Tips for Making Your Super Bowl Wings a Champion!
By Mark Weiler (a.k.a. Wy) - January 11th, 2010
If you’re like most people you don’t make wings often, but come Super Bowl time you have your favorite culinary regimen as your organize or attend your favorite Super Bowl party. In many cases, wings, having grown to be America’s fastest growing food item in terms of popularity, are in the starting lineup in the kitchen come game day. There are some things that you can do well before Super Bowl Sunday to assist you in your Buffalo Wings and general wing cooking experience, for both consumer and restaurant alike.
Buy Your Wings Ahead of Time
The first, second, and third pieces of advice are to buy your wings in advance. This goes for restaurants as well as consumers. Wings sell like water in the desert prior to the Super Bowl and distributors and supermarkets may be very limited if not even out of stock on wings if you wait until the last few days prior to the Super Bowl much less Super Bowl Sunday itself.
Estimates for last year’s Super Bowl weekend wing consumption ranged to over 1 billion portions of wings being sold on Super Bowl weekend during which wing consumption peaks and in no small way. The craze rolls on as well with wing establishments actually doing very well relatively speaking in this economy.
One of the industries “dirty little secrets” at present is that boneless skinless chicken breast costs equal to or less than wings for the most part. So consider making boneless wings as an option or augmentation of your traditional wings fare. See our website for video instructions on how to properly prepare boneless wings.
Wings freeze nicely as well, so you can buy them weeks ahead of time. Our preference for freezing them for quicker and more consistent thawing is to place approximately two dozen cut wing pieces (winglets or drumlets) into a gallon sized Ziploc bag. Prior to sealing lay the bag on your countertop and flatten the wings out into a single layer, zip the pouch to all but about two inches closed, gently squeeze the air out of the bag, and zip the rest of the bag closed. Lay flat in freezer and layer bags if necessary.
Once frozen those frozen wing packages become like plates and can be easily maneuvered in your freezer for easy manipulation of freezer space. Thawing is much quicker than if the wings were all balled up due to the increased surface area and reduced thickness of the frozen mass of wings. Bags can also be placed in cold water to thaw, however make sure that the bag is fully sealed in order to avoid any cross contamination.
Avoid buying bagged pre-frozen wings as by our experiences they tend to be of a worse quality and you end up paying for a brine that typically is 8-15% of the weight of the bag, making frozen wings more expensive than fresh wings often if not usually.
Cooking Capacity
The next piece of advice is to ensure that you have enough cooking capacity for wings, a piece of advice that is paramount if you are frying them, in our opinion the only way to go. Frying wings can be time consuming using consumer fryers. A standard Presto Kitchen Kettle can typically cook wings at a rate of approximately one wing per minute.
For example, cooking 20 wings takes approximately 20 minutes including the recovery time prior to putting the next batch into the fryer. If you use two or more fryers at home, make sure that you have an arrangement to not overload the circuits considering that they are high wattage appliances. You will likely have to connect them to different circuits in your home or party place.
You can cook ahead of time, however the sauce that you use will really make a difference as to how your wings taste when they are not straight out of the fryer. One of the recommendations that I make for purposes of sauce evaluation and comparison with our sauces, is to let the wings cool to room temperature, then sample them. You can always tell how good a sauce is based upon how they taste at room temperature.
If re-heating is necessary, a simple warming in the microwave will do. The longer that you nuke them the more adversely the quality of the wings is affected. A simple warming however, time dependent upon the quantity of wings on the plate as well as wing size, can do them wonders however in terms of reviving them without any significant impact on texture or wing quality otherwise.
Sauce Selection
If you have a favorite sauce that you purchase, do not wait until the Thursday prior to the Super Bowl to order it and expect it to arrive by Friday via standard ground shipping options from wherever you order it. Purchase your sauce in plenty of time to get it there via normal shipping options while leaving a day or two extra for shipping delays or anomalies.
If you are making your own sauce, then ensure that you have all of your ingredients lined up prior to game day and if you can, make your sauce several days ahead of time. This will give any spices that you put into your sauce plenty of time to dissolve and soak in yielding a better sauce.
Things such as frying oil, where we recommend straight vegetable oil which should be pure soybean oil, should be readily available even on Super Bowl Sunday.
If you are out to impress someone with your wings, please visit out site for further information and very detailed instructions on how to make World Class authentic Buffalo Wings right from home. Those for whom you are cooking will not be disappointed if you use our sauces. In fact, if you use our sauces on game day, we predict that you will receive more compliments on your wing cooking than you ever have before.
If you are a restaurant, January is an excellent month to debut a new wing program or new wing flavors added to augment your existing offerings. More wings are eaten on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year, so unveiling new wings at your restaurant will benefit from the built-in demand for wings on that day.
Whether your team wins or loses, we can assist you in turning your Super Bowl Sunday wing cooking experience into a championship one!