Chicken wings are a global favorite, with countless varieties of sauces and seasonings that have influenced the many wing flavors on your local wing shop menu. If you’re planning on making chicken wings at home, you can skip the deep fryer and bake them instead. Baking wings allows you to cook a large batch at once while also giving you plenty of time to make the sauce you’ll toss them in post-bake. A dry spice blend is an integral part of the prep process for most baked chicken wing recipes, and the more you coat the wings in spice, the better. Over-spicing chicken wings not only improves their flavor but also serves an even more important role in their texture.
A thick coating of dry rub will crisp up beautifully in the oven, adding an extra layer of crunch to the skin that will stand up to the post-bake sauce toss. A lesser-known but equally glorious reason you should over-spice chicken wings is that the coating of dry rub creates a barrier to lock in the chicken’s moisture. Baking is a dry-cooking method that risks drying chicken out as it cooks. But a thorough coating of spices forms a flavorful and impenetrable seal that’ll trap the chicken meat’s delectable, natural juices for the most tender and juicy results. An over-spiced chicken wing is key to achieving that tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside textural contrast that you might’ve thought was only possible with a deep fryer.
More tips for flavorful and crispy chicken wings
A spice rub can be wet or dry. But even with an oily foundation, you should still overload on the dry spices to make a paste-like coating. Over-spicing is just one of many hacks for chicken wings you’ll want to remember. For example, you should pat your wings dry or let them dry out a bit in the fridge before you even begin to spice them.
There are plenty of spice blends to upgrade your chicken wings, and some are vibrant and complex enough to stand on their own. For example, this recipe for spicy cumin chicken wings packs a trifecta of tangy, spicy, and sweet notes with a spice rub of cumin, chili flakes, brown sugar, garlic powder, and lime juice. If you’re going to use a homemade or store-bought sauce like Frank’s RedHot, you can make a simpler spice rub of salt, pepper, and brown sugar for a balanced, browned, and crispy foundation. Another trick to bolster the crisping and moisture-trapping capacity of a spice rub is to add baking soda. This is a leavening agent, but it also reacts with the moisture of the wings’ skin, producing bubbles that lead to the crispiest exterior. If you’re going to use the baking soda hack for your chicken wings, you’ll need to let them rest in the baking soda and spice blend for a few hours in the fridge before baking.
