The Best Wings I've Ever Had

Today I'm going to be showing you how to make what I think might be the best chicken wings that I've ever had. They are so crispy and then the sauce is just so good. It is inspired by a buffalo chicken wing but I'm using some ingredients to level up the flavor a little bit more and then we're serving this with a amazing smoked blue cheese dip that I think really completes the whole thing. I think the buffalo sauce can be really salty and really vinegar forward so I wanted to kind of balance out a little bit with this recipe and I think they're amazing so let's get right into it. So first thing we will prep our chicken wings. So to make these nice and crispy I dried them with some paper towels just because they have a lot of liquid in their packaging and then I have them in a bowl. We're going to mix that with a tablespoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon each of garlic powder and paprika and the baking powder is really going to help crisp up the chicken wings. I did it in my last chicken wing recipe and it really works. It changes the pH level in the skin and it's just a great way to crisp up the skin without frying it. I have about two and a half to three pounds of chicken wings for this recipe. Just mix that until everything is coated. I'm not going to season the chicken wings. I did this again in my last recipe. I like to just kind of put the chicken wings in the oven a little bit bland and then we'll season everything with the sauce. Okay so for cooking our chicken wings my last recipe I used a sheet pan but this one is going to be a little bit different. So I have a sheet pan lined with some aluminum foil just to help with the cleanup and then we're going to use a wire rack that's fitted to the pan and that is going to give our chicken wings more airflow and just give a way better crisp in the oven. Some people like to put their chicken wings after this step in the fridge to let them crisp up and dry out even more. I personally don't think that that's even needed. Using this wire rack again just gives perfect airflow and crisps them up so much more that I can't imagine them getting any crispier. So I think you can skip that step but if you do that with your chicken wings you can go ahead and let these sit for a couple hours in the fridge and you can spray your wire rack with some oil if you want. I don't really have a ton of issues with sticking with this one and if you're doubling this recipe you're probably going to need two of these pans. I only have one set so I'm glad these all fit. All right so now we're going to roast these in the oven. I have my oven set to 425. We're going to bake these for an hour but we'll rotate them every 20 minutes so that we have an even roast on all sides. So while our wings are cooking in the oven we'll make our buffalo sauce. So the first thing is we need some hot sauce and I do recommend using the Frank's Red Hot. This is going to give that buffalo sauce flavor. So we're going to do one third cup of this. You can use a different hot sauce but I recommend this one. And I'm just going to put that in a pan we're going to heat this up in a minute. Then we have two tablespoons of butter. There are some recipes out there that require like a whole stick of butter for buffalo sauce. We're not doing that. Then for a little bit more flavor than just a typical buffalo sauce we're going to do two teaspoons of Dijon mustard. I love that flavor in this. It's just like a little dynamic flavor. Then more flavor we're going to do one teaspoon of gochujang. This is a fermented chili paste. I use it in a number of my recipes. It's going to add a little bit of spice but just more depth of flavor, more character to the buffalo sauce than just straight vinegar. Then for some sweetness we're going to do two and a half tablespoons of honey or whatever sweetener you like. This is a nice local honey from down the street so shout out to my local beekeeper. And if you like a hot hot sauce you can always add just a little bit more of the Frank's but I think this is perfectly balanced. And then we'll do one teaspoon of garlic powder. Then I'm going to put this heat on. We're just going to heat this up until the butter melts. I'll whisk some of these ingredients together. So the whole point of heating up a buffalo sauce is just to get that butter emulsified into the sauce. It's kind of hard to do that if everything's not over some heat. We're just going to heat this up until we see little bubbles form. We don't want it to be boiling away. We just want it to slightly reduce. And then we'll take it off the heat. And if you are not about to serve your wings you can wait to heat this up so that it's hot when the wings come out of the oven. Just keep that in mind you don't want to serve the wings with cold sauce. All right once we see a little bit of this boiling I'm going to let it cook for like 15 seconds and then turn the heat off just so we get slight reduced sauce. All right so we're going to set this aside and we're going to reheat it probably just a little bit when the wings are ready so that everything's hot. But now we'll move on to making our blue cheese dipping sauce. All right so for our dip which I think completes the wings we're going to start with half a cup of some sour cream. You could also use greek yogurt too. I always have to measure because I can be really generous with my servings and inaccurate. So for camera sake and filming sake I'm going to measure these. Then we have two tablespoons of mayonnaise. This is for a little tang. Now you can totally serve these wings without the dip but I think it's a necessary part of the recipe. It is just that good and some blue cheese dips are just kind of just blue cheese and this one has really nice flavor. So next we're going to do one and a half tablespoons of sherry vinegar. You could also do apple cider. Then a half teaspoon of garlic powder. All right then comes our blue cheese. So this is a smoky blue cheese. It is by the brand Rogue Creamery. I found this at my local Whole Foods and honestly it's the best blue cheese I've ever had and sometimes I will say I don't even like blue cheese because it can just be too funky. And this smells amazing and it just adds another level of flavor to our dip. But you can just use straight blue cheese but if you can find a smoky one I recommend it. So we're going to do a quarter cup of some blue cheese crumbles. It just smells so smoky and the smokiness just goes so well with the wings. So this was actually an accidental purchase. I thought it was just regular blue cheese and it was smoked. This is probably more than a quarter cup but that's fine. It's a blue cheese dip. And then for a little bit of a slight oniony flavor we're going to do two teaspoons of fresh chives. I absolutely love chives in this dip. It's perfect. It just adds that really nice bite of onion but it's not aggressive. Goes really well with the wings and the blue cheese. So this is a ditch the store bought brand blue cheese dip because making it yourself is so much better. Then we'll season this with a generous pinch of salt and some black pepper. And we'll just mix all of that together. This is kind of similar to my wedge salad dressing. That looks perfect. So now we're going to go get our wings out of the oven and toss it with our buffalo sauce. Okay so the wings are fresh from the oven and they are perfectly crispy. So now I'm going to transfer these. I actually really like these metal bowls for tossing wings in. So I'm going to transfer these to this. And this makes a medium-sized batch of wings. You can totally double it. I just didn't want to have a recipe that was too big for you know I have a lot of people on our channel that are two people so I try to make my recipes like a medium size. Not too big. You can always double them. But this is perfect for Drew and I. And then we have our buffalo sauce. So I'll pour that over top. I probably won't pour all of it on. I can save some for the side. Looks so good. So we'll just toss these together. Get everything coated. So now I'm going to taste one of these with the dipping sauce. You can really smell that vinegar flavor that's I feel like very typical for a buffalo sauce. It's very pungent. This is so good. It's so good. This is the perfect buffalo wing sauce. The dip is just perfect. I feel like with basic everyday buffalo wings I can only eat like three of them and then I like need to chug a glass of ice water because it's so salty. But I don't feel that way with these. They're just perfectly balanced. You have sweetness from the honey. The dip just completes it. So I'm probably going to continue to eat these. But I figured since my last video I had my dad taste testing the wings it would be fun to have him back. So we're gonna have him taste them as well. Okay so like I said I invited my dad back. Hi dad. Here I am. You said you had to crawl out from under a truck to come here. I just crawled out from a Model A pickup truck. Okay well we he had like so much grease on him. We had to wipe some schmutz off your face. He's covered in grease. But this is real life. You called me to taste test so I dropped the wrenches and came. Okay great. What kind of cheese is that? It's actually a smoked blue cheese. So it has some smoky flavor to it. But this is so good. Yeah. It's done perfectly. Good. All right that's good to hear. Yeah so you find them crispy. They're just the way you like them. And they're not fried so it's all in the oven. And this dip is just excellent. Do you taste the smokiness of the blue cheese? Yes that's why I wondered because I told your mother that it had chunks of blue cheese and she said it was something else and like I said it was a smoky blue cheese. Nice yeah nice that you noticed that. I mean I love the smoked blue cheese. So if you guys can't find that it's totally fine but it is worth having in there if you have that available. So yeah I think that paired with the wings is just like perfection. The glaze with the dip is just outstanding. Good. All right. We could probably eat 20 of them. Good. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it and everybody enjoyed your wing tasting last time. Thank you for another delicious taste test. You're welcome. All right well thanks so much for joining us guys and thank you dad for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you. And we'll catch you guys on the next video and I'll see you in the comments.