WHAT’S A SUPER BOWL WITHOUT WINGS?
Super Bowl’s No. 1 menu item scores with a wide variety of tempting flavors
The Super Bowl is coming, and guess what is likely to be on the menu? That’s right. Chicken wings.
Chili also will be served, no doubt, and more nachos than are good for anybody. But during the Super Bowl, wings are king.
Which is kind of odd, because wings used to be an afterthought. They were the cheapest and least desirable part of the
chicken. When used for anything, they were most commonly used to make soup.
But that all changed on March 4, 1964. Late that night, friends of bartender Dominic Bellissimo came to visit him at the Anchor Bar Restaurant in Buffalo, New York. They were hungry, so Bellissimo asked his mother, Teressa, to prepare a snack. Teressa Bellissimo — one of the great unsung heroes in American gastronomy — deep-fried some wings and coated them with a sauce that was as tangy as it was spicy.
Thus the Buffalo wing was born, and with it a revolution in American snacking. Can it be mere coincidence that the first Super Bowl was played less than three years later?
The Anchor Bar is now so famous that it has opened franchises in more than a dozen cities in the U.S. and Canada.
So I decided to follow the Anchor Bar’s lead. Not only would I make their original wings, but I also would branch out into different flavor combinations and an oven-baked version.
The secret to getting a crispy skin in oven-baked wings is to dry out the skin.
Chef J. Kenji Lopez-alt, who is nearly as seminal a figure in American cooking as Teressa Bellissimo, developed the perfect method for doing this. After you pat the wings dry with paper towels, toss them in an equal mixture of baking powder and salt, and let them air dry overnight or longer in the refrigerator.
The results were very good — light and moist, with a satisfying crunch to their skin.
As for the sauces, the Anchor Bar unfortunately keeps their recipe a secret, but basically everybody knows it is just an equal mixture of Frank’s Redhot Sauce and butter.
I made the recipe with the 1:1 ratio, and it was spectacular, of course. Frankly, something that tastes this good should be harder to make.
I next tried grilling a batch of wings, just to see if it could be done — and it definitely could. I used Asian-inspired flavors for these — sesame oil, ground ginger and green onion — along with barbecue sauce and that same Buffalo sauce. The recipe also calls for an extraordinary amount of cayenne pepper, but the wings did not turn out as spicy as I had feared. They were zesty and robust, with a hint of smoke from the grill.
For the honey BBQ baked chicken wings, the sauce is mild but still noticeably sweet from the honey, rounding out the spice from a rub that is applied before they are cooked. The balance is important here: The wings are moderately sweet, moderately spicy and entirely delicious.
My next batch — I made a lot of batches — started out as an attempt to create the flavor of chicken fajitas, but they ended up tasting like lemon pepper.
So I decided to think of them as lemon pepper wings instead of fajita wings and ended up with wings to brag about.
Regardless of the flavor you make, these wings are so satisfying, you will be happy even if the wrong team wins.