Sous-Vide Buffalo Wings Crispy on the Outside and Tender on the Inside
Hello friends and welcome back toWill It Sous Vide? , the column where I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator. Today we take a look at an iconic, spicy and savory figurine: the famous chicken wing.
If our last session on topic selection taught me anything, it’s that you guys weren’t all sous vide on the subject of wings. Some of you were delighted with them, some were not impressed, and some of you had bigger plans.
While I was very tempted by the crab sauce suggestion – and I guess that’s what we’ll do next time – I just needed to know if the chicken wing would make it juicier and the skin crispier. (Obviously the sous vide cooking process will not result in a crispy crust on the wings, but removing some of the fat before frying can help.)
I first bought four pounds of fenders and split them into classic shaped fenders that I call “tiny shank” and “best part.” I then prepared four pound batches of wings as follows:
- Simply seasoned with a little salt, no extra fat added to the bag
- Simply seasoned with a little salt, add about five tablespoons of duck fat to the bag.
- Seasoned with a mixture of salt and hot pepper flakes, no fat added to the bag.
- Seasoned with a mixture of salt and hot pepper flakes, about five tablespoons of duck fat are added to the bag.
The bags were then sealed and boiled in a 150-degree water bath for four hours, during which time I washed, enjoyed a cocktail or two, and ate lots of gummy candies.
When the chicken was ready to swim in the hot tub, I took the wings out of their respective bags, blotted them with paper towels, and laid them out — nice and tidy — on the cooling rack inside the baking sheet. Then I put the entire unit in the refrigerator overnight to dry the skin a little more completely.
The next day, I heated some rapeseed oil to 400 ℉ (never letting it go below 375 ℉) and fried a winglet from each bag. As you can see from the slideshow below, everyone’s skin looked amazingly good. In what scientists call “eerily similar to my first tano tango,” this skin turned golden brown and blistered in about ten minutes.
I then ate each wing without sauce, so I could taste them without the distracting (but delicious) sauce. Wings cooked with pepper flakes had no noticeable warmth, but wings cooked with duck fat were, as expected, slightly wetter. (The meat, cooked only with its own ghee, stuck a little to my teeth.)
But wings without sauce are sad, so I melted a lump of butter, whipped in a Frank’s cup, and tossed some freshly roasted wings into this simple yet great wing sauce.
Then I ate them with gusto – I didn’t eat that day, but the wings are good too – with blue cheese, because the ranch is a salad. You may have noticed that there is not enough celery on my plate. This is because celery is the worst vegetable in existence and I don’t keep it in the kitchen.
I still had a lot of unroasted wings left, so I put them back in the refrigerator until my boyfriend left work (at midnight), after which I (drunkenly) fried him a fresh batch and enjoyed it myself.
So, sous-vid wings? Yes, yes, and this is my professional opinion that this is quite a worthy undertaking sous vide. Not only does cooking them with low duck fat and slow addition of duck fat make the meat super succulent, but removing some of the fat before frying makes the skin incredibly crispy.
Plus, you know these babies have been carefully cooked, so you only need to fry them long enough to get the skin you want. This is indeed the best possible outcome. Plus, after you’ve cooked your soup, you can either freeze or chill your wings until they’re ready to roast or grill, after which you are just 10 minutes from freshly cooked, near-perfect wings.