Spicy chicken wings are everyone’s favourite. You can cook them in the oven, use the oven-grill function, or slap them on a barbecue. Either way, you’ll wish there were twice as many.
The mystery of chicken parts
I have often wondered what happens to all the chicken legs, and a quantity of chicken breasts? The matter is fairly uncomplicated as far as a whole roast chicken goes: usually somebody prefers white and somebody else dark meat, except for those despicable wasters who roast a chicken only to eat breasts and chuck the rest out.
How many chicken wings can you eat?
But if you buy and cook your chicken parts selectively, it’s vastly disproportionate. I consider myself an average chicken eater but I can only manage one breast fillet for one dinner, or even half if the clucker is enormous. And one leg at a time. But wings? Hey, give me a dozen and I’ll look for more.
Take a look at your butcher’s or the supermarket meat counter: especially come summer and barbecue season, there will be a pile of dozen to twenty breasts and two dozen racks of wings – racks! that’s at least three on a skewer. Where’s the remainder of those chickens?
How many wings do chicken have?
So I sense either a terrible wastage of the non-wing bits of chicken, or there are mutant birds secretly running about the coops – or the labs, more likely. Six-winged beasts, like miniature earthly seraphim, organically reared I hope because, obviously, they can fly farther.
How to cook chicken wings at home?
I must admit I don’t prepare them myself very often as my butcher spoils me for choice with racks of variously marinated, grill-ready wings. I know a couple of people virtually addicted to those, so it’s the classic case of laziness and ‘why make if you can buy’ attitude. But you know – if I put my mind to something, I usually come up trumps. Mainly in the food department.
Buttermilk - best for marinating chicken
Buttermilk does wonder to the chicken meat stopping it from getting dry – not apparently such a huge issue when it comes to fatty wings, but sometimes they do get a little dry on the barbecue.
Buttermilk plus hot sauce is pure genius and the chicken wouldn’t really need much else, if it wasn’t for Samin Nosrat inspired hot spicy oil. Instead of using it to flavour already cooked chicken like she instructs, I used the oil as a marinade so the wings got marinated twice.
And the result?
Are they twice as good thanks to that? You betcha!