The Food Lab Recipe Update: Extra-Crispy Baked Buffalo Wings

An updated version of my 20010 recipe, now even crispier and juicier.

The original recipe for oven-fried buffalo wings is fifteen years old. Fifteen!

A lot has changed in the last fifteen years. I’m writing this article on an iPad, the first generation of which came out that year! There’s been a new Beatles song! Rage comics are no longer the height of internet comedy (but double rainbows are still mind-blowing—that’ll never change)! I have a couple kids!

But here’s something that’s still true: we still love chicken wings. According to the National Chicken Council, we consume 1.45 billion wings on Super Bowl Sunday alone. Nearly half a chickens’ worth of wings for every person on earth! We even love watching others eat wings. Millions of us tune in to Hot Ones to watch celebrities answer questions as they gnaw on wings and burn the f&%# out of their faces.

And while you can certainly find chicken wings that are dredged, battered, or otherwise coated before being fried, the most popular incarnation of fried wings remains Buffalo wings. That is, wings that are deep-fried naked (the wings, not the one doing the frying) until crisp, tossed in a combination of melted butter and hot sauce, and served with a side of blue cheese dressing.

Why do we love them so much? There’re a few reasons I can think of. They’re shareable. They’re humanizing in their messiness and universal appeal (one need only watch Conan burn the f&%# out of his mouth on of The Hot Ones to experience this). Despite the best efforts of scientists and farmers, chickens still only come with two wings each, yet they remain relatively inexpensive. 

On the flavor front, they are intense, but perfectly balanced. Vinegary buffalo sauce cuts through the fattiness of the fried wings, while creamy and cooling dressing complements the heat of the hot sauce.

More than anything, it’s their texture that appeals. We can still enjoy wings tossed in a wide variety of sauces. We can swap the blue cheese for ranch and (most of use will) still be satisfied. We can eat them alone as we work silently on our writing, or we can enjoy them in large groups as we watch huge men crash into each other at full force on the tv screen.

But a wing that’s not crispy or a wing that’s dry? That fundamentally breaks the wing experience and simply will not do. The best part of fried chicken is the skin. And despite technically being white meat, wings have such a high proportion of skin and connective tissue that at their best, they eat like straight up fried chicken skin wrapped around an extra-juicy, fatty core.

But there’s a problem: most of us are averse to deep frying at home.

My goal when I started developing this recipe in over a decade and a half ago was to come up with a recipe for baked wings that are every bit as crisp and juicy as if they had come straight out of the deep fryer.

Roasting vs. frying

So what’s the problem with the oven? It comes down to effectiveness of heat transfer.

Liquids are molecularly dense and thus can hold and transfer a lot of energy with a given volume. Oil is an especially effective cooking medium because unlike water, which can only be heated to its boiling point of 212°F (100°F), oil can be heated much hotter (to the tune of 400°F or 200°C). Foods that are deep-fried experience very rapid heat transfer, which means that we can brown and blister their exteirors long before their interiors have a chance to overcook and dry out. The best fried foods are crisp outside and juicy inside.

Air, on the other hand, is not dense and thus contains less energy as an equivalent volume of liquid does. Because of this, if the air temperature in an oven is the same 400°F as a pot of oil, foods in the oven will take far longer to cook than in the oil. Wings that take under 10 minutes to brown and crisp in a deep fryer can take upwards of 40 minutes to brown and crisp in the oven, and during that time, their interiors are slowly desiccating and shriveling. 

With wings cooked in the oven, you typically have to make a trade-off between crispiness and juiciness.

So what’s the secret? As I discovered in  my 2010 recipe, it’s brining with a combination of salt and baking powder, then letting the wings air-dry overnight in the fridge. Baking powder not only enhances browning by slightly raising the pH of the wings, it also improves crunch. As the wings exude juices, they activate the baking powder which in turn forms tiny bubbles of this protein-rich liquid that then dry out and harden, adding surface area to the skin and improving its crunch factor.

Meanwhile, the salty dry-brine helps ensure that the chicken remains juicy by breaking down its muscled fibrils and preventing them from contracting too tightly as they cook, which allows them to retain more moisture.

The result it juicy, crisp wings that are almost identical to their deep-fried counterparts.

The Modifications

Over the many years of making this recipe, I’ve added a couple of tweaks that improve their crispness.

• The first is to add some cornstarch to the initial treatment of salt and baking powder. The cornstarch helps absorb and liquids that may be exuded during the chickens overnight rest, as well as adding a thin, thin coating to the wings that adds a layer of crunch without overwhelming the cookie at all.

• The second modification is to toss the wings with some oil after they’ve been dried overnight and before they hit the oven. Part of what makes deep-fried chicken wings so delicious is that as the wings fry, water bubbles out of them in the form of steam and oil, in turn, starts to migrate into those interstitial spaces. Tossing the wings with oil before baking them adds a bit of oil to move into the skin spaces and it improves the evenness of browning.

Extra-Crispy Baked Buffalo Wings Recipe

Every recipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.

What I like about this recipe:

• “frying” in the oven is much cleaner than deep frying on the stove top.

• Adding baking powder, cornstarch, and salt to the wings before resting overnight guarantees insanely crispy results.

YIELD: Serves 4

ACTIVE TIME: 15 minutes

TOTAL TIME: 15 minutes

Notes: Use air-chilled chicken wings if you can find them (the package will be labeled as such if they are air-chilled).

Ingredients:

For the Wings:

2 pounds (900g) chicken wings, cut into drumettes and flats

2 teaspoons (10g) baking powder

2 teaspoons (10g) kosher salt; for table salt use half as much by volume or the same weight

2 teaspoons (10g) cornstarch

2 tablespoons neutral oil such as canola or vegetable

For the Sauce:

4 tablespoons (50g) unsalted butter

2-6 cloves garlic (adoring to taste), freshly minced

4 tablespoons (60ml) Frank's RedHot Sauce

Blue cheese dressing, for serving

Celery sticks, for serving

Directions

1. For the Wings: Carefully dry chicken wings with paper towels. In a large bowl, combine wings with baking powder, salt, and corn starch and toss until thoroughly and evenly coated. Place on rack, leaving a slight space between each wing. Transfer to the fridge.

Place baking sheet with wings in refrigerator and allow to rest, uncovered, at least 8 hours and up to 24 hours.

2. When Ready to Bake: Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and preheat oven to 450°F (230°C). Transfer wings to a large bowl and toss with an extra 2 tablespoons of oil. Retain them to the sheet pan (rack optional) and cook for 20 minutes. Flip wings and continue to cook until crisp and golden brown, 15 to 30 minutes longer, flipping a few more times towards the end.

3. For the Sauce: Meanwhile, melt butter in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat until melted, then add garlic and cook until fragrant but not browned, about a minutes. Add the Frank’s whisking until combined. Transfer wings to a large bowl, add sauce, and toss to thoroughly coat. Serve wings immediately with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks, conspicuously shunning anyone who says that real Buffalo wings must be fried.