I LOVE a chicken wing, but often I find they lack a very key component: chicken. Unless you’re buying huge monster-sized chicken wings, which honestly give me the creeps because god knows what they did to those poor chickens to make them get that big, you’re left with a lot of chicken skin with a side of chicken meat. Thus, I present to you my chicken wing-style baked chicken thighs. They’ve got the crispy chicken skin that you love so much in a wing, they’re doused in butter buffalo, lemon pepper, and or chili garlic sauce, but with lots more tender juicy chicken. What’s not to love!?
I feel it is sacrilegious to eat these with a fork and knife. Do the dish justice and pick it up with your hands and dunk them in some homemade ranch and a sidecar of your wing sauce of choice. Serve this with a pile of crisp and crunchy veg and ladies and gentlemen we’ve got ourselves a meal.
Water is the enemy of flavor (sometimes).
This recipe takes you through a pretty thorough process of preparing our chicken for the oven. The reason is, we want crispy chicken skin. Since we are not frying the chicken, we must use science to give us that fried chicken skin crunch. The enemy of crunch: moisture because moisture = steam. So we must remove as much moisture from the chicken skin as possible. What repels moisture? Salt.
Salting the chicken skin will draw out the moisture, giving you extra crispy skin. Pre-salting the flesh side will allow the salt to penetrate the chicken rather than just sit on the outside giving you juicy and flavorsome chicken meat. We will also be using the fridge to continue our quest for crispy skin. Our fridges have fans that remove water vapor to create cold dry air, the optimal environment for preserving the shelf life of food. So, by putting the chicken in the fridge uncovered, all of that moisture on the surface will evaporate thanks to our handy dandy fridge fans. Which gives us dry chicken that will soon become the crispy chicken skin of your dreams.
