The guilty pleasures file: perfecting chicken wings

If I had to rank my favourite food indulgences, chicken wings would certainly make the top five. They certainly count as one of those foods that come with a host of associations: pubs, beer, time out with friends. They also count as food you don't want to consume frequently (though really, any pub food falls into that category).

Your standard pub wing is dusted in flour and deep fried, then tossed in your sauce of choice. This is how they are both wet and sticky and crunchy—which is important, because the texture of a wing contributes a great deal to how good it is. However good the sauce happens to be, if it's soggy it just doesn't do the same thing.

That's all well and good for pubs and restaurants, who have industrial fryers constantly on the go and therefore don't have to think twice about throwing a basket of wings in to crisp up. But if you're like me and love to cook, making wings at home can be an issue ... especially if you're also like me and (a) get nervous about having a pot of hot oil on the stove, and (b) hate the cleanup afterward.

The solution is to bake the wings, which actually works rather well. If you dust them in flour and bake them at about 400 degrees until golden brown, the chicken fat does much of the work that the fryer does otherwise. Then, make your sauce and toss the wings in it, and you're good to go.

Of course, I was never happy to leave it at that, and after much experimentation have arrived at the ultimate no-fry homemade chicken wings recipe.

The two secret ingredients here are panko breadcrumbs and buttermilk. Submerge your wings in buttermilk and let sit, the longer the better. Overnight is great, but at least an hour or two will suffice.

For the breadcrumbs, I like to mix in some corn starch to add to the crispness factor; some garlic powder, paprika, chilli powder, and cayenne. Really, any other herbs you want to add—it's up to you, but that's what I use. Mix the seasonings in thoroughly, and dredge your buttermilk-coated wings in the coating. Space them out evenly on a rack resting on a cookie sheet, and put them in an over preheated to 400 degrees.

They should take 30-45 minutes. They'll be cooked through in a half hour, but I recommend leaving them in longer so they have a nice, crunchy crust. I usually wait until they are a few shades darker than golden; the buttermilk keeps them from drying out.

Now, the sauce: I have experimented with dozens of variations on wing sauces, and tried several store-bought ones, but must come back in the end to the classic Buffalo sauce. It is so simple as to be criminal: equal parts Louisiana hot sauce and melted butter (the second part of this equation is also why you don't want to make these a regular meal).

Seriously. You simply cannot do any better than the original recipe, invented by some genius bar owner in Buffalo so many years ago. I favour Frank's Red Hot, but any variation on the classic Louisiana hot sauce will do. If you prefer spicier wings, you can ramp up the heat by adding Tobasco.

A tip: I have found that the best way to make the sauce is to put the butter in a small pot on an element, but don't turn it on. The heat from the oven will do the job for you, and when you're about five minutes out whisk in the hot sauce.

Get yourself a really big, cheap plastic bowl. Put the wings in the bowl, pour the hot sauce over them, and toss the wings until completely coated. Serve with baby carrots and blue cheese dressing. Invest in a box of wet wipes. The wings go well with a pale ale or dry white wine.

Adventures in the local cuisine

It's been a comfort food type of weekend here in St. John's, with a grey and rainy saturday and a bright but cold sunday, the kind of weekend where I spend more time in my pyjamas than not. And while in an ideal situation that entails sitting in front of a fireplace with a favourite book, I alas have no fireplace and instead have a mountain of essays to grade. It is probably good that I do not have the former when I have the latter. (To any of my students stumbling across this blog entry: that was a joke. I hardly, hardly EVER think about burning essays. Hardly.)

Still, it is very pleasant to lounge around the house on a chilly sunday when dinner is cooking away in the crock pot over a slow nine hours. I love my slow cooker. I camped out at the dining room table all day with the aforementioned stack of grading and multiple pots of tea while the stew I prepared at ten o'clock this morning filled the house with its savoury, peppery fragrance (I like pepper in my stews).



The above picture, alas, doesn't do my stew justice ... in fact, it looks a little gross. I need smell-o-vision.

At seven pm the buzzer went off and I ladled out a bowl of one of my favourite comfort foods for a cold evening, beef stew. And to get just the exact measure of comfort, it must be served on top of a slice of white bread (the kind that's really bad for you -- I'm talking wonderbread here), with a second slice put aside to sop up the juices after.

But the carb level in this stew was somewhat higher than usual, thanks to the addition of a local ingredient I bought recently on a whim and have been since stumped as to how to use it. I'm referring here to hard bread, or "brewis," a staple of the traditional Newfoundland cuisine left over from the days before refridgeration.

Now, I have to explain something: I have now read a respectable number of novels of Newfoundland historical fiction, and one of the recurrent meals mentioned is "salt fish and brewis." I think it's one of those things you have to include (a lot) if you want to be seen as writing authentic historical fiction about Newfoundland. And when I walk past Velma's Restaurant on Water Street, a homey little eatery specializing in traditional Newfoundland fare, "fish and brewis" is there on the menu (alongside the cod tongues, jigs dinner, lassy mogs and figgy duff ... no, don't ask).

The trouble is, I've never had any frickin' clue what "brewis" is, and I certainly never connected it with the bright red bags labelled "Purity Hard Bread" that are ubiquitous in all the grocery stores here.* That was, until I bought a bag out of sheer curiosity.



Now let's be clear on something: to call this product "hard bread" is misleading. Really, to be accurate, it should be named "rock bread" or "titanium bread" and come with warnings that this product should never never be used as a weapon, for it might cause serious harm.



I've read enough C.S. Forester novels to know that the British Navy subsisted on hard biscuit that they would have to dip in water to make them even gnaw-on-able, but my first attempt to nibble on a piece of Purity hard bread probably would have led to an emergency dentist's visit had I persisted. Happily, the instructions are pretty clearly and neatly laid out on the bag: break up bread into smaller chunks (I have, fortunately, a very serviceable cleaver), and soak overnight (at least) in water. Keeping them in the soaking water, bring them to a near boil -- but stopping short of an actual boil. Salt and pepper to taste.

See, here's the thing: they were kind of yummy. I was pleasantly surprised. Even after sixteen hours of soaking and then being nearly boiled, there was substance enough to the bread to be al dente, and while bland in and of themselves, a little salt and pepper -- and, I discovered, a few dashes of white vinegar -- made for a nice snack. Now, the full preparation as described on the bag called for the preparation of scrunchions, another traditional Newfoundland dish -- fried pieces of pork fat -- along with a gravy made from the drippings, plus the requisite salt fish.

I don't know if I'm ready for that yet. The pork fat gravy, maybe, but my preferred way to eat salt cod is fried in a fish cake or in a fish chowder.

HOWEVER ... While preparing the stew this morning, it occurred to me that hard bread, broken up sufficiently small, might make for a nice addition to the stew's broth -- sort of like dumplings, but with a bit more substance. And what do you know? Nine hours of simmering sped up the soaking process, and the bread absorbed the broth to become very flavourful ... it almost made my requisite slices of white bread redundant. Almost.

Sometimes when I think of my alternative academic paths, I imagine I might have become a military history. On days like today, I think perhaps a food anthropologist ... like so much else here in Newfoundland, the traditional cuisine speaks more powerfully to a concrete, lived history than almost anywhere else I have ever been. Hard bread, or "hard tack" as it's also called, is of course a holdover from the days when baking aboard ship was simply impossible. Brewis (which gets its name from the process of breaking it up for soaking, or "bruising" the bread) would not spoil for weeks, indeed months. And in a place of deep, isolating winters, a large stock of hard bread would keep a family in good stead for a very long time. That it is still so ubiquitous in massive corporate grocery chains here makes me happy.

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*A note for mainlanders: "Purity" is a traditional Newfoundland company specializing in baked goods, of which hard bread is merely one of many offerings. Walking into a Dominion Superstore here is pretty much like walking into one anywhere in Canada, which is why I'm always cheered when, upon walking down the cookies & crackers aisle, I am presented with a wide span of shelves all in the trademark deep red of the Purity products, such as the "Jam-Jams" and their quite excellent cream crackers. It is the grocery store equivalent of walking into a liquor store here and seeing an entire wall given over to Lamb's Rum. Seriously.

You know you've been watching too much "Hell's Kitchen" when ...

I was out the other night for a job candidate dinner at The Casbah, one of my favourite St. John's restaurants. My usual habit is to order their steak specials -- they do beef very well there, especially the tenderloin. The special that night was a NY striploin with cracked black pepper. I ordered it rare ... and it came medium! I was rather disappointed. I wasn't, in that context, about to send it back, but I kept having Gordon Ramsay flashes ... imagining taking it back to the kitchen screaming "You fucking DONUT! Is this rare?" And so on.

I might have to stop watching that show. Food and rage have never been conflated for me, until now.

It WOULD have been funny, though.