If you love Buffalo Chicken Wings and the only place you eat them at is a restaurant, you will be better off not reading this article. Otherwise, you run the risk to never eat them at a restaurant again! I have learned this recipe from a very good friend of mine – Nicola. I still can’t believe that I considered my own variation of this dish decent before Nicola taught me the real thing!
Most of the restaurants out there bake or fry the chicken wings until they done and the just coat them in a hot Buffalo hot sauce before serving. The trick is to bake chicken wings until they almost done, coat it with sauce and then finish baking them.
To start off you will need about 12 – 16 chicken wings. You might want to cut them in two through the joint. I leave the tip of the wing on, but if you don’t like the look you can cut the tips off:
Arrange the chicken wings on a baking sheet and generously season them with powdered garlic, powdered onion, pepper, and paprika. You can also do the seasoning in a large bowl so you can toss the wings- wings get a better coating of seasoning this way. It is important not to use any salt in this step as your Buffalo hot sauce will have sufficient amount of salt in it.
Bake the wings in a preheated (400° F) oven for about 35 minutes until the skin begins to turn golden brown and the mean begins to barely separate from the bone:
Place the chicken wings and large ball and coat them in Buffalo sauce:
Rearrange the coated wings on the baking sheet while replacing the foil. I am using aluminum foil for two reasons, it leaves less mess, but it also makes it easy to discard the fat.
Bake the wings for another 10-15 minutes in a 400 °F over. You have to keep an eye on them now because you will not wont to overcook them. Generally I judge by the strong aroma from the sauce, you hardly smell the sauce when it is cold.
Hot Souce
To make the sauce for the chicken wings you will need:
- 3/4 cup – Hot Sauce (Red Hot by Frank’s seems to work the best, but you can use Tabasco or any other brand)
- 1/2 cup – Ketchup
- 1/4 cup – Blue Cheese Dressing (You can also use Ranch dressing, but the blue cheese gives it that extra something if you know what I mean)
- 1/4 cup – Soy Sauce (Reason we do not use the salt to season chicken wings before baking them)
- 3 Table spoons of butter
Combine the above ingredients in a sauce pan place it over the medium heat burner:
While heating, stir the sauce until all ingredients fully dissolved and incorporated. The sauce should acquire a color of the cream of tomatoes soup:
This recipe should make a sauce that has a rather serious kick to it. However, if you like more spicy or little milder sauce you will have to adjust the ketchup to hot sauce ratio.
