Extra Crispy Baked Wings | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji and i'm going to show you how to make oven fried chicken wings extra crispy style so got a couple pound of chicken wings here um these are air chilled wings which are great um so what chicken after it's uh processed that is you know killed and cut into pieces um the feathers are then removed uh and then the chicken has to be chilled down below 40 degrees relatively fast and there's a couple ways to do this either they take the chicken and um dunk it into a very cold bath which goes quickly and it's cheap and easy or they put it in a blast chiller which is more expensive not quite as cheap and easy and then ends up leading to slightly more expensive chicken but the good thing about air chilled chicken versus water chilled chicken is that air chilled chicken has a lot less retained moisture um and the skin is already a little bit drier which makes this faster you can do this with water chilled chicken too it just um i'll show you where the steps change when you do that so i've got about two and a half pounds of chicken wings there you can do this with any amount of chicken the important part is just the ratio of the ingredients so i've got two and a half pounds of chicken wings in a bowl and now i'm going to get some kosher salt as well baking powder and a little cornstarch so for every pound of chicken we're going to be adding one teaspoon of each of these okay so kosher salt one two and a half baking powder one two and a half and kosher and sorry cornstarch if you've read my recipe for this on serious eats um or the recipe was based off of um which i'd for cooks illustrated on roasted chicken um it didn't have cornstarch in it but i've started adding it because it adds a little bit to the christmas so these um baking powder wings um you might have seen this technique of adding baking powder to poultry before i know now that like even alton brown has done a video on it chef john has done a video on it um this is the technique i originally developed for cooks illustrated in uh 2007 uh 2007 something like that for a roast chicken recipe um in that recipe it's pretty complicated what you do is like you break the chicken into parts you cut a few slits for fat drainage and then you poke a whole bunch of holes in the fat deposits on the chicken thighs and breasts um in order to help them render and then you coat them in a mixture of salt and baking powder and you let them rest overnight in the fridge uncovered before roasting them and it leads to super duper crispy uh chicken now the way it works there's a couple mechanisms by which it works the main one is that baking powder as we know when it gets moist it forms little bubbles of gas and in this case those bubbles form inside a membrane of you know moisture from the chicken breast that sort of bound that has a quite a bit of the protein from the um the chicken skin in it and so as the chicken then subsequently cooks it forms these like teeny teeny tiny micro blisters that give the surface give them much more surface area um the other thing is that baking powder is mildly alkaline um and the mild alkalinity helps the protein and the chicken break down more so you get shorter protein strands um and crispier texture in the skin so what i'm doing now is i'm going to take these wings toss them really thoroughly they have a nice coating on them i'm going to arrange them skin side up on this baking sheet spaced evenly apart so now i'm going to bake these on the same day this right now it's around 9 a.m and i'm probably going to bake these for lunch so around noon if i were using water chilled chicken wings um and unless you're an unless your package says specifically air chilled it is almost certainly going to be water chilled chicken if i was using water chilled wings i would probably do this the day before and bake them the next day as opposed to trying to do them all at once on the same day because you want some of that excess moisture to really evaporate off um the other thing you can do is point a fan at it and let the fan uh get rid of some of that excess moisture anyhow these are going to go into the fridge i cleared a space out for this whole tray here at the bottom you do want to store raw poultry at the bottom so that i'll take these raw things out so that it doesn't so you don't accidentally drip any poultry juices onto things below so that's going to go in there and i will now come back in about three hours and show you where we're at i have preheated the oven to 450 degrees rack in the center upper center um and here are the chicken wings so they could be a little bit drier but you can see what's starting to go on here you can see they have that sort of very faint coating on them and you can even see the little bubbles that are starting to form um those are the sort of micro blisters i call them that are going to um give surface area and crunch to these um i you know my recipe on sirius heat says to wait a minimum of eight hours and go up to 24. it's only been three hours but i'm not gonna stand i'm not gonna let five hours stand in the way of some chicken wings i'm pretty sure they're gonna work anyway all right so they're gonna go into the oven for about 20 minutes at 450 degrees convection on if you've got it um and meanwhile i'm gonna make some ranch dressing so normally i would do blue cheese but i don't have any blue cheese at home right now and none of the shops nearby me carry it so i'm going to make some ranch this one's a little bit more traditional than the yogurt ranch i made last time so we're doing a mixture of buttermilk sour cream and if you don't if you don't you know if you don't have buttermilk around you can just skip it you can use just sour cream and mayo it'll come up fine thin it out with a little bit of regular milk if you want to or some yogurt and mayo so about equal parts of each okay then got me some garlic powder garlic powder is different from fresh garlic there you know it's not a replacement for fresh garlic it's also not necessarily bad it's just a different flavor similar with granulated onion i'm sorry that's granulated garlic garlic powder i i always call granulated garlic garlic powder for some reason same with granulated onion that's about a teaspoon of each i think i did about a half cup each of the um the sour cream buttermilk and uh mayo and all right now some fresh garlic let's say garlic press is totally fine for garlic doesn't hurt it two two cloves two big cloves in there good all right those are those ingredients i've got some fresh parsley i'm going to pull off some fresh dill here these are sort of the classic ranch dressing ingredients if you want it to really taste like store-bought stuff use dried dill wheat and dry parsley as opposed to fresh and then stick with just the granulated and the granulated onion and garlic but i like the flavor of the fresh herbs and fresh garlic in this summer so i want to use them [Music] so what do i talk about now this is a porg my sis my daughter was playing with him this morning i thought it would be um it reminded me i thought it'd be funny to have him sitting there um well as he was sitting there i was thinking it's funny that he's sitting there watching me uh cook some chicken wings that reminds me of that scene uh in the last jedi which was a star wars film that i actually quite enjoyed i did not particularly enjoy ryza skywalker although you know last year i actually had the opportunity to go to the world premiere um in hollywood so part of my enjoyment might have just been the fact that um i was there and it was like a big event and i was super excited to be there um that said i've still enjoyed it even after then so who knows maybe maybe i'm basking in the joy and the glow of my premiere access to that or maybe i just legitimately like the movie all right chop chop chop chop chop is it weird i talk about star wars on a episode about oven fried chicken wings some people are gonna say i know some people are gonna say oh why are you calling these oven fried when they're not having fried um okay fine you can call them baked if you want you can call them roasted if you want the reason i call them oven fried is because language is meant for communication and i think when people hear fried oven fried chicken wings they they then can make the connection immediately and say oh okay these are meant to be like regular fried chicken wings but they're done in the oven so that's why i use the phrase oven fried because language is for communicating all right some lemon juice also seedless lemon interesting and a little dash of this is pimon despalet you can use whatever kind of chili you like if you're chef john you can use a pinch of cayenne salt of course last two ingredients plenty of black pepper that's the other sort of primary flavor in ranch dressing for me is black pepper sometimes people ask what's going on my phone this is just a monitor so it's delayed by like three seconds i've heard people say oh he's watching the recipe as he goes along um i'm not watching someone else cook i'm watching my own feed delayed by a couple seconds um and this is just some msg to give it that real that real ranch flavor let's see how we looks good to me let's see how it tastes that is ranchy all right so this i'm going to set aside for a little bit it's going to get better as it sits because that granulated garlic and onion is going to start rehydrating a little bit and in the meantime i'm going to make my chicken wing sauce so wing sauce you know of course there's a million and one ways to do it but classic buffalo wing sauce is frank's red hot specifically that brand along with butter just melted together that's it that said you can always do a little bit more with it and today i don't have any franks they didn't have it at the store nearby so i'm using crystal which is from a different place but similar in flavor garlic and butter so let's go about four tablespoons of butter let me re-fold this towel along with about four cloves garlic we're just going to let that melt and sizzle a tiny bit on the stove top we don't want to brown the garlic at all we just kind of want to get its raw edge off and let its flavor kind of infuse a little bit into the butter that one i'm going to use my tiny whisk i don't know if this is the same i don't know if it's the same size as the one uh andrew uses over on a binging with bavish i know he's into his tiny whisk right but this is this whisk i've had i've had since my restaurant days so i don't know probably for 15 20 years now um i use it all the time in restaurants it's really good for um when you're when you're heating up reheating single portions of soup for re-emulsifying it and making it making sure it's smooth for when you're making pan sauces um a tiny whisk is useful and any time where you're you're going to frequently reach for and grab a whisk but you want to be able to fit inside um a bain marie you know like a container of water where you keep all your spoons and various utensils that you use throughout the course of the night i leave a tiny whisk in there all the time because it comes in useful making butter sauces like this is really useful making little batches of vermonte or burblanc sauce useful all right so basically by the time the butter is melted you can smell it you can smell when the garlic kind of shifts from being really raw smelling to being a little bit more smooth and mellow and of course the longer you cook it the sweeter it's gonna get and the more um well the more of those brown flavors you're gonna get and i don't really want brown garlic flavors in my uh chicken wing sauce so i'm not gonna let it brown so basically once you start seeing bubbles like that that's a sign that you're getting to around 212 degrees garlic cooks at 183 degrees so if it's bubbling you're probably good all right now we're just going in with about four tablespoons of hot sauce which when you're working with a tiny bottle like this it's gonna take a while it's about a third of this bottle but basically equal parts hot sauce and butter is what we're after i think that's about right and that is it that is our [Music] that's our wing sauce [Music] franks and crystals um hot sauce they're made with um um cayenne peppers and they are um aged and then uh bottled with vinegar and salt so it's a very sort of vinegary vinegary hot sauce which is what you want for wings because you need something to really cut through all that fatty richness of the rings wings okay so i'm gonna check my wings once yeah it looks like we're starting to get brown and crispy already you guys see that you see that so tell you what i'm gonna put these back in i'm gonna cover this up and open it back up in 10 minutes and all right here's where we're at now so you see how oh my goodness you see all these little micro blisters all these puffy crispy bits oh it's already so crisp it's still not quite done though because we still gotta crisp up the other side and let just a little bit more fat render so we're going to do is we're going to flip the wings over like this so chicken skin is made up of a few things it's mostly water as you know as most kind of tissue in the body is it's mostly water but it's also got quite a bit of fat and also quite a bit of collagen um connective tissue so when you're trying to get crispy skin that's both crispy and tender your goals are to a first dehydrate it you can't get crispy things when there's still water in them dehydrate it and to render out quite a bit of that fat so that you don't have as much liquid fat in there and then also to break down the collagen so that it's not tough all right so air drying over air drying you know for even for a few hours and overnight and also giving it plenty of time in the oven that's a good step towards dehydrating it rendering the fat is also something that just takes time as far as breaking on collagen goes you need both moisture and fat sorry moisture end time and heat to do that so that you can't break down collagen in tissue that is completely dry um so if you've ever for instance tried letting your chicken or turkey rest several days oh sorry so i flipped those over there's gonna go back in there probably for another another 15 minutes or so if you've ever tried letting your turkey or your chicken um rest for several days before uh roasting it several days uncovered in the fridge before roasting it what you'll find is that if the skin is dry it will never get soft it kind of just dries out and turns into leather as opposed to becoming crispy and crackly so you need some amount of moisture retained in there so that's why it's important to let it rest to dry a little bit but not so much to the point that the skin completely dries out because then you'll never be able to render it so even even with a three hour rest like this it's going to come out plenty uh crispy it might have come out a little bit crispier if i let it go for eight hours but um my oven's got convection so that helps um because that draws away excess moisture and yeah all right so the chicken wings are gonna go in for another 15 minutes and so i will see you in just 15 minutes and here we are now now all right so you can hear how crackly and crispy they are in fact let's get this close up to the microphone that you can hear it hold on a second here can you hear that crispiness yeah well that is a crispy chicken wing is it as crispy as if you were to deep fry them for 12 minutes probably not quite as crispy but given that given how easy it is and the fact that with this method you don't have to um heat up a deep fryer don't have oil to strain or discard etc um i often think it's worth worth the trade-off and i know especially for a lot of you know home cooks out there who um are a little afraid of deep frying or don't like the smell that it makes or the mess that it makes uh this method has has consistently been one of my most popular recipes oops so i'm losing a little bit of chicken skin there because i'm being a little impatient with the way i'm pulling these up if you get if you use like a little thin spatula and kind of pry them up off the uh the grate you won't lose skin like i did just there okay chicken there sauce here sauce on the chicken the idea with buffalo wings is they need to be extra crispy to start with because you're adding a sauce that you know it's mostly it's about you know half fat half water you know hot sauce is mostly water and butter is mostly fat um and fat will not cause um crispy skins to soften so like something in that like natural hot chicken where you're coating in a pure fat a chili oil fried chicken and chili oil that's not gonna soften the skin at all in fact you could take a french fry crispy french fry crispy piece of fried chicken dunk it in a vat of oil leave it overnight and it won't uh it won't get soggy but water is what is going to make a crispy skin soggy and in this case you need that chicken to be extra crispy to start so that by the time you're done adding the sauce it still stays crispy even with the sauce on it this is hot personally i am a flat sky as opposed to you know chicken wings consist of a chicken wing consists of a of a drumette which is white meat you know it's part of the breast and a flat which is dark meat and more connective tissue i am personally a flat sky and i find they are much juicier than the drumettes are all right i'm going to go over eat one of those and call my wife because she loves chicken wings when i was developing this recipe um i don't remember when but it's when we were living in a one-bedroom windowless apartment in brooklyn um and my wife was out of town for a couple weeks and that was the week that i that was the week that i developed this recipe so i was cooking you know dozens of batches of chicken wings at home and she was so mad when she got back because she loves chicken wings all right should we give it a shot damn wings are not though the healthiest thing in the world but man are they good here shut up let me pull off a little a little chunk for you sit little girl all right here we are extra crispy oven fried chicken wings using the uh baking powder method um yeah there you go guys gals non-binary pals check the description below for the recipe subscribe like do whatever you want and i will see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 1,215,014

Rating: 4.9177046 out of 5

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Id: mh2AXh1eRmE

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020