once at a low temp and then fry them again at a higher temp to finish. It’s all about getting a crispy skin. I think the skin is the single most important factor in the wing. And if you can’t, if that’s not right, then it can’t be a good wing.”
Anctil’s strategy is to wait until his big cuts of meat have finished cooking before starting his wings.
“That way,” he said, “when the wings go on, they’re going into a dry pit. That helps me get the skin, the crust, where I want it to be. Moisture is also the enemy of the crust.” At the same time, he said, it’s important to keep the meat juicy. “That’s where finding the balance lies,” he said.
Barbecuing is one option, but there are any number of other directions wings can go. They have a reputation, for instance, for being an ideal bar food. Billy’s Sports Bar & Grill in Manchester sells a lot of them.
“We go through an average of six [40-pound] cases a week right now,” said cook Chris Kamel. During football season it’s probably 10 to 12.”
The wings at Billy’s are breaded, Kamel said. “And they’re always cooked fresh. We get them fresh a couple of times a week. We have barbecue [flavored wings], buffalo, double-dip is very popular. You know, garlic parm, all kinds of different sauces.” Cooking the wings is a quick process, he said. “We take them raw and then coat them in Supreme Breader [a commercial fry coating]. It’s like a clam-fry, almost. Once they’re done, we’ll toss them in, buffalo, barbecue, whichever sauce the customer ordered.”
Because Billy’s serves so many wings, Kamel said, the process is pretty quick.
“I get phone calls that say, ‘Oh, can I pre -order 40 wings?’ I say, ‘You know, you don’t need to pre-order them, right? Just come in and get them.’ Forty wings seems like a lot to them, but for us it’s just another day.” There are other forms of wings customers can order, if they want to go in a different direction, he said. “We also offer baked Jamaican jerk wings. You can order them baked in the oven, not fried. Or you can order [the regular wings] non-breaded — that would be fried in the fryer, but with no breading.”
For Kamel, the appeal of chicken wings is that they are so good for groups of people.
“A lot of customers share them,” he said. “They’ll get like 20 at a table; it’s like a big app basket that they can all eat from. Even the people that say, ‘I don’t think I’m hungry,’ and then they realize they have room enough for a wing. People love them during games. They can eat one or two, then go back and have some more.”
Granite Tapas & Cocktail Lounge in Hooksett serves wings with sharing in mind. Co-owner Jamie Jordan admitted that the word “tapas” can be misleading.
“We don’t serve small, individual portions,” she said. “It’s more shareable items. Some people get their food and they’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa! We didn’t realize how much food we were going to get!’” Which suits wings perfectly.
Granite Tapas has embraced the versatility of wings to an unusual extreme.
“We have a buffalo[-style wing],” Jordan listed, “a honey barbecue, a garlic parmesan, a garlic buffalo, we have a honey sriracha, we have sweet chili, we have mango-habanero, we have maple-jalapeno (which comes with fresh jalapeno slices on it and local maple syrup), we have Jamaican jerk — that one we have in the dry rub or in a wet sauce — then we have teriyaki, we have citrus chipotle, we have homemade honey mustard, we have buffalo-honey mustard, which also comes with the homemade honey mustard mixed with the homemade buffalo sauce. We have gold fever, which is barbecue mixed with the homemade honey mustard. That’s where you get the gold fever from. We have garlic-buffalo-parmesan, and then we have beer-cheese and bacon, which sounds really wild, but it’s actually really good. And then we have a strawberry glaze. And then for dry rubs, it’s the Caribbean Jerk, Cajun, and Habanero.”
“Oh, and we also have Thai peanut,” she added. “I forgot that one. It’s the chef’s special.”
With so many varieties of wings on the menu, Granite Tapas par-cooks the chicken to be ready for the fryer.
“We season them, bake them and then fry them,” Jordan said. This allows the wings to be fried quickly and at a high temperature, to get that crispy skin. The restaurant’s most popular flavor of wings however, is something unexpected, she added.
“By far,” she said, “it’s the salted caramel wings. The wings are topped with the caramel sauce and then sea salt. By a huge margin, we sell more of those than anything on the menu.”
At the other extreme, Amphora Restaurant and Taverna in Derry only serves one style of wings.
“We have some amazing fig wings here,” said Nathan Piercy, one of Amphora’s cooks. “It’s an fig metexa sauce,” he said, “a thick glaze that goes over the wings after we deep-fry them. We cook them ahead of time in the oven to get them nice and crispy, we give them a nice deep fry. We cook them with some buffalo sauce on them, but there is absolutely no heat to these whatsoever. That sweetness of that thick glaze cuts all of that heat right out.”
“I don’t even think it’s on our actual physical menu,” Piercy said. “We call it a special, but it just never comes off the menu, because everyone loves them so much. If they’re gone, we have people complaining when they can’t have them.”
By contrast, the River Road Tavern in Bedford leans into the heat.
“We have what we call our regular sauce,” Joe Carey, the Tavern’s General and Kitchen Manager, said. “It’s just a regular mild buffalo sauce, which we make in house. It’s on a par with what you’d see on the basic level of most restaurants. Then we have what we call our “stupid sauce,” which is sort of intermediate. I think it’s pretty hot, but I don’t like to push the boundaries. A lot of people love [these wings] because there’s a lot of great flavor. We roast habaneros with spices, then cook the stupid sauce down for a few hours so it simmers and it really gets a nice flavor. And then it’s blended all together, so there’s no avoiding any of the seeds or anything like that. There’s no way to get away from [the heat], but it still has that nice flavor.”
“And then,” Carey said, “we go into what we call ‘the death punch,’ which is pretty brutal.”
“We make it with habanero oil,” he said. “We use vinegar, different spices and sriracha. It’s almost like a concentrated habanero puree. We have some other extracts that we put in as well. This is one of those things where a lot of folks come in, a lot of guests will say, ‘What’s the spiciest, hottest wing you have?’ And we give them that, and they say, ‘Oh, I can do it, no problem.’ And usually, within a minute or so, they’re either crying and quit or they get through it but they are asking for milk or sweating bullets. To me, that isn’t enjoyable, but I know a lot of folks love that.”
All of which is great, but invites the question: Is there a proper technique for eating chicken wings?
Alex LaChance is a food challenge enthusiast. He attempts challenges set by restaurants — Chez Vachon in Manchester, for example, which invites the brave or foolhardy to finish five pounds of poutine in under an hour. (“I believe I was the fifth person to take that down,” LaChance said.) He has a system for eating wings.
“There’s definitely a process going on in my head every time,” he said. “And it comes down to drums versus flats, two different plans of attack. With the flat, where the two bones meet, I like to rip out one of the bones. Then you can kind of daintily hold it by one end and pretty much suck the meat right off. With a drum, I’m more attacking the fattest part of it first. I’m just ripping off as much meat as I can with my teeth and going from there.”
While most restaurants refer to an order of “wings,” many places serve a combination of actual wings and tiny drumsticks. These are referred to as “flats” and “drums.”
LaChance said that while this level of planning might seem excessive to civilians, it’s worth thinking about seriously. “What’s more serious than food?” he asked. “We need water and we need air and then the next thing you literally need is food. It’s one of the most important things in life and I always think that if you don’t take it seriously you shouldn’t be in the business.”
And then there’s cooking wings yourself.
According to Kristen Chinosi, owner and Instructor at The Culinary Playground in Derry, completely drying chicken wings before cooking them is crucial to Wing Greatness.
“The key is to get those babies nice and dry before you bake them,” she said. “So if you have the forethought, put them on a cooling rack, set inside a baking sheet and leave them in the fridge uncovered overnight. The fridge is a great place to dry them out. And then, when you pull them out in preparation for baking, you pat them dry again, using a paper towel, because you’re not going to be able to crisp them up well if there’s excess moisture.” She dusts the chicken with salt, pepper and baking powder, she said, “then when I’m doing them in the oven, I do like to start at a lower temperature, around 300 degrees. And that’s going to cook some of the fat off of there. (This facilitates a good bite-through on the finished wing. See above.) Then you can crank the temperature up higher to 425 [degrees] or so for the remainder of the bake time until they’re nice and golden. And you’re baking them on that same setup where you have a cooling rack set in a baking sheet. That allows the air circulation all over, so they get nice and crispy on all sides.”
Featured Image: Chicken wings from the River Road Tavern. Photo by John Fladd
