When Ted isn’t busy giving Unsolicited Advice, he loves to kill animals and smoke them until they are delicious. Now you can too!
Most people know chicken wings as a deep fried spicy treat, unless you have the taste buds of a cowardly child. Then they probably strike fear deep your heart. A heart that is likely less clogged than someone who regularly shovels fried meat in to their head.
Frying the chicken wing goes back to Buffalo New York, one of the most depressing places on the earth that isn’t the former site of a concentration camp. (Editor’s Note: As a former resident of Western New York, I can confirm this.) Buffalo, or as it ineffectually know as, The Rusty Buckle of the Rust Belt.
What buffalo wings did was give us a template. Take chicken wings, a traditionally garbage piece of the bird, cover them in sauce and magic happens.
Now you can’t go to a restaurant with out seeing all varieties of wing sauce: Buffalo, BBQ, Honey BBQ, Honey Buffalo, Buffalo BBQ, and of course mild. The list goes on and on. Chicken wings are now one of the more manly foods you can eat, right up there with steak and light beer served before noon. This is really saying something because the wing was once a scrap fit to be fed only to the family dog or female children. (Note: Do not feed wings to dogs or female children the bones will get stuck in their tiny throats.)
The reason wings were traditionally undesirable is because evolution robbed the chicken of flight long ago. As a result the wings are and under used limb, lacking the taste and texture you get from the thighs. Gentlemen don’t you just love to bite into a juicy thigh? I’m getting carried away. I’ll save that for another article. (Look for the sociopath’s guide to smoking: After Dark) This is why the chicken wing is nature’s most useless appendage.
The chicken was originally domesticated as an animal to be fought for sport. At a certain point some decided it would be a good idea to eat the loser. Thus chicken farming was born.
Cats were domesticated to do absolutely nothing.
Chicken remained a relatively expensive protein source for most of history. That was until factory farming was invented in the 20th century and allowed for billions of chickens to be produced every year. This is why we are living in the time of histories most delicious genocide.
Chicken hand enthusiast.
So lets get to smoking the wings. (Note, I was lazy and didn’t take as many pictures as normal so there may be photos of random bullshit through out the article.) Chicken wings have three parts: The drum stick which everyone likes, the middle part that is hard to eat because it has two bones instead of one, and the chicken hand or tip which no one eats except weirdos.
Saucy!
Since we are slow cooking I recommend leaving the whole wing intact so it doesn’t dry out. The night before you smoke them you are going to need to marinate them. Choose what ever sauce you’d like. Just dump a bunch of sauce on top of those things and put them in the fridge for about 12 hours. For the batch I made for this article I made a mustard sauce of consisting of garlic, salt, pepper, parsley, lemon juice, and multiple types of mustard.
This is what a man looks like.
When you are ready to smoke I would recommend using hickory or mesquite. After all, these are a manly food so you want a wood that smells like a man. Once they are in the smoker they are only going to take a couple of hours. After about an hour I would recommend brushing them with sauce. Repeat this after another half an hour.
The finished product.
Once you pull them out of the smoker they are ready to eat but there are several options for making them better. Throwing them on a hot grill for a few minutes to crisp up the skin, tossing them in more sauce, serving them with with blue cheese (ranch is for the illiterate), or any combination of the three.
The answer is yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!
If you do everything right you’ll have made a chicken wing so good a straight man will propose marriage to you, even if you are a dude. For more tips on Barbecue follow me on twitter. I don’t ever tweet tips but it will make me like you more and maybe I’ll strike up a conversation with you sometime and let you know some secrets.
XOXO @tedpettingell
