EPTAs some of you may have seen last week I decided to make my own hot sauce with my home grown, freshly harvested chilis. It turned out absolutely delicious! In the blog people gave me the excellent idea to make some hot wings with the sauce and preferably do another blog with the results. So here I am!
Now first off I should explain that I have never actually eaten hot wings, nor buffalo wings which I understand to be roughly the same thing, before. Much less made them. With that in mind I set about stalking various cooking sites trying to find out what hot wings really was and how to one would make some. As far as I could work out hot wings is chicken legs coated with flour and then deep fried. The deep fried chicken is then coated in a sauce based on smelted butter and hot sauce. Sounds simple enough! I formed a basic plan of attack and decided to make the rest up as I went along. This Friday it happened and it turned out very nice!
Now I did have some logistical issues. The biggest issue was probably that I don't have much experience in deep frying things and the fact that I don't have a deep fryer nor a thermometer that could measure over 120°C. This was mildly inconvenient since I had no clue what temperature the oil had. I pretty much just turned it up to the max, had the lid to the pot nearby and hoped for the best.
Another one was that I couldn't get a hold of chicken wings (hurray for living in a tiny Swedish town!) which meant that I had to go with chicken legs that I divided into drumsticks and thighs. These were still relatively big though. In combination with the lack of temperature control on the oil this meant that I had to finish the chicken off in the oven to get them properly cooked through. Not ideal, but it worked out in the end.
I am going to apologize in advance this time for the bad quality of the pictures, I'm a terrible photographer, and the lack of measurements. I'm terrible at measuring stuff, I just put as much in as I feel might be right and taste. Taste often when you cook!
The Dip!
Sifting through the endless amounts of recipes you find when googling 'hot wings recipe' I quickly found out that you need a dip. I decided to go with two different kinds: a blue cheese dip and a guacamole. Both quite simple to make and both absolutely delicious!
For the blue cheese dip all I really did was I got 3dl of sour cream and a chunk of blue cheese and mashed it together with a fork. Once I thought the cheese was mashed enough I added a little bit of honey for sweetness, a little dash of lime juice and some pepper and salt. Go easy with the salt since the cheese might already be quite salty.
The guacamole was nothing really fancy either. I got a couple of nice, ripe avocados. Mashed them up with a fork. Added one chopped tomato. Seasoned with some coriander, chili powder, lime juice and salt and pepper.
The Sauce
For the sauce I started out with about 200g of butter if I recall correctly, which was probably a bit overkill for the 2kg of chicken I had. Either way I smelted the butter and then added a couple of cloves of crushed garlic to it. I then divided this in half into two bowls since I had to make a hot one and a less hot one (there were going to be females present. Since females, apparently, have no penises they have no need nor wish to eat spicy food).
For the hot one I added a good chunk of my own home made hot sauce. I also added some Heinz chili sauce, you know the ketchupy one, paprika powder, coriander, cumin, lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper. Again I don't really know much of each. Taste, taste, taste!
The milder one was pretty much equal to the spicy one except that I had quite a bit less hot sauce, a bit more chili sauce, some ketchup and a little bit of red whine vinegar.
In hindsight I wouldn't bother with the vinegar and maybe not even the lemon juice, or add some more sugar, since the sauce ended up a little bit too sour. Not much, but a little.
The Chicken
And now the real star of the show, the chicken! I decided to go what I think is a bit of an unorthodox way of preparing the chicken. I think the standard way of doing hot wings involves either marinading the chicken or do little to no preparation before the deep frying. I decided to go with keeping the chicken parts in something that resembled a spiced brine for about 20h before I started cooking. Basically the brine consisted of about 2-2.5l of water, ~1.5dl salt, ~1.5dl sugar and some cajun spice. I had never tried this before so I went a bit easy on the salt since I didn't want it to be too salty, but I think today I would go with even more salt.
The idea behind this technique for preparing meat, as I understand it, is that the salt water will both 'pull' the spices into the meat, adding flavour, as well and both tenderizing and keeping the chicken moist. It seemed to work really well because the chicken turned out nicely flavoured, very tender and very succulent. I recommend giving this a try if you're preparing chicken of just about any kind!
But now we get down to the real business, the actual cooking part! I set the oil to warm and started to mix the flour for coating the chicken. I added black pepper, since there was no pepper in the brine, and some chili powder to the flour.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KPtlh.jpg)
Flour, pepper and chili ready for mixing
I then dried the chicken parts off with some household paper so they were as dry as possible before going into the flour.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/C7jBZ.jpg)
Mm, chicken! As dry as I managed to get them
The chicken was then coated thoroughly with the flour mix. I actually coated them multiple times to make sure I got a nice, thick and crispy skin on them. And then into the oil they went!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/UwvPw.jpg)
Ready for a nice soak in some oil
After they got a nice golden brown colour I fished them up from the oil and placed them on a baking tray and put them in a hot oven to make sure they were cooked all the way through.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RrwyP.jpg)
Nicely golden
When they were all done cooking all that was left to do was to place them in the sauces and make sure they were all fully coated in loveliness. Quickly onto the table and serve as soon as possible.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/JnjJk.jpg)
How could anyone say no to that?
Conclusion
Considering that I had never done hot wings before, I got the wrong kind of chicken, I had very little experience deep frying stuff and that I had no proper equipment to actually deep fry anything it all turned out very well in the end. The chicken was incredibly tasty and very much enjoyed by all who were there. It's a bit of a hassle deep frying stuff, but in the end I think it was all well worth it!
Next week my plan is to cook Asian food pretty much every day. I'll try to get back with more posts if it turns out ok!
