Wood Fire Roasted Chicken Wings

The most necessary ingredient for my cook tonight was salt. Lots of salt.

No, it wasn't for the wings....

I had to salt my deck just to get out to our Big Green Eggs today.

An ice storm hit Knoxville about 3am this morning creating a real mess across the city. Even Y-12, the facility that houses the fuel for the U.S. nuclear weapons opened 4 hours late this morning! The top of our deck was solid ice, even the spots under the awning.

Even after trying to salt and shovel off the excess, you can still see ice on the deck behind my feet in this picture late this afternoon. (Excuse the expression, it's what you get when an 11 y/o calls your name when you are busy and then snaps a picture.)


But back to the wings. I've done hot wings several times on my blog and am pretty happy with my results. However, tonight I was trying something different. I was making BBQ wings.

• I used Adam Perry Lang's technique & recipe for wings from BBQ25 (fantastic book that I won from Robert at White Trash BBQ)
• I kept the wings whole instead of breaking them down into drummettes and wingettes.

When I do my wings whole, I like to flip the wing tips back like this:


My normal wing routine is what we call "30-20-10 wings" which is cooking the wings (already rubbed) @ 375f (indirect) for 30 minutes, flip. 20 minutes, toss in sauce. 10 minutes.

Adam's routine is using your favorite marinade or rub and then cooking indirect at 300f for an hour. Then toss them (literally) in a cup of your favorite BBQ sauce, a little brown sugar, and green onions and finish them at 400f for 30 minutes. (You could try the same thing in your oven.)

I used 2 fist sized chunks of cherry wood for my smoke. The BBQ sauce I used was Carnivore Robust which is one of my new favorites. I bought two bottles at the Eggtoberfest and have really enjoyed the rich texture and spicy taste.

I served the wings with an easy saffron rice and roasted chickpeas.

Results?
Everyone thought the wings were smackalicious. The flavor was just about perfect, Lang's marinade and the Carnivore sauce delivered. The wings were something that 97.25% of people would devour and never have a second thought.

But the perfectionist in me would have liked just a bit more crispy texture in the skin. The next time, I'd either start with a dry rub (instead of a wet marinade AND a wet finishing sauce) or finish the wings over direct heat to get the sauce to "set" a little better.

But that is nit picking. These were damn good!

Today's question:
Today I had to salt the deck to get rid of the ice. Tell me about a time when weather directly affected how, what or when you were cooking dinner.