Serious Eats: Recipes
Grilling: Sweet and Spicy Chicken Wings
[Photograph: Joshua Bousel]
Ever since I started taking wings to the grill, I've been hooked. Less mess and more flavor than frying, It's becoming my preferred path to perfect wings. Building on this, I tried out a recipe from Super Smokers BBQ, the famous St. Louis barbecue joint. The flavor added a little smoke in the wing equation—and it blew my mind.
These wings are coated with a rub, cooked over indirect heat with the apple wood chunks for about 40 minutes, then finished with a sweet and spicy barbecue-honey glaze. There's a lot going on here: the succulent smokey meat, peppery rub, and a sticky sauce that started sweet and left a pleasing lingering heat.
As a less than graceful eater, these left me a bit of a mess (I couldn't stop myself to take a cleaning break between wings) but I wore that mess with pride as a badge of all the deliciousness they embodied.
Adapted from Peace, Love, & Barbecue by Mike Mills and Amy Mills Tunnicliffe.
About the author: Joshua Bousel blogs about grilling on his blog, The Meatwave, and appears weekly here on Serious Eats.
