Date: Sat, 7 Aug 93 17:27:55 PDT
This is a wing recipe from a guy who used to cook wings for a living in
Buffalo.
Get some Durkee's Frank's Original Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce, there
is "no" adequate substitute, you may have to ask your grocer to order it,
or call Durkee/French's at 714-526-3363. If it's the little bottles, get
two or three of them, I get the gallon jug from a restaurant supply place,
cheap! It used to be called Frank's Red Hot Pepper Sauce, then it was
Durkee's Louisiana Hot Sauce, but there already was a brand name Louisiana
Hot Sauce. Still tastes the same!
Acquire some margarine. Only margarine works right (correct taste and
resistance to burning). Neither oil nor butter will substitute.
Get the wings cut up, and start heating up the frying grease. Some
revisionist (or health-conscious) types insist on other cooking methods,
but there is nothing like the real crisp-on-the-outside moist
-and-chewy-on-the-inside texture of fried wings.
Make up the sauce. Put the Durkee's and margarine into a skillet or
saute pan big enough to comfortably hold one fryer-load of wings. The
total amount of sauce at once should be about a quarter of an inch in the
bottom of the pan.
The proportions are:
Equal parts is the nominal starting point (called "medium" in Buffalo).
A bit of tingle, but not very spicy.
Undiluted Durkee's doesn't taste as good, but is pretty hot. Three to
one, Durkee's to margarine is about as hot as I like it.
For the really timid (like kids) just a splash of Durkee's in the margarine
gives a little flavor but no noticeable hot. The idea is to cook up the
Durkee's and margarine to a bit thicker consistency. It should simmer for
5 minutes or so, then be kept hot.
You can make up just one batch of sauce for a bunch of wings. You can just
add more ingredients to the pan as you use up the sauce. When you add more
ingredients, you can adjust the spiciness.
I use this to satisfy everybody, I start out with all the margarine I plan
to use, and put in just a splash of Durkee's. That makes a few wings for
the kids. Then a bunch more Durkee's to make the wings medium. Still more
Durkee's to get it the way I like it.
Fry the wings. They're cooked when the bubbles slow down significantly.
This takes seeing it once to know just how much bubbling corresponds to
"done," but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to get it right. At home,
I put the "drumettes" in first, because they take a minute or two longer
to cook. As always with frying, be sure that you don't put in so much
food that the temperature of the fat drops below 325 or so, and have the
heat on so it gets back up to 375 ASAP.
As the wings finish cooking, take them out and drain thoroughly. I
generally put them in a strainer held over the fat. Don't pile them up
in a bowl, or the fat will cool and congeal before it runs off!
Once the wings are drained, put them in the sauce and get the wings covered
with sauce. The official restaurant way to do this is to toss them in the
air, but your stove cleaner may not appreciate this.
Use tongs to pick the wings out of the pan and let the sauce drain off.
Toss the wings on a grill or in a hot oven for a few minutes at this point
to "bake on" the sauce.
Serve with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing on the side. Yes, the
BCD *is* for the wings! But make sure it is good BCD, with nice chunks of
good cheese. (One of the sadder realizations of my growing up is that there
are some things you just can't get, restaurants get a special Kraft dressing
that comes only in five-gallon containers that must be continuously
refrigerated. Great stuff, not available to you and me.)
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