Cooking age.com - Serving chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday is a natural, whether you cheer for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Arizona Cardinals this weekend.
Nothing could be better than a menu of chicken wings, deviled eggs, tortilla chips with avocado dip, casseroles of macaroni and cheese, and baked beans. For dessert serve homemade brownies.
The tender meat and the crispy crust of a pan-fried or baked chicken wing is delicious anytime. Granted, this finger food can be messy, especially if you slather on a sauce or baste it with a glaze. But you can keep it simple and easy, and supply your guests with plenty of napkins.
On Super Bowl weekend more wings are sold than any other time of the year, says Debbie Moose, author of Wings: More Than 50 High-Flying Recipes for America’s Favorite Snack (Wiley, $16.95).
The National Chicken Council projects that 1 billion wing portions will be consumed during Super Bowl weekend, which is more than 90 million pounds of wings. In 2008, about 12 billion chicken wings (2.55 billion pounds) were marketed as wings (as opposed to wings on whole chicken or breast quarters). Of these, 3.5 billion wings were sold through food-service channels. Another 3.5 billion wings were sold in retail grocery stores.
Not only are there more restaurants specializing in cooking and serving wings, home cooks have countless interpretations of this classic finger food.
My interpretation is simple. I don’t even split the three-segment wings, although sometimes only wing pieces are available in stores..
According to the chicken council, the majority of wings are disjointed, with the third joint (known as the flapper) being exported to Asian countries and the meatier first and second joints sold domestically.
Simple cooking
Whether I fry or bake the wings, I dredge them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.
My mother, who was the ultimate chicken fryer, always made chicken in her iron frying pan. In recent years, rather than fry the chicken wings, I bake them at 400 degrees and they get quite crispy.
If I fry wings, it’s in an iron frying pan or an electric one, with about a half cup of Crisco heated to 350 or 375 degrees. You don’t want the heat too high or the wings can burn. I watch the heat and the chicken, turning the pieces every 15 minutes until they are golden brown. I add additional Crisco by the heaping tablespoon if necessary, but I don’t put too much in the pan. When the chicken is done, I remove each piece to a paper towel-covered platter so any grease is aborbed.
Pan frying takes time, and that’s probably why so many recipes call for deep frying, which requires extra safety when you have a pan of hot oil.
Basic Fried Wings from Debbie Moose’s Wings cookbook is more highly seasoned than my wings (with cayenne and pepper) and it cooks faster thanks to the deep fryer.
In fact it’s even hard to find a pan-fried chicken recipe unless you search a southern cookbook like Bon Appetit, Y’all by Virginia Willis (Ten Speed Press, $32.50) with Meme’s Fried Chicken and Gravy or Screen Doors and Sweet Tea by Martha Hall Foose (Potter, $32.50) with Proper Fried Chicken.
The key is selecting a fat (I prefer a tasteless fat), heating it to the proper temperature, and cooking chicken long enough so no pink juices run.
If you bake the seasoned flour-dredged wings at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, they get crispy enough.
I am surprised at the variety of chicken wing recipes that add so many ingredients and steps in the recipe.
One cookbook’s recipes marinated the wings for 1 to 24 hours. Wings are tender enough that they don’t need marinating.
A second concern is if you do marinate wings, do not reuse a marinade for basting whether the chicken is cooked on the grill or in the oven. “If I’m basting chicken, I would make a separate batch of marinade,” said Mrs. Moose in a phone interview.
“Wings take so well to a variety of ways of cooking, from marinade to rubs,” she says. “They are so small that there is not a lot of meat.” She thinks that if you marinate wings, three hours should be plenty of time.
When Kay Lynne Schaller tested the Baked Buffalo Wings recipe from Betty Crocker’s Cooking Basics (Wiley, $25.95), she marinated 1 ½ hours and found there was plenty of spice in the flavoring in that time.
Kickin’ Chicken Wings from Fix It & Forget It Big Cookbook by Phyllis Pellman Good (Good Books, $29.95) is made in a slow cooker. It’s a simple recipe.
Ms. Schaller tested wing recipes with flash frozen chicken wings and fresh wings. When using the slow cooker recipe, the flash frozen chicken wings were thawed in a bag of cold water so as not to put frozen meat in a slow cooker.
Variety of flavors
Wings can also be grilled and then seasoned with glazes and sauces. “I had fun coming up with glazes,” says Ms. Moose about her cookbook noting Ginger-Lime Wings with Rum Glaze. Other recipes include Roasted Black Pepper Wings with Maple Bourbon Glaze and Dean’s Asian Barbecued Chicken Wings. The flavors of fresh ginger and hot Thai chili-garlic sauce are found in Tangy Thai Wings. The heat builds as you eat them.
Orange Hoisin Spiced Chicken Wings from the National Chicken Council is seasoned with a blend of spice mix of Chinese five spice powder, ground ginger, chili powder, and cayenne pepper. Then the wings are deep-fried in canola oil until skin is crispy, about 8 to 9 minutes. The cooked wings are tossed with Orange Hoisin Sauce.
While deep-fried chicken wings have been a staple of Southern cooking, the concept of cooking wings in peppery hot sauce was born in 1964 at Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY. Co-owner Teressa Bellissimo cooked leftover wings in hot sauce as a late-night snack. Her son and his friends liked them so much, that the Bellissimos put them on the menu the next day and served them with celery slices and bleu cheese sauce. Buffalo Wings were an instant hit.
The concept went national in 1990 when McDonald’s began selling Mighty Wings at some restaurants. KFC rolled out Hot Wings a year later