How Brooklyn’s Best Buffalo Wings are Made

[bright upbeat music]

I'm Sam Braverman, chef owner of Lori Jayne.

I'm gonna show you how to make buffalo wings.

They're gonna be the best you've ever had.

We're here at Danger Danger in Brooklyn,

the home of Lori Jayne.

The sauce for our buffalo wings is a little unique to us.

We call it Buffalo 2.0.

It's taking all your favorite things

that you might dip a buffalo wing in or add to it

and just putting it into the sauce.

Buffalo wings shouldn't be super hard.

It's really about setting yourself up for success.

You just have to pay attention to a few details

and just approach it with intentionality,

and you will get a great final product.

[gentle upbeat music]

First step with buffalo wings is buying good chicken.

You wanna look for some smaller wings

that have nice tight skin and no strange discoloration.

In the grocery store,

ideally, you should get some

kind of air-chilled chicken wings.

Best to get something with as little

to no retained water as possible.

That retained water is gonna make it harder

to get a crispy fry and get that good moisture we want.

Chicken wings have three parts:

the drum, the flat, the tip.

We are going to break them down into three sections.

I like to use this comically large cleaver.

You wanna find the joint,

slice down evenly.

That's your tip.

Put him off to the side,

then take this guy,

line 'em up, find that joint again,

slice down, one motion.

There we go. We got a drum.

There we go. We got a flat.

Chicken wings are one of our most popular dishes

at Lori Jayne.

We go through about 1000 or so chicken wings a week.

You wanna be sure to take the tips off

and separate the pieces.

The tip, in Western culture,

we don't eat this as much,

but we do use it here to make stock.

If you buy whole chicken wings for home,

snip these off, put 'em in your freezer.

Next time you wanna make chicken soup or stock, use these.

Real simple thing you can do

that'll make a difference in your wings

is give them a little score.

Just give 'em one nice slice across the top.

When we do this,

it's gonna allow our dry brine to get in

much faster and more consistently.

And when we cook,

then the skin is gonna puff up,

and it's gonna cause this lovely little separation here

that you're looking for when you fry,

where the outside will get crisp

and the inside is going to essentially steam and stay moist.

So we dry brine our wings.

That's just adding a solution of salt and sugar.

We're gonna want to go to about

a tablespoon or two for every pound.

The dry brine, it's just enhancing

that good moisture we already have.

It's not adding more liquid to the chicken.

Chicken powder is dehydrated, pulverized chicken.

So we season the chicken with chicken,

and then it tastes, get this, like chicken.

One little trick you can do at home

if you don't have a fryer is add a little bit

of baking powder to your dry brine,

and that's gonna cause the skin to pull away,

puff up, do that stuff we were talking about,

where your wing is gonna be nice and moist and juicy,

and the skin's gonna be nice and crispy and crunchy.

Our chicken has been thoroughly dry-brined and cut.

Letting them hang out in the fridge overnight

will yield the best results.

But if you only have 45 to 60 minutes, that's fine.

You're gonna get a delicious wing either way.

And now we're ready for our first cook,

because we do have to cook 'em twice

to make 'em really, really good.

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We're gonna par cook these wings.

Par cooking means cooking something up to or just shy

of the finished temperature

and then reserving it for time to serve.

By gently cooking them the first time

and then resting and chilling them down,

it's gonna allow us, on our second fry,

to get a really dry, crispy skin out of them.

That's gonna then have the sauce adhere better.

We also do this for practicality.

By par cooking 'em off,

I can fry and serve you buffalo wings

within about five minutes as opposed to 15-20

if we're going straight from raw.

This is just over two pounds of chicken wings

that have been dry-brined.

We've let them sit for just long enough,

and now we're gonna par 'em off.

We use a deep fryer here.

When you're heating up your oil,

for the first fry,

you want it to land somewhere between 300 and 325.

We're at like 315 right now.

So the oil's come up to temp.

Pop it on our oil.

We fry exclusively in beef tallow,

which is rendered beef fat.

It has a higher smoke point than most oils.

We have been frying in canola oil forever,

but we switched over to beef tallow

because it tastes really, really good.

If you don't have a deep fryer at home,

then you're gonna want to use a pot with a high enough edge

that you can fill that less than halfway up with oil

and not be worried about its splattering everywhere.

I would strongly recommend doing the in and out at home.

Shake 'em around,

make sure they're not sticking.

In and out will tighten up the skin.

When the wings come out after our par,

they're gonna have taken on some color,

but not that full golden brown sheen

that they'll get on the second fry.

These guys should be coming out looking a little more pale.

Just a little bit past this is where we're gonna get to,

but already you're starting to see from that paprika

and the other seasonings we're getting a little bit of red,

a little bit of color in there,

just enough to start darkening our chicken.

If you're making chicken wings at home,

you can do this step just in the oven.

Bring your temperature down,

something gentle like 275 or 300 in the oven,

and you're gonna let them rock out

until they reach an internal temperature of 165.

Another great tip for buffalo wings

would be to temp your wings using a thermometer.

We're gonna go up on the bone.

See there, we're still at 142.

Need another two or three minutes.

Right now in the fryer,

all of the excess moisture is being forced to the surface,

and that's beginning that steaming of the chicken inside.

By not cooking at too high of a temp now,

we're allowing it to gently come up to temperature,

retain the moisture we want,

expel any retained water so that when we chill them down

and do our second fry,

we're just gonna have all that good juiciness inside

and none of the wibblyness that might come

with an improperly prepared chicken wing.

So these are ready to rock.

We just temped them,

and they're all at 165.

We wanna drain off that excess oil

and then lay 'em out onto a rack.

They're not gonna cook any further.

This is that good, good skin in there.

That's how you know you have a good quality chicken.

These little darker bits,

that's how we know that our seasoning penetrated.

Next up, chilling 'em down.

It's gonna allow our skin to get crispier,

and it's also gonna make it so that

when we're frying these off for the second time,

they don't overcook.

Because we're going from cold into hot,

we're gonna get crispy exterior,

moist interior, good chicken wing.

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There's two ingredients in most buffalo sauces:

butter, and hot sauce.

We're gonna take our butter,

and we're gonna brown it.

By browning the butter,

we're just gonna unlock a bit of nuttiness

and a more depth of flavor.

This is one of the more integral elements

of our buffalo sauce that I think makes it different

from a lot of other ones.

We're already getting that nice brown color

and a nutty aroma.

Browning the butter is just another way of layering flavors.

Butter's its own thing.

You brown it, you're adding another layer.

You add the chicken powder,

that's another layer.

Chicken powder is a great tool in your arsenal

to just make so many things taste better.

We want like a heaping tablespoon of that chicken powder.

We're just gonna blend that through.

The hot sauce, that's another layer.

We use Crystal hot sauce 'cause it's the best hot sauce.

Many hot sauces are just spice and vinegar.

And while that is the composition of this sauce,

it just has more of a depth of flavor

than a Tabasco, a Frank's.

It's not one note.

I would say it's like a 1-4 ratio about

for hot sauce to butter.

We wanna mix it through very thoroughly.

And you wanna keep the heat on nice and low at this point.

We're going fat into fat.

As soon as they're at the same temperature,

they're gonna have an easier time combining.

So this is our standard lovely buffalo sauce.

But we're gonna do a little more today.

We're gonna make Buffalo 2.0.

What that means is we're gonna add blue cheese,

Grana Padano cheese, mixed up with our garlic.

Grana Padano is the hard cow's milk cheese,

similar to a pecorino or a parm.

We're gonna add lemon juice in there.

The blue cheese is nice and funky.

The Grana kind of grounds it,

and then the lemon picks it back up again,

gives you that acid that goes along with the buffalo.

So we take that, pour it in here.

And you're gonna get these lovely little chunks in here,

where some of the blue cheese is gonna break into the sauce

and give you this more nice, creamy texture.

But we're gonna still keep some chunks

that when you're biting into the wing,

you got a lovely little hit of that.

Everybody wants blue cheese dipping sauce.

Why do that when you can have blue cheese buffalo sauce?

Our wings are nice and chilled now.

You're gonna see that that skin

has tightened up a little bit.

Now we're ready for the final fry.

Our oil has come back up to temp.

We need to be at at least 350.

And if you have a higher smoke point oil like tallow,

you can go to 365 or 370.

Let's get a nice blend of flats and drums.

Drop 'em in.

We're gonna let these rock for at least

that first two to three minutes.

So you can see already they're starting

to take on more color.

After this step and the final cooking is done,

we're gonna go right into our sauce,

because when they're hot

and they still have the oil on them,

it's the same thing as salting your food.

That sauce is gonna stick to it more.

We have fat in the sauce

that's gonna bind with the fat on the oil.

It's gonna make happy, fatty, good time.

So at this point,

you see that the skin has pulled away a little bit,

it's starting to crunch up, looking like a chicharron.

This guy is ready.

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Make sure your sauce is nice and hot.

You should see steam coming off it.

We're gonna take our hot, hot sauce,

take our wings, just a little shake,

and then right in, okay?

You're gonna hear that nice sizzle.

Toss.

Toss.

You don't have to toss.

You're at home.

Take some tongs.

That's what your final product should be looking like.

Because we have the hot sauce going onto the hot wing

and little fats and oils in both places,

it's more conducive to sticking together

and holding onto the wing.

They have a lovely even coating of the sauce throughout.

We're just gonna tear up a little bit of parsley.

It's more for presentation and color.

And we're gonna take a little bit more

of our 2.0 mix.

Blue cheese mixed up with our garlic,

with our Grana Padano,

and we're gonna toss it through

just to give it that nice final coating.

Couple little extra chunks of blue in there.

And that green just to break up the deep, deep orange.

So there you go, you should have nice little chunks of blue,

little bit of green, some lemon.

We're ready to plate our wings.

At Lori Jayne, that means a little paper boat.

Build upwards if possible.

Take our excess sauce,

all over the top.

Buffalo wings shouldn't be clean.

It should be messy.

It should be a whole experience.

That's why we serve them with wet naps.

These look so good 'cause we've done all the work

to have a great chicken wing.

We followed all the steps.

We got 'em nice and crispy.

We can even feel the crisp through all the sauce.

It really should smell amazing between the blue cheese,

the Grana, the garlic.

These are just all the things you want

to eat with a chicken wing.

Hmm, check it out.

Steaming, still moist on the inside.

You'll notice we don't have carrot,

we don't have celery, we don't have ranch.

We don't need those things.

If you ask for blue cheese,

just look at the sauce, man.

It's already in there.

People are super passionate about buffalo wings,

and I get it.

There's so much variation in what is really two elements:

sauce and chicken.

Talking about American comfort food,

I don't think it gets much better than buffalo wings.