Fridays are for Food

I have been cooking since I was a teenager. I love food. I love eating food, I love prepping food, I love thinking about food. Most of my vacations involve serious consideration about where we’ll eat when we get to our destinations.

Fridays here at the blog will be devoted to food. Sometimes it will be links to recipes or articles, sometimes it will be my own recipes, sometimes it will be theological reflections of the joys, blessings, and dangers of food. Like all of creation, it’s a great gift and a terrible master.

For this first week, I thought I’d share my method of cooking chicken wings. It’s an unglamorous task, but one that reaps great rewards when done well. There’s nothing better during a football or basketball game than a heaping pile of wings, where the meat falls off the bones and the skin is crispy and spicy.

The method here is the most important part. You could substitute a lot ingredients, and I tend to never do anything the same way twice myself. Here’s the method:

Ingredients:

• 3-4 lbs. chicken wings
• Kosher salt
• Black Pepper
• Smoked Paprika
• Olive Oil
• 1 Bottle of Beer (or 2 Cups of Broth- whatever your conscience permits)
• 1 Bottle of Wing Sauce (I like this one or you can make your own — I generally just buy a bottle because it doesn’t necessarily taste a whole lot better to make your own.)

Directions

• Rinse the wings thoroughly under cold water. Normally, you’d pat them dry afterwards, but it’s not necessary here.
• Spread the wings evenly in a roasting pan. Salt and pepper liberally, and sprinkle just a little of the smoked paprika over them.
• Pour in the whole bottle of beer.
• Cover tightly with foil and roast in a 400 degree oven for an hour to an hour and a half. You want the meat ready to just flake right off the bones. They will be an unappetizing pale color, but that’s okay.
• Remove from the oven. Pour off the liquid.
• Fire up your broiler and put an oven rack on the second-highest shelf.
• Transfer the wings to baking sheet(s) that have been brushed with olive oil or canola oil (or you could put them back in the roasting pan, if you wipe it out and oil it). Make sure they have “breathing room” – wings shouldn’t be touching. Also – be gentle with the wings. They’ll fall apart if you’re rough with them.
• Salt and pepper your wings on both sides, then place them with the meatiest side down on the baking sheets or pans.
• Brush them heavily with wing sauce. I’m a big fan of these brushes.
• When the broiler has thoroughly heated up, put the wings in the oven. Stay close – you need to watch them. Broil for 3-5 minutes, letting the skin get crispy and dark around the edges.
• Remove from the broiler, gently flip the wings, brush again with wing sauce, and return to the broiler. They should be meaty side up this time. Again, watch them, but it will probably take 3-5 minutes.
• At this point, if you like your wings dripping with sauce and messy, brush them again before plating. I like mine without extra sauce. This method is a little less of a mess to eat (the sauce dries out on the skin a bit) and has plenty of flavor.

While I’m at it here’s a similar method for cooking frozen French fries. Real fries are a two-stage process: you confit them in medium-hot oil to cook through, then you finish in very hot oil to make crispy. But that’s a lot of mess on your stove top, and frying is generally unhealthier than roasting and more expensive (because of the amount of oil you have to use).

You can buy some decent frozen French fries (we get frozen sweet potato fries from Costco) and make them taste great with this method.

• Put the still-frozen spuds in a big bowl. Drizzle with peanut oil and sprinkle with salt. Toss until everything has a light coating. (You can also use olive oil, and add in some garlic, and rosemary that you’ve smashed up in a mortar and pestle or one of those handy flavor-shakers.)
• Spread evenly on a baking sheet and roast for 15-25 minutes in an oven that’s 400 degrees or so. (Perhaps while you’re roasting some wings.)
• Remove from the oven when they’re cooked through and soggy. Stir and flip them gently to recoat with oil.
• Finish under the broiler like you do the wings, letting them get golden and crispy.

This is actually all pretty easy to pull off. The only hard part is being patient with the wings both when they’re braising (let them get really tender) and when they’re broiling (don’t be afraid of a little char on the tips!).

Enjoy!