Chicken Wings

A couple weeks ago I was having lunch at one of my favorite spots in town, Buffalo Wild Wings on Eastern. At the end of the meal, I made an impulse buy of a package of three bottles of BWW wing sauces (I went with Terriyake for Danielle and Medium and Mango Habenero for me). Since then, I've purchased chicken wings from the grocery store and have fixed them twice, with excellent results.

Thoughts:

If you buy 6 "traditional wings" from BWW, I think you pay somewhere around $5. I paid $6.91 for an entire package of wings at the store, which is 17 full wings which means I'm getting 34 "wings" (wingettes + drumettes) for less than $2 more of what I pay for 6 wings at BWW! Even considering I also pay for celery, the sauce and ranch dressing, its still super cheaper to make wings at home.

I've found cutting the wings up to be a pain in the ass. However, the video below that I found on youtube does a quick good job of explaining how to do it. The problem is that we don't have ANY good knives in this condo at all (maybe Santa will help us out with that).

The quality of the wings at BWW and from the grocery store are exactly the same in my opinion.

I've made wings twice and have also poured some medium sauce over things like hot dogs and a regular chicken sandwich and I STILL have some medium sauce left! I haven't even cracked open the mango-habenero yet!

I've noticed that the medium wing sauce becomes LESS spicy once you open it and have to refridgerate it. Therefore, I nuked a small bowl of the medium sauce for about 30 seconds before coating the wings last night, which was a very good move!

I don't own a deep fryer, which is probably the prefered way of cooking the wings up, but Danielle owns a very nice deep frying pan that I've used to pan-fry the wings in olive oil. I've been frying them for about 6-7 minutes on each side or about 13-15 minutes total. I then transfer them to a noodle strainer and let them sit in the sink for a minute or two. From there its into the big bowl where they get introduced to the sauce. Cover the bowl, shake it for about 10 seconds and you've got some awesome wings. With the exception of the pan-fry part, I think that's pretty much how their made at BWW. The one drawback is that I can only fit about half of the wings in the pan at a time. So I've been frying up Danielle's portion first, and she'll be enjoying piping hot wings while I'm still slaving away while making mine up.

I still love BWW and will go there on occasion, but I can't see myself ever ordering their traditional wings again. If anyone can tell me how to mimick their boneless wings at home, let me know. I'm aware that their boneless "wings" aren't part of the wing at all, but without a deep fryer, I doubt if I could come close to them at home.