Sticky Chicken Wings

Break out the napkins for this one! Succulent, juicy, a fab first course, or if you serve a flock of wings 😉 it can be a main course as well.

I love eating wings but hate cleaning them. Then, as I have already mentioned, the French butcher in our neighborhood saved us by delivering to us during our Corona lockdown and he gave me the cleanest chickens e v e r. So, the wings were beautiful and I said Eureka! I can now make the sticky wings that I love.

This is a really easy recipe and you should have most of the ingredients available in your pantry but the deliciousness quotient is off the charts. The technique here is important. So, start with preheating your oven to 425 F. The high heat matters.

It renders the fat from the wings so that you are left with juicy, not fatty, chicken. So clean your wings thoroughly and pat them dry. I use a grate for the chicken to roast on so any fat will drip down onto a foil covered baking tray. You can also use a broiler tray.

Don’t forget to line it with foil, makes clean up so much easier. Leave the wings aside (remember, they should be dry) and check that your oven has come to temperature. If it has, place the wings with no coating or sauce in the oven for 20 minutes and meanwhile, prepare the sauce. I prefer doing it this way to marinating them. They just won’t cook dry and this way the fat drips off. No nasty gobby bits.

On to the sauce – take out a mixing bowl and put all the sauce ingredients in together, soy sauce, mustard, ketchup, brown sugar, duck or sweet chili sauce and molasses.

Mix it up smooth.

It may not look like a ton of sauce but it is sufficient to cover about 15 wings. If you want to do 2 trays, just double it.

Your twenty minutes go by, remove wings from oven and they will be light brown – keep oven on.

As you see it’s light brown but you will continue to cook them. Next, take the sauce and (I switched out the tin foil for fresh to get read of the fat) and put sauce right on the foil.

Take the partially cooked wings and put in sauce and toss till fully coated.

Okay, so now they’re starting to look yum, no?

Then, no more rack needed, pop back into the oven for about 15 more minutes (peek after 10 minutes) and they should look and smell like a slice of paradise.

I am glad that there were people around or I mighta snorfed them down myself. Luckily, I controlled myself and served them as a first course to happy people. They taste as good as they look, and the mustard adds a pleasant light kick.

Sticky Chicken Wings

15 chicken wings, well cleaned and patted dry
2 heaping tablespoons ketchup
2 heaping tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons deli or whole grain mustard
2 heaping tablespoons duck sauce or sweet chili sauce
2-3 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons soy sauce

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 425 F.

Really pat the wings dry or they might steam instead of roast in the oven.

Prepare a rimmed baking tray by lining with tin foil and place a grate on top or use a broiling tray (the kids with the slits so the fat drips down) or a foil pan for broiling. Place dry wings on pan/grate.

Once the oven comes to temperature, place wings in oven for 20 minutes. While wings are roasting, prepare sauce. In bowl, stir together the ketchup, brown sugar, duck sauce, mustard, molasses and soy sauce till smooth. Remove wings from oven and if the tray is fatty/greasy, switch out the tin foil with fresh. Right on foil, spread the sauce and put the wings on sauce tossing in sauce till completely coated. Place wings right side up and continue roasting in oven an additional 15 minutes, checking to make sure they don’t burn after 10 minutes and when a lovely deep color remove from oven.

The nice part of this is, while delectable hot out of the oven, they reheat beautifully (we actually had a few leftovers since it was a starter) and get gobbled up happily then too.