And, to me the temperature just... plane. Plane. Where? Where? Hey, welcome back to Mythical Kitchen, where dreams become food. So today we're smoking chicken
wings inside of a watermelon that we have converted to a barbecue pit, yeah, you did hear that correctly, but we'll get to that in a minute. Today's episode is sponsored
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portion of today's video. All right, so I mentioned that
watermelon barbecue earlier, well here is what we're doing. So we're smack dab in the middle
of grilling season, right? I love grilling, I love donning
the crop top and some Crocs, and just going out there
and hitting the meat, but the problem with grills
is that they're expensive, they're difficult to lug around, and if you eat out their insides you get all cut up from the metal bars. That's where the watermelon
has an advantage, this tasty berry, yeah,
watermelon's a berry, deal with it. This is a super awesome invention that I am really really proud of and the wings are truly truly delicious, I hope you all do this at home. And if you wanna do that,
we've broken the recipe down to three easy steps right there, we also got a full written recipe down in the description below. And hey, if you like podcasts,
or even if you don't, please check out me and Nicole's podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, newest episode just dropped yesterday and you can find that wherever
you get your podcasts. Let's get cooking. All right, so how the
heck are we going to turn this here watermelon into a barbecue pit? We already kinda did that
a little bit with GMM, at the Will it Barbecue episode. Remove the lid, and then check the temp. It really has cooked this pork! So, what we have figured out is that if you just cut it in half, you'll see. Why talk about it when
I could do it, you know? I'm gonna stab this
watermelon in the heart, and dead, stop breathing. And cut it down,
watermelons are not berries, I don't believe that,
but they do have souls. And there we go. So we have two halves
of a watermelon here. What we're gonna do is
we're gonna hollow it out. Whoa! One of these watermelon
tops is going to be our lid, one is going to be the bottom. Just gonna take a spoon,
nope, take a knife, and I'm just gonna trace around, just trying to hollow this out until we get some sort of a
kettle drum configuration. Why am I doing this? This just makes the most sense to me. We're trying to basically make
this just like a big bowl. My thought here is, you
get a charcoal grill, any standard charcoal grill
from a hardware store, it's just a bowl that you're
filling with hot things, so you might as well use a watermelon as your bowl full of hot things, and then put meat on it. Does that make sense to other people, is that how other peoples' brains works? Does my brain work okay? We've got a seedless watermelon here, hey, did you know that
seedless watermelons were developed at the
University of Kyoto in 1951, but didn't get popularity
until America in the mid 1990s because they generally cost
about nine times more to produce than seeded watermelons, and also have about one
third of the crop yield? That's because they had to take a typical diploid watermelon,
that has 11 chromosomes, and convert it to a tetraploid watermelon that has 22 chromosomes, and then that didn't yield
enough big fruit crops. Did you know that? Did ya? 'Cause I did. Also, hey, save all
these watermelon chunks, 'cause what we're gonna do, in the same way that when
you smoke with apple wood or cherry barkington wood, you get the flavor of that wood and the flavor of whatever
environment you're cooking in. So we're gonna be putting
some mesquite wood right down into the
bottom of this watermelon, so you should actually get a fair amount of watermelon perfume on that, and my thought with these wings here is that we're gonna make
a spicy watermelon glaze, that's gonna go on the wings,
gonna be nice, spicy, sweet, a little bit fruity, and then the smoke off that watermelon's all gonna marry together, just
be like really a copacetic. I don't know what that word means. Can someone search "copacetic"? "In excellent order." Yeah, dude, it's gonna
be copacetic as heck. I'm all sticky. Oh, I hate being sticky. Aw, god. In the elbow bits. Ugh. Oh, god. There, okay. Yeah, well, the good thing
about it is it's so easy. Wings are one of the easiest and also one of the most
delicious things to smoke, they only take probably
about 40, 45 minutes, and to me the temperature just plane. Plane. Where? Where? And so the cool thing
about chicken wings is that not only are they easy to smoke, they're actually one of
the most delicious things. You can cook it anywhere
between 220 degrees and 400 degrees, and they still turn out really good, so you don't need to worry
too much about your heat here. What we're gonna try and do is do it over the course
of about 45 minutes, get some nice char on 'em, smoke flavor. So we're gonna get these
marinating real quick, we got salt, we got
cayenne, we got paprika, we got black pepper, and we have ginger. So I want that ginger to sorta
marry with the fruitiness that we're gonna do in this
spicy watermelon glaze. Gonna toss all that in there, and hit it with a little
watermelon juice, why not? Get it a little wet. So we're gonna take our skewers, and we're gonna thread them through, I wanna do two at a time
through these chickens, I've stabbed myself a
whole lot doing this, so if you don't like blood... So I'm gonna do two through
each piece of chicken, and try and give it a nice solid bed here. All right, so I'm alternating here, I'm going drumette and flat, the drumettes are just
to protect the flats. I'm gonna throw all the drumettes away, because they are by far
the inferior chicken wing, that sound fair? No one wants the
drumettes, let's be honest. So I'm gonna get this, I'm
gonna go four to a skewer, and I'm gonna fit three skewers on there. Again, you're not trying to feed a family with a watermelon barbecue grill, you're taking it, you're going to the beach
with that special someone, you really wanna impress
him, and then you're like "Hey, I'm about to dig
through this watermelon and bark like a dog at the plane, and then we're gonna eat a bunch of sand. Would you like that?" Then they go "Oh my god,
you're so resourceful." And that's how I imagine it. Anyways, here we go, now just clear the fingers. Oh, god. All right, well great, look at that, wow, fill that with coals, get that on there, bingo bango, barbecue chicken wings. This is like a little bit reminiscent of that mango habanero combination that you get from a wing restaurant. But for me, I really like
the idea of watermelon, I think people, they tend
to go a little too sweet, a little too spicy, with
that mango habanero stuff, so I'm gonna try and get some
real complexity out of this, with as few ingredients as possible. Let's see what happens. So, we're gonna take a
couple Fresno chilies, these are really awesome, a lot of people think they're
red jalapenos but they're not, they're actually an
entirely different pepper. They've got thicker skins,
a big fruity flavor, they're hard to find, so
if you can't find that, cayenne peppers, what are they called, the long Holland peppers, red jalapenos, or Thai bird's eye chilies. If you can't find any of that, just dump some cayenne pepper in there. But I wanna keep it red,
you can use green jalapenos, but then you are going to get
some browning in that sauce. We wanna keep it nice and vibrant. Just pouring a tiny bit of liquid in here, because when I blend these
Fresno chilies, like I mentioned, they do have a tough skin, so I want 'em to really puree, just in a little bit of liquid, how does this thing work? Does anyone know? Oh, there it goes. Gradually increase the speed, sike! All right, so you're
trying to blend this stuff, oh, there it goes, wah, wah, I get it, I get it. All right, so we got that... Is it on still? What's happening? All right, so we got that
chili and watermelon puree, and I'm gonna pop that
right into a hot pan, like I said, this is a reduction. We're trying to take the natural
sugars in the watermelon, and really reduce all this down with some of our own natural added sugars. You know recipes that are
like "No added sugar." I'm like "Pfft, eat a
half cup of honey, idiot." We're gonna add honey into that, that's just gonna help tighten it all up. And whenever you're making
a sweet fruit-based sauce, the biggest things that are
gonna help you with that are salt, spice, and acid, so we're taking red wine vinegar as well, that's gonna reduce, get nice and tight like a tiger. Little bit of black pepper, to me anything smoked
absolutely loves black pepper. That thing almost killed me! Smoked foods love black pepper, you think about Texas barbecue rubs, so many of them are so black pepper heavy, so I love that too, and then salt, salt is the other thing that a
lot of people don't think of, anytime you're making orange
chicken, or lemon chicken, or tangerine chicken, or lime, lime, lime, lime chicken, satsuma
chicken, pomelo chicken, ruby red grapefruit chicken,
Buddha's hand chicken, starfruit chicken, pineapple, pineapple? No, not pineapple chicken? Point is, anytime you're
making a fruit-based sauce, you want plenty of salt to go in there, because that's gonna give
you that baseline savoriness so you're not just putting, it's the difference between putting a jam on your chicken wings. Which now that I'm thinking
about it, probably pretty good. All right, so we're gonna
crank the heat up on this, and we're gonna bring it to a boil, and we're just gonna let it go, we're gonna let it go
for like 25, 30 minutes, until this is reduced,
super nice and syrupy, it's gonna be super
tight, very bright red, we're gonna brush it on the
wings as they're smoking, it's just gonna caramelize
and get nice and juicy crispy, and lacquered, and you're gonna look at it and you're gonna see your
reflection in the glaze, and you go "Wow, life is beautiful." Or, like the portrait of
Dorian Gray, you're gonna die. Summer 2021's about
grilling in parking lots, and shoddily made crop tops. That's what it's about. All right, so let's do
this, we got the barbecue, we cut our watermelon
in half is what we have, it's yet to be a barbecue. What you're gonna do is you're gonna take these mesquite chips
that we've been soaking, again, barbecue is a beautiful art form, so we'd never do say a
brisket, or ribs or anything, but chicken wings, super easy, and so you can do a
kinda rudimentary method, I'm taking some soaked mesquite chips, I'm gonna pop 'em in the bottom of this, what we're gonna do is we're
gonna put coals on top of that, but leaving enough room to put the chicken
wings across in a layer. So, put on my heat glove, 'cause safety's important
in the Mythical Kitchen, and I'm gonna grab some lump charcoal that I have heating in a chimney lighter, if you wanna learn how to use
a chimney lighter properly, find an article somewhere, I don't know. We're gonna take that, watch out, everyone, shield your eyes, we're just gonna put some
coals on top of there. There we go. All right, so you wanna
spread your coals evenly 'cause you don't want
the chicken to touch 'em, but the chicken really can be within less than an inch of the coals, because again, these cook super quickly, and then the water from those wood chips are actually gonna sort
of cool down the coals, and so they're not gonna
get crazy crazy hot. We want the indirect
heat to really cook this, so all you're gonna do, is you're gonna space these out evenly, and then all we're gonna do, we're gonna take our watermelon lid, we've crudely cut some
holes out of the top, and we're gonna take
that and just pop it on, you might get a little bit of flare-up, so check on this every 10 minutes, 'cause you're gonna get some of the fat rendering subcutaneously
from that chicken, it could hit the coals and flare, but, good news is, you've got
all those soaked wood chips that are acting as a sort of buffer, so it really is the perfect
janky smoking machine, you're getting air flow from
the slight cracks in here, along with this vent hole, you can see the smoke pouring
up from the vent hole. It smells like chicken
and watermelon and coals, and summer, this is gonna be rad. Check on it every 10
minutes, give it a flip, and then after these are cooked, you're gonna glaze 'em with a little bit of
that watermelon glaze. Woo, hot! Can I take off my shirt? All right, so the wings have been going for about 15 minutes. Take this off, look at
that, I mean honestly dude, it smells really good, it
smells like a watermelon, you get all that chicken fat. Give 'em a flip, we're getting some lovely
char on the outside. Oh, yeah, look at that. Oh, that's awesome, so you see, these probably need
another 20 minutes to cook. You see you've gotten a
little bit of char there. The heat'll probably start to mellow out as the coals go down, but what you can do, take
some of that wood chip water, and just splash around
the coals a little bit. You can get some on the
chicken, it doesn't matter, it's all going to the same place. Splash some on the coals, then you can pop the lid back on that, and all that's gonna do,
it's gonna create more smoke, you're gonna get more flavor, it's gonna cool down the
temp but it can go longer, probably got another about
20 minutes on these bad boys. All right, the wings have been
going for about half an hour, let's check it, we
flipped it a couple times, and I mean, these look so stupid good. You're getting absolutely
great caramelization, great browning on both sides, they're probably about five minutes away from
being perfectly done, the good news again about wings is like, you can undercook 'em,
don't eat the raw chicken, but you almost can't
overcook 'em in a way. So I'm gonna take that watermelon glaze, I'm gonna brush it all over the top, there's so much sugar in this that it's gonna caramelize really quickly, so you only want 'em to be glazed for about five minutes on there. God dang, I mean you're getting
great Chinese takeout vibes from all the sugar in there. The heat from the coals is just gonna caramelize
that glaze really nicely. Get it like three or
four minutes on one side, flip it over, a couple
minutes on the other side, absolutely perfect. This shouldn't have worked. Can we all just agree on that, that this is a dumb idea
that shouldn't work, and it did, and we're
all very happy about it? Which I feel like is kinda
Mythical Kitchen in a nutshell. And then just gonna
close that, lid back on, couple minutes, we'll flip
and these are ready to plate. These are the watermelon smoked wings, I can't wait to dig in, oh, that's hot, don't put your hands
casually over the smoke hole! We got these wings, they're
fresh off the watermelon smoker. We got 'em glazed in
that spicy watermelon, it's absolutely fantastic. But, summer grilling
season, it's about friends. Friends, come, join me and eat wings! Friends. Church hug. Church hug. That wasn't even a church... Ah, I do a half church hug. You guys ready to eat some wings? Yeah! Are they hot? Okay. No, no, no, they're a little
hot, they're a little hot. I know I dogged on drumettes earlier, but this looks really good, I'll have this right here. Hey, cheers to the best
summer of our lives. Oh my god. Holy crap. That a good wing. It's actually crazy how
much smoky flavor you got, from just being in a watermelon. First flavor I get is smoke, second flavor I'm actually getting is all that black pepper
in the rub, fantastic, and then you get the
sweetness of the watermelon. It's like ridiculous how
balanced these wings are. Yeah. It's like a nice smoky Thai chili wing. Thank you guys for all the hard work, this was a heck of a
project to put together. Can I eat the watermelon? Eat the watermelon,
yeah, that's the dessert. We hadn't saved money for ice cream after. We don't get ice cream after? What kind of summer is this? I give them everything, they
take from me everything. What can I do? What can I do? Thank you all so much for
stopping by the Mythical Kitchen, we got new episodes out every week. We got new episodes of our
podcast every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram @MythicalKitchen under #DreamsBecomeFood with pictures of your mythical dishes just like Magda did. She said she was working at a restaurant down in Texas when the pandemic hit, she said she wasn't really
a brave or adventurous cook, but when she saw that we did
the #Leftovers challenge, she got really inspired and she made these really awesome biscuit
and gravy croquettes. Thank you so much, Magda, I mean honestly it means a lot to us that
that meant a lot to you, and I hope that we can
continue meaning a lot to you and you continue to mean a lot to us. See you all next time. Get as messy as you
want in your own kitchen when you have the Mythical Kitchen towel, available now at Mythical.com.
We’re still good!
Josh, close your mouth please.