Super Bowl is this weekend. Are you ready? Below were some wings I made for division championship weekend and I was so happy despite the fact that it is hard to enjoy with a Taiwanese exchange student and two boys that couldn’t give a rip about sports. In fact, when I was asking the exchange student about football he went on and on how he watched it with his last host family watching the Sponge Bob simulcast. I was silently praying that he wouldn’t ask it today as I wanted to watch the games.

The last time I did wings, I made them in the oven. I tried something that I had never done before and that was coat them in baking soda. They were fabulously terrible. I am sure I didn’t do a good job rinsing off the baking soda and it was just a bad aftertaste. In addition, I didn’t think it really lent anything to the crispiness of the wing either. I would say that it definitely turned me off to making wings for at least a year.

I’ll be honest, I don’t love wings. Making them at home never seems as good. But even eating out, I don’t pan longingly for them. I would much rather have fried chicken and proper dinner sides. But, I thought that I would pull out the stops for the exchange student since Super Bowl is my son’s birthday this year. On the menu is hot pot :(.

This time, I thought that I would actually break out the deep fryer. We bought this thing when we move to South Carolina thinking it was was going to endear us with the natives. What we quickly found out was that it takes a lot of oil and cleaning is a pain, read messy and expensive. When I broke it out to make wings it was probably the first time in 15 years. In fact it was so long ago, I cant even ever remember using it in this house and that has been over twenty years.

This time I really focused on the details. I defrosted the wings to room temperature. I aggressively seasoned them, dried the moisture and I lightly rolled them in flower. Holding my breath, 10 minutes later they looked like the picture. That was the look but how did they taste? They were perfect.

My wife and I have a debate about wings, dry or wet? I like my dry, meaning not overly sauced. The light flour dusting soaked up the sauce but the frying meant that they were impervious enough to not get soggy. This is exactly how I like my wings.

This is what I learned. Baking wings is fine but will never get the right texture. For that, they must be fried. As a result, this process is a lot of work and not cheap. Honestly, if you have a wing place that you like then you would be time and money ahead to buy wings rather than make them. The only real justification that I could see to make your own is if you have some sort of dietary restriction. A distant second to that would be a particular sauce combination that is not commercially available.

While I believe that my wings were superior to any that I could buy, they were not four to five times better based on my effort/cost versus ordering. Also, as suspicious as I am of the food industry I don’t think what I made were any healthier than commercially available options. To each his own. If you want to have the best wings at the Super Bowl party, fry them.

Since the fryer was already going, I went ahead and threw some french fries in as well. I didn’t realize that it only took two minutes rather that the twenty in the oven. Once again, they were the consistency that you would expect from a drive through, not at home. I decided that the fryer still has a limited role in the kitchen and now dreaming of some fish tacos.

End Your Programming Routine: What drove me today was getting ready for Super Bowl. Look at your recipes so you can shop tomorrow, not Sunday. Some things need time to defrost or marinade and it is a bad time to find out two hours before it needs to be on the table. Mise en place is not just for the kitchen but also getting ready for the event. As much as I dislike the home kitchen fryer, sometimes there is no substitute for doing it right.