Hot Wings

This isn’t turning into the grilled meat blog, I promise. It’s just, well, it’s summer isn’t it and I’m either having or getting invited to a lot of barbecues. Wings always fit the bill because they’re cheap, cook quickly and have a lot of fat for their size, which means loads of crisp, charred skin. Tick, tick and tick.

Thinking about it, this is probably the unhealthiest of all ways to cook wings without deep frying them first.* They’re hot wings you see, which means they’re bathed in hot sauce cut with a load of melted butter.

Hot Wings

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It begins the night before with a marinade made from onion, garlic, thyme, oregano and paprika. Then right before cooking you melt the butter with the hot sauce, dunk the wings in half of it and grill them, reserving the other half for later. When they are charred and cooked through, you dunk each once again in the sauce, leaving a sweet-spicy coating, silken with butter, which stains your fingers and face bright orange.

These went down well at the BBQ but they weren’t hot enough because I ran out of hot sauce. Traditionally you would use Frank’s to make hot wings; I didn’t as I needed to use up my homemade scotch bonnet sauce but I didn’t realise quite how much the butter would tame it. Still, easily remedied in future. I served them, as is traditional, with celery sticks and a blue cheese dip, which make for a cooling interlude between each sticky wing.

Hot Wings with Blue Cheese Dip

For the marinade

30 chicken wings
1 tablespoon salt
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 onion
3 teaspoons thyme leaves
3 teaspoons dried oregano
1.5 teaspoons black pepper
1 teaspoon paprika

For the sauce

250g butter
Hot sauce

Sticks of celery and blue cheese dip, to serve.

Process the onion and garlic in a blender with 1 tablespoon water until you have a puree. Put this puree in a bowl with the salt, thyme, oregano, pepper and paprika. Put the chicken wings in a large dish and rub the marinade all over them, giving them a good rub to make sure each wing is well coated. Refrigerate overnight.

When you want to cook the wings, remove them from the fridge to come to room temperature and start your BBQ. When the BBQ is ready, melt the butter in a small pan and stir in hot sauce to taste. You’ll want it nice and spicy. I only had half this kilner jar of sauce and if you’re using a shop bought sauce you’ll need to experiment. Don’t worry though, it’s not exactly rocket science. Split this sauce into two bowls.

Dump the wings in one of the bowls and mix to cover with the sauce. Grill the wings until charred all over and cooked through. When cooked, dip each into the remaining bowl of sauce.

Serve with sticks of celery and the blue cheese dip.

 

Ham Cooked in Coca Cola

As you can probably tell, I’m into American food at the moment; perhaps the pulled pork with Boston baked beans or wedge salad with blue cheese dressing gave it away? Cooking ham in coca-cola is one of those ideas that sounds just outrageous but is actually brilliant. I’ve cooked it many times now. The cola imparts, as you would expect, a sweet and subtly spiced flavour to the salty ham and I finished it with a sticky glaze of molasses, mustard and rum, which melted into a glistening varnish.

While pondering how to eat it (it takes 2.5 hours to cook, I pondered a lot), my thoughts inched ever closer to the idea of a towering sandwich; a Man vs. Food style beast topped with deep-fried pickles and hot sauce. Yes, deep-fried pickles. I first saw this genius idea on Homesick Texan, a blog partly responsible for this American food phase. Pickles? Good. Deep-fried stuff? Gooood. Together? BOOM! I decided on a combo of traditional dill pickled cucumbers (I always use the Krakus brand since my friend’s Polish mother recommended them – so crisp), pickled chillies and those sweet little silverskin pickled onions which are totally under-rated. A crunchy cracker base (base, base, base) mixture surrounds juicy, crisp pickle. They made an excellent snack and a serious sandwich garnish that says I Mean Business.

The ham was easily torn apart with frantic fingers and stuffed, chunk on juicy chunk into a roll. We topped each with a selection of the pickles and sauce made with 50% home-made hot sauce and 50% ketchup. Oh my. This is what Sundays are all about.

Ham Cooked in Coca Cola with a Molasses Glaze

1 x 2kg ham. Mine was was just over this weight (I used a boneless one; a bone will add more flavour but you need to account for the weight)
1 x 2 litre bottle full-sugar coca cola
1 white onion, peeled and cut in half

For the glaze

100ml molasses
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons dark rum (or whisky)
Cloves

Put the ham in a large pan, skin side down. Cover it with the cola and add the onion. Bring to the boil then reduce to a good simmer. Put a lid on, but not tightly; rest it so you have a teeny gap at one side. Cook for 2.5 hours (or just under if your ham is exactly 2kg).

When the ham is nearly finished cooking, preheat the oven to gas 7/210C

When the cooking time is up, drain the ham, put it in a dish then remove the skin so that you are left with a thin layer of fat. Score the fat into a criss-cross diamond pattern. Mix the glaze ingredients together well and brush the glaze all over the ham. Push a clove into the points of each diamond. Cook it for 5 minutes, then brush again with the remaining glaze. Cook for a further 5 minutes then remove the ham from the oven and allow it to cool.

Deep-fried pickles

5 good sized Krakus brand pickled cucumbers, cut into inch-thick slices
6 pickled chillies
6 silverskin pickled onions

1 egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 pack Matzo crackers (about 75g. Matzo are very similar to the ‘Saltines’ that Homesick Texan uses)
1 scant teaspoon paprika
Salt and pepper
Flour

Vegetable or groundnut oil, for deep-frying

Preheat the oven to Gas1/140C

Cover a plate with flour and sprinkle with pepper and paprika. In a bowl, mix the egg and buttermilk. Put the crackers in a food processor and pulse to crumbs; spread this mixture on another plate. Dip each pickle first in the flour, then the egg, then toss about in the crackers. Set aside. Heat your oil for deep frying in a sturdy pan until it shimmers. You can test if it is ready but putting a little piece of bread in – if that starts to properly sizzle and fry, you’re good to go.

Fry the pickles in small batches; do not crowd the pan. Put the cooked pickles on a plate lined with a couple of sheets of kitchen paper and put in the oven to keep warm while you cook the rest.

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I just love how the Americans cut a big wedge of iceberg, drench it in blue cheese dressing and then call it a salad. Respect.

I’m rather fond of the poor old iceberg. It doesn’t have any flavour to speak of but as a big ol’ wedge of crunch, no lettuce does it better. So, you take a quarter of the lettuce and drench it; yes, drench it, in a blue cheese and sour cream dressing. Dribble. You’ll need something to offset all that richness and tang though, so why not sprinkle on a handful of sweet ‘n salty pig-candy pieces? Oh yes indeedy. Picture this: kerrrunch down through that wedge; creamy, salty; nuggets of blue cheese sneaking into every layer but then, hang on what’s this? Chewy shards of sticky, streaky candied bacon, that’s what. Salad garnish crack.

Caramelised walnuts would make a lovely alternative to the bacon but I wasn’t allowed to make those because that would have taken up time I could have been using to make more candied bacon.

Wedge Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and Candied Bacon

(serves 4)

1 iceberg lettuce (try to get a nice round one so your wedges look good)

150g blue cheese (I used Roquefort)
100ml sour cream
100ml natural yoghurt
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon lemon juice (plus extra just in case; I found I wanted a little more)
1 tablespoon chives, snipped with scissors

For the candied bacon

8 rashers streaky bacon
1-2 teaspoons of sugar per bacon rasher, depending on size

First candy the bacon by laying the rashers out on a baking tray and sprinkling the sugar evenly over them. Whack them under a hot grill until crisp and caramelised. Wipe the rashers around in the stick juices that have accumulated in the tray, turn them over and cook the other side. Watch them like a hawk once you’ve turned them as they will caramelise extremely fast. Once cooked, remove and let cool on a wire rack. Don’t let the pieces touch each other as they will stick together.

Crush the garlic with a teeny pinch of salt in a pestle and mortar until creamy. Blend the garlic with all the other dressing ingredients together in a bowl. You can do this with a blender if you like but I like my blue cheese dressing quite chunky so I mash it in a bowl to achieve the right consistency; it’s nice to get the odd nugget of cheese. Taste and add salt and pepper if you like; the cheese will already be quite salty. Taste again and add a little more lemon juice if you think it needs it.

Remove any manky outer leaves from your iceberg and quarter it. Wash it. Arrange each wedge on a plate, dollop on the blue cheese dressing. Cut the bacon into pieces and sprinkle over. Serve.