02.06.11: dinner (chicken wings with homemade barbecue sauce)

Homemade Chicken Wings with Spicy Barbecue Sauce

In order to understand what we were attempting here, I need to comment that my restaurant in the area is Dinosaur Barbecue. Without spending the next fourteen paragraphs waxing on about the merits and wonders of this place, I will simply say that if you want good, fun barbecue in NYC, look them up.

I enjoy chicken wings, very much. Ever since I made them for E and I, (Vietnamese-style) she and I have been waiting for the next opportunity to recapture the magic, so to speak. Sure, it was Super Bowl Sunday, but I assure you our mutual and exclusive thirst for chicken wings that night was something altogether stranger than simply wanting traditional football fare, as she alluded to yesterday. Alton Brown did a show on making wings at home, but we both were in the mood for saucier, more BBQ-stlye wings opposed to Buffalo so I figured I’d sauce them before cooking them as well as after (with Buffalo, the cooking should be done dry then sauced at the very end). This was fortunate because making crispy wings without a deep fryer is… arcane at best.

Barbecue-smothered chicken wings, up close.

For these, it was a simple matter of constructing a sauce early enough in the day to let the wings have a good sit in some of it, thinned with some fresh OJ and then to brush them with the rest before they went into the oven (I actually reserved a little more for saucing on the plate). The sauce was from the Gourmet cookbook, so I won’t reproduce it here, but it contained ketchup, vinegar, OJ, soy, Worcestershire, mustard and maybe a bit too much brown sugar. It was still a very good sauce, though I added lots of extra paprika and chipotle for smokiness.

The wings did 20 minutes in a 425 F hotbox on a cooling rack over a cookie sheet before getting flipped for another 20 minutes. The result was sublime. Eating too many wings and getting a stomach ache sublime. When I try again, I may try the super-dry method and toss the little babies in hot sauce and butter. If all I can do now is fantasize about the next time I attempt the recipe, it must have been a triumph. So until next time  friends, fixate on a favorite–regardless of the source–and make it your own. Cook on!