Recipe: Grill Fried Chicken Wings

At Thanksgiving, I was visiting family in Pittsburgh and met the owner of Cafe Fifth Avenue.  It's a bar and restaurant that's right next to Consol Energy Arena where we always take in a Turkey Day Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game.  He serves up some mighty tasty chicken wings and through the course of the conversation (and a couple of cold beers), he sent me home with a bag of the seasoning that uses for my very own.  If you're in Pittsburgh, please stop by and try his chicken wings.  They were awesome!

I'd been itching to try this on fried chicken, but due to life circumstances in and around the holidays I've been trying to eat a little better and fried chicken just hasn't been on my list.  But Sunday, I deciced to try and adapt a recipe for "oven fried" chicken to the grill.

So I soaked a package of chicken wings in buttermilk, seasoned the flour with my new chicken seasoning, and placed the wings in a disposable pan.  While this seemed like a reasonable approach, I don't think my fire was every really hot enough.  Towards the end I finally got it where it should have been all along, around 425 degrees.

I did pull the wings out of the pan and crisp them a little directly over the fire at the very end.  All in all, the wings were tasty and preferred by my kids over the chicken breasts that I was also grilling.  I'll probably give this another try soon and I'll use a little more of the seasoning on the chicken.  Heck, the Super Bowl is coming up and you can't go wrong with chicken wings at a football game, now can you?

Cheers,
Braddog 

Recipe: Chicken Wings on the Bubba Keg

With football season upon us, I got a craving for some chicken wings. So on Sunday, after a full day at the soccer park, I picked up a large bag of drummies and headed home to put dinner together.
Cooking chicken wings isn't difficult, but landing on a flavor that you like takes a little experimentation. I like my chicken wings dusted with a generous amount of rub, grilled until slightly crisp, then tossed in a little BBQ sauce. I then toss them back on the grill to let the sauce caramelize.
You can experiment to find the flavor that you like by trying different rubs and sauces, but here are a couple of tips to grilling chicken wings.

• Grill them over direct heat.  I personally don't see any benefit in trying to do them low 'n slow.
• Start with a low temperature.  You'll have the lid open a number of times to keep turning them, so your fire temp will creep up on its own.
• Use a pair of long tongs, but be careful that they're not too stiff.  Turning a load of chicken wings over and over puts a lot of strain on your wrist.

So, what's your favorite tailgating dish?  Drop me a recipe in the comments below.

Cheers,
Braddog

Cold Weather Smoking

How versatile a BBQ chef are you?  I got to find out this holiday weekend.  My brother-in-law asked me to "make some magic" (his words not mine) with his CharBroil H20 smoker.  Now it's been a good long while since I've cooked on one of these but we set out to give it a shot.

It was a cold and windy 25 degrees in Pittsburgh and I knew that keeping the temps up with this thin-walled smoker would be an issue.  I decided to forego the water in the water pan and instead filled it with some small gravel in hopes that it would hold more heat than water.

We started a full pan of charcoal and realized that we'd need to keep pouring the coals to it and keep it out of the wind to keep the temps up in a good
cooking range.  Unfortunately, my BIL didn't have a chimney starter but was able to fashion one out of a piece of stove pipe he had in the garage.  This worked out better than I had hoped.

In the end, we were able to serve up 3 dozen ABT's, 3 lbs of chicken wings, and a couple of salmon fillets.  They were very tasty and I'd say that in spite of a cooker with a few limitations, we proved that you can cook decent food if you're patient.

So don't let this cold weather stop you.  Get out there and get cooking!

Cheers,
Braddog