Inferno wings with fermented pepper sauce and blue cheese dressing
Binging with Babish · ♥ 56.1K likes · 4.5M views · 86 min video
Read about wings in the BrightCulinary Book
Timestamp
Ingredients
Method
Techniques
- habanero peppers
- Fresno peppers
Protect hands, eyes and countertop before handling the peppers. Remove the stems and cut the rest of each pepper into one-inch segments, about a pound of peppers total.
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 cup white vinegar
Blend the peppers with four cloves of garlic and maybe a cup of white vinegar, low speed at first, then high speed for at least one minute until completely smooth.
Pour into a non-reactive container, cover loosely with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for three days to ferment; little bubbles rising to the surface mean it is fermenting.
Strain through a not-too-fine mesh strainer, keeping some pepper solids to thicken the sauce.
- salt
- sugar
- MSG
Cook the sauce at a bare simmer for maybe 10 to 15 minutes to thicken it and mellow the harsh raw pepper flavours, then taste and add a little salt, a pinch of sugar and some MSG.
- chicken wings
- vegetable oil
Rinse and thoroughly pat dry the chicken wings and place them into vegetable oil heated to about 225 degrees Fahrenheit, cooking slowly for about 20 minutes as a chicken wing confit.
Rest the pale, flabby wings on a cooling rack at least one hour at room temperature or overnight in the fridge.
Cool and filter the oil into a bigger Dutch oven, heat it to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and fry the cooled wings for 10 minutes in small batches, pulling them apart in the first two minutes while they are sticky.
- 1 cup mayonnaise
- ¾ cup sour cream
- garlic
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
- kosher salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- ½ tsp white sugar
- lemon juice
- 4 oz blue cheese
For the blue cheese dressing combine the mayonnaise, sour cream, a sprinkle of garlic, white wine vinegar, kosher salt, black pepper, about half a teaspoon of white sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice, then fold in about four crumbled ounces of blue cheese. Keep covered and refrigerated so the flavours meld.
Blue cheese dressing
Toss the wings in the sauce as immediately as possible after frying to ensure sauce adhesion.
- bourbon
Optional flaming version: put the wings in a saucepan with a good glug of sauce, get them hot and bubbly, kill the heat, add bourbon and set it alight, letting all the alcohol burn off.
Flaming the wings with bourbon