I’m going to clue the world in to how many meals cooked at home, even obscure ones, come about.  Usually it will start wirg Margaret saying something like, “<randomness> sounds good, huh?” Since the economy continues to anally rape my spending abilities I’ve been really focused on perfecting at home things that we both like to eat out.  It generally takes me 3x to get a recipe nailed down and then I try to refine the flavors until I have something close to perfect.  The wings I make definitely approach perfection on the flavor spectrum, the tricky part of the wings is actually the cooking process.  There are different camps for different frying oils, dredging, nekkid wings, and there are even those who fight about whether or not to fry or bake the wings.  Basically most people feel pretty strongly about the “right way” to do up some hot chicken wangs.  I fry mine, if you bake yours and they taste as good as mine that’s great, I would acknowledge that method as legit.  However….let’s be honest, they’re not going to be as good as mine so next time try the fry method, yea?

So the essence of Margaret’s challenge is to serve up the perfect wing.  The perfect wing to me is crispy on the outside but very moist inside.  The skin should render out and form a barrier between flesh and sauce.  The sauce to me shouldn’t drench the wing and can’t be too buttery.  I like a nice balance.  I also like a lot of spice, the kind that makes things uncomfortable 6 wings in spice.  Most importantly the wing should taste like chicken first and I think that so many wings are just average because the chicken itself is bad quality.

The only vegetable is in the ranch

I put out two batches this week.  The first was from a leftover bag of party wings we bought around the Superbowl, the second are locally raised Organic wings that were air chilled and butchered fresh for me.  I kept as much constant as possible, both were fried in canola oil (not my first choice, but it’s what we had) and both dredged in my flour mix which is fairly consistent.  I kept the wing sauce essentially the same though the second time around I played with the fresh pepper blend and I think it was a better mix than the first.  Finally to dip I made a blue cheese sauce the first time, and a roasted jalapeno cilantro ranch the second time.

Frozen Party Wings

Organic Chicken Wings

Oh the tricky frying method, it can get you everytime.  When I did my party wings they were fried perfectly, hot and juicy inside and not a trade of rubbery skin or fat.  The meat literally will fall off the bone with minimal effort when they’re done right.  Paired with my blue cheese these were fantastic and there wasn’t really any complaints to be made.  I chose to try and repeat the performance with fresh organic wings because I knew they’d be meatier and have better flavor and skin. I think that you can see in the two pictures the difference in the size of the drummettes, the organic drummettes are huge compared to the first batch.

To make perfect wings, a key trick in getting the skin crisp is to minimize moisture and I knew that the air chilled wings would have less retained water then the first batch.  Chalk it up to user error, there were several mistakes made frying the second batch.  I didn’t let the skin fully render and a few pieces had a lot of extra skin that unraveled itself in the fry pot.  This left the batch somewhat inconsistent, some of the wings were perfect and juicy, the flavor of the chicken coming through to get a big flavor boost from perfect wing sauce.  Others however had a bit too much chew to them which left Margaret disappointed.  She has a fat phobia with her food so mistakes like this pretty much ruin dinner for her.  She ate 3, I ate 14….and regretted it…not really.  Ultimately there was a noticeable difference between the two batches though a little extra care has to be taken to make sure that the larger size of the fresh wings is accounted for.  Third time will be a charm and I know that I’ll get the best of both efforts rolled into one.

Oh, as a back-up plan for Margaret just in case I fucked up my wings, which I did for her taste, I made perfect hand-cut pomme frites.  These I don’t need any repeats on, they’ve been perfected for quite some time now.  Double fry method all the way, and be generous with the sea salt when they come out.

Perfect Pomme-Frites