Back to School Chicken Wings
In the early nineties, a friend and I cultivated a yearly back-to-college ritual involving a local brewery serving platters of fiery wings accompanied by a sour-cream dip.
We slathered the chicken in dipping sauce before sucking each wing dry, washing everything down with rivers of house I.P.A. Thus fortified, we faced fall semester.
Then we graduated and went our separate ways. That I remained in academia, albeit on the other side of the desk, didn’t stop my forgetting the wonders of chicken wings.
It wasn’t until I came across this quintessentially American dish in an English cookbook– Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Supper For A Song–that I prepared chicken wings myself. By then I was no longer at University, my health having forced early retirement.
As Alice Cooper says, school’s out forever, but as August looms, I’m beginning to have back-to-school moments anyway. Likely I always will. Dreams of new semester orientation. Of missing final exams. Of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
These moments call for chicken wings, dipping sauce, and rivers of I.P.A.
They may also call for sleeping pills, but I have no recipes for making these at home. Best not to try it. Better to jest about our night terrors, then go for the chicken wings and beer, right?
Chicken Wings, adapted from Tamasin Day-Lewis’s
Supper From A Song.
Serving size: 2 adult dinner portions, 3 appetizer servings, or 1 person returning to school.
Marinade Ingredients:
2 Pounds Chicken Wings
1 Large garlic clove, crushed, peeled, minced
Piece of fresh ginger, about size of your thumbnail. Crush with heavy knife and mince. No need to peel.
2-3 Small dried red peppers, crumbled, according to preference
2 Tablespoons castup
Juice of 1 medium lemon
1 Teaspoon sea salt
1 Teaspoon black pepper
1 Tablespoon molasses
1 Tablespoon honey or Lyle’s Golden Syrup
1 Teaspoon sesame oil
Optional:
1-2 Teaspoons Nam Pla
Prepare marinade at least 4 hours and up to 24 hours before cooking. Rinse the chicken wings. Trimming the wingtips with a poultry shears or cleaver is optional, but prevents burning while cooking. Arrange wings in single layer in a 13×9 inch baking dish.
Using a whisk or large fork, mix all marinade ingredients in a large bowl. The honey and molasses will initially resist, then integrate.
Pour marinade over chicken, cover dish with foil or plastic wrap, and refrigerate.
An hour before you plan to cook the chicken, remove the dish from the refrigerator.
Preheat oven to 325 F.
Cook wings in oven on middle rack, uncovered, for approximately 1 hour 10 minutes. Check at 45 minute mark to ensure wings are not drying out or burning. If they are burning, cover loosely with foil. If the pan is dry, add a splash of vermouth, white wine, broth, or water to the pan.
While the chicken cooks, make the dipping sauce.
Dipping Sauce
6 Tablespoons sour cream
3 Tablespoons mayonnaise (homemade or commercial)
1 Teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1-2 Teaspoons Tabasco sauce
1 small garlic clove, crushed, minced, and peeled
Stir everything together. Serve with damp cloths or lots of napkins, plenty of I.P.A., and, if you are feeling guilty, a green salad.
Yes, this marinade sounds sickening. Yet the honey’s sweetness (or the Lyle’s), the bitter edge of the molasses, and the sweet-sour catsup all come together in the cooking, lifting the dish from ordinary to spectacular, which is saying something for the pedestrian chicken wing.
I am able to find Lyle’s Golden Syrup in the imported foods section of my market. A little goes a long way, mitigating its expense. For ease of use, I decant the syrup into a jar.
Fresh ginger will keeps forever immersed in a jar of wine.
Tamasin Day Lewis: Supper For A Song, Rizzoli New York, 2010
Share:
You might also like:
Red Pepper Chicken Wings
Sunday Afternoon This post is nearly a year old. Well, not the post. It’s new. The handwritten draft and the recipe are nearly a year old: 9/5/15, to be exact. Somehow, this keeps slipping under the radar, three sheets of yellow notepaper migrating to the bottom of various piles in…
Three-Cup Chicken
A few weeks ago the IK attended a literary event sponsored by the San Francisco Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier. There numerous Bay Area authors–and a few non-Bay Area folk–gathered to meet, greet, and share nibbles the authors had prepared from their cookbooks, conveniently for sale on nearby tables. Said event…
Chicken with Red Pepper Sauce
About a week ago I was rereading Diana Henry’s The Gastropub Cookbook and landed on Chef Peter Robinson’s recipe for Squid with Piri Piri Sauce. I page through my cookbooks a lot. Do other people? I hope so. It’s amazing how often you find something you missed the first…
