Recipe | | Page 7

This is a real finger food favourite of mine but it is one which can be a bit of a let down if it’s not done well. There are a number of factors to consider when making wings – you need the right size and texture for the chicken, the right level of sweetness and hotness in the sauce and, of course, the right amount of sauce on the wings.

My whole family shares my love of BBQ chicken wings and over the years we have had some great tasting wings. One of my favourites was at a bar in Goderich, Canada. This is a small and extremely beautiful town in Ontario where my Great Uncle settled to start his family. It was my lovely family in Goderich who introduced me to the wings at Paddy O’Neils – quite simply AMAZING! With my family’s love of chicken wings, it is somewhat unsurprising that this recipe was suggested by my big brother.

I have been regularly making chicken wings since we returned from a trip to Vegas in 2013 and my boyfriend and I quickly got withdrawal symptoms from the yummy food we enjoyed on holiday. I searched online and found a great recipe which has been a regular treat every since. I’ve always made my wings with a buttery hot sauce and I therefore had to find a BBQ sauce recipe to use for this challenge.

A quick search online revealed lots to choose from and eventually I opted for this one from tasteofhome.com

When combined with my existing recipe for the wings, you will need the following:-

Wings
- Chicken wings (1 pack of approximately 700g)
- 60g flour
- 0.4g cayenne pepper
- 0.6g paprika
- 2g salt
- Oil for frying
Sauce
- 1/4 onion (finely chopped)
- Oil for frying
- 2 medium-large garlic cloves (crushed)
- 250ml ketchup
- 120ml cider vinegar
- 66g light brown soft sugar
- 60ml worcestershire sauce
- 1tsp hot chilli powder
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1/2 tsp ground cumin
- 1/4 tsp hot pepper sauce

WARNING – in case you haven’t realised already, this recipe is not a healthy one but my gosh, it is worth the guilt!

Practical Tip: trying to weigh 0.4g of cayenne pepper and 0.6g of paprika is a bit of a nightmare! So I weighed out 4g of cayenne pepper, mixed this with 6g of paprika and stored it in an airtight container on my spice shelf. Each time I want to make the wings, I just weigh out 1g of the mixed spice. Trust me, once you have made these wings the first time, you’ll come back again and those leftover 9g will most definitely get used up.

With my ingredients ready I set out preparing my chicken wings. I chopped off the tip of each wing first (and discard this bit) then separated the wing and drumette. Once this was done I placed the chicken wings and drumettes in a nonporous dish and in a separate jug mixed the flour, cayenne pepper, paprika and salt. Then I carefully coated the chicken in the flour mix and popped it in the fridge for 90 minutes

Practical Tip: add a small amount of the flour mix to your chicken and stir with a spoon. Then add a bit more and give it another stir. Finally, tightly cover the dish with cling film and give the chicken a good toss. The cling film will keep the kitchen (and your clothes) tidy but this helps make sure you get those chicken bits fully coated!

With the chicken in the fridge it was time to start thinking about the fryer. Now I have a deep fat fryer and, in complete honesty, I was dreading using it the first time. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories of fires from deep fat frying and I was completely against having one in the flat. However, my in-laws bought one for us as a present and as it was in the flat I had no choice but to give it a go (my boyfriend likes his chips homemade and deep fried – nice and healthy!). If you don’t have a deep fat fryer, this recipe will no doubt work with a deep pan and frying basket; but please be very careful and make sure you control the temperature.

Whichever method you are using, you want to get your oil nice and hot to around 190 degrees celsius.

Practical Tip: make sure your oil is very hot before you add the chicken wings. If you add them before the oil has reached the right temperature the flour coating will simply absorb the fat and you will end up with very greasy and slightly soggy wings rather then nice crispy ones.

Whilst the oil was heating up, I got started on the sauce. I fried my onions until soft (this took about 8 minutes) and I added my garlic for a further minute. Next, in went the rest of the ingredients, except the hot sauce which got added right near the end. The recipe said to simmer the sauce uncovered for 8-10 minutes, however, I left mine a lot longer than this as it took a while to thicken up. In fact, I let the sauce simmer for somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

With the sauce on the go and the oil ready I placed half my chicken in the basket and popped it into the fryer. Actually, I always get my boyfriend to do this bit – I’m still scared of my fryer! The chicken takes about 15 minutes to cook. Once done, I placed the cooked chicken in an overproof dish, covered it with foil and put it into a warm oven while the second batch went in the fryer. Depending on the size of your fryer you may be able to do the whole lot in one go but you must be careful not to overcrowd the chicken.

When I put the the second lot of chicken into the fryer I took my sauce off the heat. It was looking quite lumpy because of the onion (despite my best attempt to chop finely!) and so I decided to blitz it with my handheld blender. I let it cool for about 5 minutes before I did this, then added the hot sauce and returned the sauce to the heat for the final 5 or so minutes until the chicken was ready. I put it all together and served up with some sweet potato fries.

Practical Tip: I covered the chicken in a bit of sauce then gave it a mix before adding the rest. This helped make sure every bit had a good coating of the yummy BBQ sauce.

Pre-sauce coating – nice and crispy wings!

Smothered in yummy sauce!

And so the verdict – best BBQ sauce my boyfriend and I have ever had! It was delicious! Challenge No. 4 was a success 🙂

Next up, I’ll be turning my hand to chocolate fudge cake so make sure you come back next week for Challenge No. 05.

Before I get started with this recipe, I just want to say welcome to those who have kindly starting following this website! 🙂 I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures.

So onto the challenge. Eton mess was suggested by my dad and it is a pudding my mum makes quite often in the summer. It’s a great one for a dinner party and can be put together in many different ways. With it being one of my mum’s specialities I felt I had a lot to live up to with this one.

The first hurdle, I’ve never made meringue before and it is something I have been scared of trying. I’ve often saved the whites of an egg (when a recipe calls for just the yolk) with the intention of having a go but then I always backed out and threw the whites away. Silly really, considering some of the things I have turned my hand to in the kitchen.

And so, here I was, faced with the prospect of having to make meringue. I hunted online and found a recipe which I thought looked good. This recipe is one by Marcus Waering and you can find the full details here, http://www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/eton-mess.

It was the presentation of this dish that really caught my eye – it was so neat and pretty. Now, some of you may be reading this thinking an eton mess is supposed to be messy?! I hear you, but I thought the idea of the mess being inside a neat dome was a great one. It would look beautiful to serve but once you break the dome and get tucked in, the true ‘mess’ of the eton mess would be revealed.

This recipe uses the following ingredients:-

80g of egg white
80g of caster sugar
80g of icing sugar
2 punnet of raspberries
200ml of cream, lightly whipped
2 tbsp of raspberry jam
25ml of raspberry liqueur, optional

I decided to halve this recipe as there was only me and my boyfriend to eat it. I also left out the raspberry liqueur as this isn’t something I had in and it seemed a bit extravagant to buy a bottle just for 12.5 ml. Oh and I also opted to use strawberries instead of raspberries, simply because I prefer them and I used my homemade strawberry jam (click here to find out how to make your own strawberry jam).

Practical tip: I found that one medium egg white was approximately 35-40g.

With my ingredients ready, I got out my bowl and in accordance with the recipe, carefully separated my yolks and white. I then started whisking with my electric hand whisk. I didn’t really know what I was looking for when the recipe said until “very stiff” and I just whisked until it looked about right. I then added the sugars as per the recipe (caster first and then the icing sugar). It was going well and then quite suddenly the mix collapsed! It was extremely runny and there was no way it could be piped into a dome. So in the bin it went.

I spent a bit of time at my laptop trying to find out what went wrong. With this I found a few useful tips:-

Make sure the bowl, whisk etc is thoroughly cleaned and dried before starting.
Use a glass bowl. Avoid plastic as this can have an oil residue which affects the egg whites and stops you reaching the required stiffness;
Clean the bowl with some lemon juice as it helps remove any residue (I didn’t try this but it’s one to note for the future)
To test for stiff peaks you should be able to hold the bowl upside down above your head.
When adding your sugars, do it gradually. For instance, add one tablespoon then whisk, another tablespoon then whisk and then add the remainder.

And so I started again, this time with my glass bowl. Once the whites looked stiff, I started to tip the bowl to check the consistency and after a little more whisking I managed to tip it upside down without the mix falling out. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t brave enough to do this over my head and stuck to doing it over the worktop!

I then gradually added the sugars, once again starting with the caster and then the icing. Everything was looking rights until part way through adding the icing sugar. It collapsed AGAIN! It wasn’t quite as runny as last time so I thought I would try piping my dome.

Nope, that didn’t work. It stayed within my defined circles but there was nothing ‘dome-like’ about it, definitely more of a pancake! I popped it in the oven and thought i’ll just see what its like for flavour.

Practical tip: draw two (or more) circles on the parchment paper and then turn this upside down on your tray so you have a clear shape to pipe/fill with your mix.

I made a quick phone call to my mum to try and figure our what went wrong – remember you’re never too old to ask your mum for help! I explained step by step what I had done and we couldn’t figure it out. Mum suggested that the icing sugar should have been folded in rather than whisked but the recipe specifically states to whisk it in. We also discussed that perhaps I just over whisked the stiff peaks to start off with and this destroyed the structure of the mix. But at the end of the call we couldn’t pin point the problem. I considered having a third attempt but I needed to get the meringue cooked as I needed the oven to cook our dinner. And so I was left with pancake meringues.

Whilst the meringues where cooking I sieved my strawberries to make the puree and got the rest of my ingredients ready. Although I waited to fold the strawberries into my cream until just before I was ready to put everything together.

Once my meringues were done, I took them out of the oven and I tried to remove some of the softer meringue from the bottom as the recipe told me to. However, in hindsight this could probably have been left in to give a gooey texture to the eton mess. One to try for next time (I will definitely be making this again as it was yummy!)

With everything ready to go, I decided to serve it up in wine glasses which has been chilled in the fridge. I started layering in my ingredients, some meringue first, then the cream mixture, a bit more meringue and then cream and finally topped with some carefully selected meringue to make it look pretty. I used the puree to pour on top and drizzle down the sides where the gaps where. Finally, I finished the presentation off by adding a strawberry to the rim of each glass.

So this didn’t turn out as I had hoped but it certainly tasted amazing and I think it still looks pretty good, even without the dome! Although, when I gave it to my boyfriend, whilst he said it looked amazing, he did ask me to tip it into a bowl so he wouldn’t break the glass. Just goes to show, try as you might, you just can’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) take the mess out of an eton mess!

Coming up next week, Challenge No. 4 – BBQ chicken wings. See you then 🙂

Tag Archives: Recipe

Challenge No. 4 – BBQ Chicken Wings

Challenge No. 3 – Eton Mess

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