As I have mentioned in prior blog posts, I am quite fond of chicken wings. It’s such a versatile protein and can be paired with any flavor combination that your tastebuds desire. Combine that with the small portions that you can pick up and eat with your fingers and I’m hooked! It can be an appetizer or a meal, depending on what you’re looking to make. Like I said, you can pick any type of seasoning and it’ll go perfectly with chicken, but in this case I want to talk about one of my favorite flavor profiles – Asian – which goes unbelievably well with chicken. There’s nothing better than the flavors that can be found in Asian cooking. One of the key ingredients in Asian cooking is soy sauce. Soy sauce is made from fermented soy bean paste and has been around for about 2,200 years. That’s amazing! My family loves Asian flavors—it’s all I can do to keep my youngest son from using all of the soy sauce every time we have rice!
With a little experimentation, I’ve come up with an Asian sauce that I use on fish, pork, poultry, steak, and more. It contains soy sauce, ginger, garlic, siracha, brown sugar, honey, and olive oil. For a little more pronounced Asian flavor, I like to mix a little sesame oil into the sauce–it just give it a little more depth. This is one of my favorite sauces and because of the honey and brown sugar, it creates a wonderful caramelization with that perfect combination of sweet and salty. For today’s topic, I’m talking about one of my favorite dishes, Sylva’s Kitchen Sticky Asian Wings.
For this recipe we start with chicken wings (I usually get party wings which are packaged with both drumsticks and wings). I’ve cooked them using either an air fryer or oven. If I have the time, I prefer to cook them in the oven as I feel they retain a bit more moisture and fill the house with an amazing roasted chicken aroma, but air frying is great, too. In this discussion, we’ll talk about using the oven.
Bake the wings on a baking sheet at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes (I suggest putting the wings on parchment paper on the baking sheet for easier cleanup). Pull the wings out, turn them over, and put back in the oven for another 20 minutes. While the wings are cooking, mix the sauce ingredients together in a saucepan and bring to a boil for 5 minutes to reduce. Once the wings are cooked, place them in a bowl, toss them in the sauce, and return the wings to the oven for about 5 more minutes just to caramelize the sauce get the wings nice and sticky. Place them in a family-style serving dish or on plates for individual services, garnish with some sliced scallions (aka green onions), and there you have it–one of the best appetizers there is. Or serve it with some jasmine rice and a gochujang cucumber salad and you have a complete dinner. I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as my family and I do!
