Sticky Chicken Legs/Wings

Martha's recipe

In the March issue of Everyday Food, Martha has a recipe for sticky chicken wings. As you may or may not know, we live in Buffalo. So we know a thing or two about wings. I was interested to try Martha’s take on it, which is actually pretty similar to a recipe I use. I’ll share both here with you.

First up – Martha. I used chicken legs to make this recipe because I can find organic chicken legs but I can’t find organic chicken wings in our stores at this point. I actually think chicken legs are a nice alternative – they are less fatty and more meaty and you can still get that nice crunchy skin on the outside of it.

Martha’s recipe includes these ingredients:

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup fish sauce

1/4 cup lemon juice

2 tbsp soy sauce

a 1 inch piece of ginger, peeled and smashed

1 serrano chile

2 lbs chicken wings

Martha says to mix everything but the wings in a baking dish, add the wings, toss to coat, and bake at 300 for an hour, then increase the temp to 450 for 30 minutes. Martha says to serve with the sliced chile. I skipped that part.

This recipe was pretty good. The legs came out nice and brown and the sauce had a good flavor. It made one hell of a mess in the baking dish though- all the additional sauce burned. I’m actually still scrubbing and soaking it. I’m not wild about fish sauce in general, but it did add a nice note to this sauce.

Now onto to my recipe. This is an adaptation of a recipe in Buffalo Spree magazine.

5 lbs wings, tips discarded, cut into two sections

2 cups honey

1 cup tamari

2 tbsp ketchup

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp garlic salt

Spray a roasting pan with cooking spray and preheat oven to 375. Arrange the wings and pour the sauce over them, turning to coat completely. Bake for one hour.  Turn the wings and continue to bake for 10 to 30 minutes. The time differential depends on how you like your wings. I like mine very dark, but not burned.  I also find that it will depend on your oven and how well you turn your roasting pan to take advantage of the hot spots in your oven.  If you like your wings spicy, add some hot sauce to the mixture. If you’re interested, traditional Buffalo wings are covered in nothing more than butter and hot sauce and taste best deep fried, but you can replicate it by roasting the wings completely plain and then tossing in the butter and hot sauce mix at the very end. I find that for baking wings you have more success with a sauce like my recipe. You can make my recipe with chicken legs if you prefer.