The Perfect Wing

Due to popular demand, or I should say the good idea of one of my readers, I have created a page containing the current recipe for my wings. I will update this as the wings evolve, so that you may all share in the glory of perfect wings without having to crawl the site for the various recipe components.

It is linked in the menu bar, or right here

Since my last trip out there I have been pretty sure that they are the best chain big wing establishment. But, I had tried all their wings, I had my fill, or had I?

While i was there last time, it was mentioned to me that there was a certain contest. A contest where the chef’s churn out their hottest wings, they pout all sorts of hot sauce on them and send them out. If you can finish these 6 wings in less than 5 minutes you get your picture on the wall or some such nonsense. Not much of a challenge really.

Last visit, i was too bust gorging myself on their wide selection of wings to even attempt such a thing. Additionally, I didn’t want to ruin my palate for the tasting. This time i had no such proclivity. After some prodding of the server towards the nature of the contest, and what the chef’s actually do to the wings, we learned that they take their hottest wings and dump a bunch of other unknown sauces on them. I was satisfied that they didn’t dip them in corrosive liquid ,and that I wouldn’t have to coat my tongue in wax, or talk to Johnny Cash in the desert. So I said, why not, go ahead, lets do this.

They brought the wings out with looks of caution in their eyes and set them in front of me. The wings didn’t smell too strong, though there was a definite spice chemical smell coming from them. I dug in….

They weren’t too bad, nothing like some of the sauces i had made by accident. I got through the wings in 1 minute and 24 seconds. Generally, i was fine. I hade face irritation from the hot sauce on my skin and my stomach was churning a bit. Things were good.

But this is where my intellect failed. Perhaps I had taken part in one to many drinks, perhaps the spiciness of the wings had given me the vapors. But, I ordered a milk shake. Now, as any one of you reasonably minded individuals might know, a pint of what is essentially ice cream on top of hot, spicy wings is not what the doctor orders. I instantly inflated and, my friends, I am sad to say, I puked, thankfully in a toilet.

If you are there and are accustomed to heat, do the challenge. Just to impress the wait staff. But, at any cost, do not order a milkshake.

Well, it’s been a good year since I posted anything. Let’s see who is still listening. The batch I made with the home made sauce is come and gone and many things have changed, but i will finish up the entry. I am sure you are all wondering what happened. Did the sauce come out okay? Did it explode in a great big ball of flame consuming me and my kitchen? Was I poisoned?

Only one of those things has an answer, the rest are nonsense. But first, to the process…

After last post I let the hot sauce mixture sit in the fridge for about a week, my line of thinking was that the longer it sits the better for the sauce. Later I learned that a good hot sauce should result from a fermented pepper and salt mash, fermenting for at least 6 months.

A good article describing the process resides here http://www.pickl-it.com/blog/410/3-way%20pickled%20peppers/ . Scroll down to the part about the Dry-Brine Pepper Mash. I am currently in the process of making a pepper mash based sauce, but this is for a different post.

Once the sauce had sat in the fridge for a period of time I was ready to make wings. Now, if you have been reading this blog at all, you will know that my favorite form of wings sauce is the spicy bbq. I usually create this sauce by making a typical barbeque sauce and substituting the vinegar component of the sauce for my hot sauce [here is a post about it]. Today was no different. I went through much the same process in creating the barbeque sauce.

• 1 12oz Jar molasses
• 2 cans of tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt

This time for the vinegar component, I used my home made hot sauce and cooked for a short period of time. Just enough to get it hot, but not enough to separate the peper oils from the mixture. You can tell when you have gone too far because a deep red oily liquid will start floating around the top of the pot as it cooks. I noticed this tends to make the sauce too painful for most people, not in the mouth.

Once i had finished with the sauce, I cooked the wings that I had brining for a night using the adaptation of Kittencal’s brine that I love so much. Substitute buttermilk with heavy cream, substitute cumin with cayenne pepper (dried).

I like to fry the wings for about 8 minutes a batch, basically until they have a light crispy outer shell and don’t stick to eachother. Shake the basket around a bunch during the process to break up the wings and make sure they all get fried. You might know this already, if you do, then good, i guess. I mean it is kinda fryer 101, but i am just a humble country programmer who once didn’t know a fryer from a fricassee.

Then, wings out of the fryer onto paper towels to absorb the extra oil, not too long mind you. You want the wings hot when you throw them into the sauce.  Wings into the delicious sauce bath to get all awesome.

As you may imagine, these turned out, well, perfect. Essentially this was the cause of not posting in a long time, i was satisfied. But, as I have delved further into hot sauces, I have realized there is still much to learn about the gentle art of wing crafting. So, more posts to come, with more pictures and more awesome.

And now the long awaited results of the home made hot sauce experiment…

After the initial mixing of the hot sauce i let it sit in the barrel for two full weeks.

The two weeks being up, filtered the sauce through a cheese cloth to remove all the chunkiness that resulted from the fresh ground peppers. After the filter i had two parts of the sauce: the main vinegar/pepper mix and the chunky vinegar smelling goop. The sauce had a nice flavor and heat, but it wasn’t quite as hot as i was hoping.

Not wanting to waste any of these delicious pepper remnants i set them out on a paper plate to dry out.

Placed the sauce into the fridge while the peppers dried. This took about three days for the vinegar to evaporate completely and come away with a dry red pepper spice.

… (Dots to simulate the passing of time)

I took the dry peppers and ground them up in the handy coffee grinder.

Once ground i had a nice powdery, only slightly vinegar smelling, pepper mix.

I then took the hot sauce out of the fridge and put it into a pot on the stove so i could mix the remaining peppers into it and make sure the spice is distributed properly. Briefly i brought the sauce to a boil once everything was added and added some granulated sugar to bring down the vinegar bite just a bit.

After boiling for a second and mixing in the sugar (about a cup) it had a nice spiciness to it and very closely resembled a tabasco sauce with just a bit more heat than your typical tabasco. I took the resulting sauce and put it in the fridge until i was ready to make the wing sauce from it.

Next up, the wing sauce from complete scratch…. wait for it.

As promised, and much to the addition of gluttony to my list of sins, several others and I took a trip to Buffalo Wild Wings in Wilmington DE. As some of you may know, if you have visited their establishment, they have a large selection of sauces. a total of 14 standard sauces, plus an additional two ‘specials’ for the day we visited. In order to provide an appropriate and complete review of the restaurant we ordered a serving of 6 wings for each type of sauce. This madness was not without a plan, from sweet to hot, much like you would taste a red wine before a white as to not corrupt your taste buds, the spicy of the hot would make the sweet and any other subtle flavors dulled and ruin the review.

The sauces were as follows

• Sweet BBQ – This was an unremarkable sauce. Pretty good but nothing I hadn’t tasted or made before. I was a nice starter but didnt have any interesting flavors to it. Mind you, i wouldnt discount this sauce if you like the sweet BBQ variety, it was damn good for what it was.  Rating: C




• Teriyaki - Way better than my teriyaki. They balanced the soy sauce and the spice very well. I am not personally a huge fan of the teriyaki style, but it was well received by Julie.  Rating: B




• Mild - Your standard run of the mill sauce. I notice that most wing places tone down their spiciness. Most of the time when you get a mild labeled sauce you can pretty much assume it won’t have much heat to it at all, and Buffalo Wild Wings was no exception. I suppose they have to have something for people who dont like their wings spicy (Whoever they are). Rating: D




• Parmesan Garlic - One of the more interesting flavors there, this was a creamy almost salad dressing like sauce. It was pretty good. I couldn’t eat a whole lot of them because the parmesan flavor gets a little overwhelming.  But, overall, i would say this was one of my favorites based on variety alone. Rating: B+




• Medium - Good old medium. Their medium spiced wings had barely any spice, mind you we had been eating wings for quite a bit and tried a variety of flavors, but the medium at BWW is pretty much what you could expect from your standard pizza shop. The quality of meat was much better, but the sauce on these, unremarkable. Rating: D




• Honey BBQ – I personally love the honey BBQ. I tend to devour these in swaths due to the fact that they taste like candy. BWW has a good BBQ sauce going for them.  Rating: B




• Spicy Garlic - The spicy garlic had a decent creeping heat to them. You know the one, where you dont taste it at first, but slowly it builds. This was a very good sauce and I am tempted to try my hand at it. It was a salty spicy balance that i loved.  Rating: B+




• Asian Zing - Asian zing is a kind of generic flavor name. This could have been any variety of asian flavors. But, as it turns out, it was very much like a duck sauce and szechuan tasting spice (yes i know szechuan is a region).  Pretty tasty. Rating: B+




• Caribbean Jerk - A good variety of spices went into this sauce. It had a complexity to go along with its spiciness. One of the better sauces there. Rating: A




• Hot BBQ – One of my personal favorites, if you havent been able to tell from reading this site. I cant seem to get away from the combination of hot and sweet that the Hot BBQ sauce provides. Not giving it an A because i know i am biased. Rating: B+




• Hot - Standard, should be hot but isnt actually all that hot, hot sauce. Rating: D+




• Mango Habenero – This sauce ruled the house, brought some home for later. The mango made the sweet not boring and hid the spicy until you had fully devoured the wing (which wasnt long). These things were awesome, i want some right now just thinking about it. Rating: A++




• Wild - These were what the ‘hot’ sauce should have been. They had all the spice that was lacking in the hot and a better variety of flavor in them. Get these if you want hot wings at BWW. Rating: A




• Blazin‘ – Toted as the hottest wings there. You know these, every restaurant has them. They take your order with a look of dread and bring them out with long metal tongs. Well, not really, but that is almost the impression you get when you order them. These, while spicy, were pretty boring. They had a strong chemical heat, but none of the interesting flavors of the peppers that went into them. There is a contest there, if you can eat a dozen of these in 6 minutes you get your face on the wall. I believe i will return for this contest. Although, the waitress confided in us that they cheat and load up the wings with other sauces to make them hotter. Bleh i say. Rating: C+




• Desert Heat(Special) – These wings were not saucy, they were dry as the name suggests. The rub was pretty good and gave the wings a decent, slightly crunchy, texture. The heat wasnt all that hot, but it did have a nice black pepper edge to it. Rating: B




• Pepper Infusion(Special) - This was another ‘not so saucy’ sauce. A pretty decent complexity of peppery flavor without killing your mouth. If you like spicy wings, but you actually like to taste the peppers in them, you will like these. Rating: B+

As you can see we ate quite a variety of wings. It was difficult to keep my palate clean while eating these so i made sure to load up on their awesome bloody mary. This drink is totally worth mentioning because of their use of BBQ sauce in it. Freaking delicious.

Overall, i would say that if you enjoy wings you will enjoy this place. The only detriment to the whole experience was the atmosphere, which had all the charm of a large warehouse in which everyone around you is shouting.

I will go back for the wings, they are good enough to ignore the atmosphere (which doesnt matter all that much when you have had a few).

Total overall king fish rating: B+
UPDATE: Pictures from the outing

Recalling the day of the four sauces, I had an overwhelming urge to perfect the teriyaki sauce. There were certain changes I wanted to make to build upon the rough draft of that day. The two major ones were that I felt it needed to be less chunky and less watery/pasty.

First the list of ingredients. I tried to keep it fairly consistent with the last batch. One thing I did forget was the plum wine (the mirin substitute). And why I don’t have any mirin lying around is beyond me, I’m pretty sure I used to. Oh well. Anyway, here goes:

1.5-2 cups Soy Sauce
1 peach
1/4-1/3 of a pineapple
3/4 cup apple cider
1 tbsp pureed garlic
1-2 tbsp chopped ginger
3-4 tbsp corn starch mixed with cold water

I started with the soy sauce in a saucepan on the stove, then I pureed the fruit in much the same way as was done the previous week.

This time though, I strained most of the pulp from the fruit, leaving mostly juice. Though some pulp did come through, it was far more tolerable. Next I added the ginger. I wanted the pulp from that to be in tact.

Getting close here. Next I added the garlic. Now we had the right taste but the wrong thickness. By some spark of inspiration I decided to actually *read* the package of corn starch. It basically said, to thicken hot sauces or gravies, mix some with cold water and pour slowly into the heated liquid. So I tried it. The consistency of the mixture is very odd. It’s kind of a cross between liquid cement and glue.

You can pick it up and play around with it and it hardens, if you let it relax, it turns back into liquid. I spent some time just playing with it out of amusement.

Anyway, after pouring it in the heated sauce (which by this time, was starting to cook down pretty well) it thickened nicely.

In lue of making my own wings this weekend, i decided to get my hot sauce started. The recipe is fairly simple. All you need is a load of peppers:

and a large bottle of vinegar:

The quantity you will want to use will vary with the amount of hot sauce you are making. I included about 20 peppers of various kinds for about 1.5 liters of vinegar.

I also happened to pick up a sweet oak barrel 2 liters in size from the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire on Saturday to allow the peppers and vinegar to soak in.

Here is what i did:

First i took down all my drying cayenne peppers, about 13 in all and ground them up finely using my hand held coffee grinder.

I have a krups model, but they are pretty awesome for grinding up spices and other dried things very finely.

Then, fearing that i had too little ground peppers for my sauce, i grabbed every other spicy pepper in the house and used the handy hand-blender attachment to puree the hell out of them. In order to get the peppers down to a nice slushy consistency i added a little vinegar to the mix as i was blending it.

Once i had a nice amount of ground and pureed peppers i mixed them into my vinegar and put the mixture in a large pot on the stove to boil. I kept a pretty close watch on this pot because i know what steam from pureed spicy peppers can do and i didnt want my kitchen filling with a gaseous form of pepper spray.

I boiled the mixture for a very short period, just enough to let the heat from the peppers come out into the vinegar. Now that it is nice and hot, i grabbed a funnel, stuck it in the bunghole of the barrel and very carefully poured the sauce in.

After i got all the sauce into the barrel i corked the bunghole and rolled it around so as to assure that the hot vinegar and spice coated the inside of the barrel.

Now i placed the barrel on top of my fridge to age for about a week. I will check on it this coming weekend to see how the sauce is coming along.

The goal of this sauce is a light spicy sauce that can be added optionally to things to spice them up a bit, much like Tabasco sauce. If it works out very well maybe i will include it in one of my batches of wings sauce…

Whats coming up: We have a guest chef creating a teriyaki sauce, a review of Buffalo Wild Wings in DE and the results of my first attempt at hot sauce. Don’t touch that dial.

Goodfellas Pizza, Infuego Hot and Honey BBQ sauce mixture

Over the weekend, instead of making a new batch and working with my sauce ideas, I decided that it would be worth it to give my kitchen a rest and check out how my palate for wings has evolved since i got started.  So, as we have done so many times in the past, we ordered from the pizza shop down the street Goodfellas Pizza.

They have on their menu (online menu here, it is a little outdated) several varieties of wings. Like before, we ordered 60 wings with ‘infuego’ hot and Honey BBQ sauces mixed. This was, as you may have read earlier, the inspiration for the beginnings of my venture into making my own wings.

Well, how things have changed. The wings themselves were overcooked. The sauce was sparse and not spicy. It was hard to believe that just a few months earlier these were the proverbial cat’s pajamas of buffalo wings to us. I ended up pouring my own sauce, leftover from a previous batch, onto them and throwing them into the oven. Once that was done they were delicious and all was right in the world.

PJ Whelihan’s Hot N’ Honey Wings

Tuesday I took a trip over to PJ Whelihan’s in Blue Bell PA as i have done in the past for lunch. I am always sure to order the wings, even though they are breaded, when i go.

I am typically biased against breaded wings because it is a cheap way to hide the quality of your chicken and it adds loads of unnecessary calories (almost 140 per wing). But, for breaded wings, these were damn good. The sauce was sweet and light and the chicken was tender and cooked the right amount (not too dry). It  could have been spicier, but, overall it was a pretty good balance and left me wanting more with wing sauce all over my face.

This past weekend with the success of the barbecue sauce I decided that just a little spiciness in the sauce would increase its deliciousness exponentially. Also, having managed to track down some actual buttermilk, I wanted to give the true brine recipe a try (Kittencal’s Buttermilk Poultry Brine).

So, the night before I pulled the wings out to thaw grabbed the ingredients:

• 4 quarts light buttermilk (only version i could find).
• 1 large onion, finely chopped (i pureed this, cause why not)
• 8 tablespoons chopped garlic
• 8 tablespoons kosher salt
• 8 tablespoons sugar (i used brown sugar)
• 4 teaspoon cumin
• 8 teaspoons black pepper
• 2 tablespoons cayenne pepper (why not)

First I poured one quart of buttermilk into a large bowl this would be my mixing base, allowing all the ingredients to be stirred and dissolve properly.

I poured in the garlic, salt and sugar. Then, with a whisk, i stirred it up well, making sure that the salt and sugar were properly dissolved.

The finely chopped onion then went into the blender to puree. I have spoken previously on the ideas i have about pureeing vegetables when they are to go into sauce, i believe that it allows the flavor to be evenly spread throughout. Especially in this case when it will not be cooked.

After the onion, in went the least soluble ingredients, the pepper, cumin and cayenne pepper. I stirred those in as thoroughly as i could.

Once all the ingredients were mixed, I poured the remaining quarts of buttermilk into a large tin pan.

Then, slowly added the mixture to the plain buttermilk, stirring as i went to ensure that it was properly mixed.

At this point the wings had been thawing for a period and were almost unfrozen. I plopped them in, coating each one and not allowing any to poke above the surface of the brine (this is why i used 4 quarts). I covered the pan with a layer of tinfoil and into the fridge it went. The remaining frozen wings would thaw in the brine.

The next day, around 3pm I got to working on my sauce. This would be a standard barbecue sauce with a spicy side to it. I also was advised by my taste testers to add a bit of honey, so that there would be a high sweet flavor to compliment the low molasses flavor.

Thanks to the large contributions of peppers from my fans, I had plenty of peppers to play with:

So, i rounded up my ingredients, I doubled my recipe because I was doing a larger batch:

• 4-5 cups of Distilled White Vinegar
• 4 cans of tomato paste 6oz
• 2 jar of Molasses 12 oz
• 2-3 cups liquid smoke to taste
• 6 tablespoons black pepper
• 3 tablespoons of cayenne pepper
• 1/2 lb of alfalfa honey
• 2 tablespoons of ground, dried jalapeno peppers

First, I mix the vinegar and the tomato paste until i get a nice ketchupy mixture. I then poured in the molasses and the honey, tasting as i went so i didn’t over sweeten. Usually i at least pretend i am not going to use all of the molasses, but i end up doing it anyway.

Step two, i added the liquid smoke into the sweet ketchup. You have to be careful when adding this, it is very easy to get over zealous and end up too smokey. This flavor is good when used in the right amount. But if you add too much it is overwhelming of everything else in the sauce.

Adding the black and cayenne pepper last, i stirred as i went to make sure it gets all through the sauce. The pepper should add a nice bite to the aftertaste of the sauce and the cayenne will give it a little heat.

Then, finally, i added 2 tablespoons of dried ground jalapeno.

I chose jalapeno peppers specifically for the taste. They have an almost black pepper flavor when dried and add to the smokiness of the sauce. I tasted as i went so i didnt over spice.

Actually, i DID end up over spicing the sauce by deciding to add some of that god forsaken Da’ Bomb hot sauce from previous recipes. I then had to run out to the store and get more ingredients and make the sauce all over again. Don’t use super hot sauce unless you want to make your food practically unedible.  One day i may understand the desire for an ultra hot sauce, but today is not that day. I threw out the bottle so i wouldnt make the mistake again.

After all the ingredients were fully mixed and tasty i put them in a pot on the stove to allow the pepper flavor to grow just a bit.

While on medium heat i stirred the sauce constantly with a wooden spoon until it starts steaming. This caused the pepper flavor to bolden and when the sauce cooled it thickened up a bit thanks to the molasses I added.

With the sauce done, it was time to cook the wings. So I pulled out my fryer and using fresh oil did them in batches. As they came out of the fryer i plopped them into the sauce allowing the flavor to immediately seep into the chicken.

The brine made the chicken quite tender, but i think it didn’t quite have all the flavor of the batch with cream. I may do a side by side brine to compare the flavors in the future.

The wings all cooked and ready to be served i put them into the oven until my test audience arrived. I know that baking the wings in this sauce last time made it very thick and much like a good rib sauce, i was hoping for the same effect.

These wings came out very good. Lots of the sweet barbecue flavor with a nice peppery back to them. Although i noted that without a certain amount of spice it is difficult for me to eat as many, the sweet taste devours my taste buds and makes it hard to just keep eating like i want to.

It was suggested that i retire this recipe as a success and move on to other flavors. But, i think the goal of this venture is to perfect a recipe. I want to make it so that every time anyone who eats my wings goes out and eats someone else’s, they are thinking of mine. I want to induce wing loyalty, and i will get there.

However, in the interest of variation and to reset our taste buds, i believe some wing tourism is in order. So, next week we will have a guest poster who will have at the teriyaki sauce.

In the coming weeks i will make it a point to travel around and sample wings from various places in the area. One i plan to hit is Buffalo Wild Wings which is famed for their wings varieties. I’ll be reviewing these wings and more, stay tuned.

This sauce, the fourth sauce of the quadrilateral assault on flavor and ingredients, was the standard, run of the mill hot sauce. The ingredients i kept simple and, yes, i did use some franks hot sauce on this one.  I decided to treat this sauce much like the barbecue sauce, but with franks in there the part of the vinegar was added already.

I do plan on making my own hot sauce in future posts. Hopefully it will be delicious, but it will definitely be fully documented here.

So, the ingredients for this one

• about 4 cups of Franks Hot Sauce
• 1 12oz Jar molasses
• 2 cans of tomato paste
• 1 jalapeno pepper pureed
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

That was it, kept it simple and it worked very well. The sauce had a nice peppery flavor due to the jalapeno and was sufficiently spicy but didn’t kill the consumer. I was glad to get a plain ol sauce out that wasn’t full of crazy ingredients and lots of messy insanity.

Well, with all the sauces out of the way and consumed i can say i learned alot from just the attempt at making smaller batch sauces. i think the most important thing i learned is, you don’t need to go crazy on ingredients and it is very easy to make a good sauce from scratch.

This experiment has gotten me thinking about all sorts of other sauces to try. One that came up recently was a pumpkin ginger sauce for fall….. or maybe a pumpkin pie batter. I think the best idea for the season would be to find a wing that can pair up with the awesome fall beers.

Next time i will be taking that sweet BBQ sauce and spicing it up a bit. I think that sauce, with a bit of spice could be very close to the sauce that filled the holy wing grail during that fateful meal.

But the pursuit will never end, once i find the perfect sauce for me and my test audience i will expand my audience, bringing the sauce to many more… in the hopes of finding that absolutely perfect sauce.

So, till next post…