Tag Archives: butter

Bacon Buffalo Wings

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Note: The following post contains cursing. Yep.

In honor of the Super Bowl, I decided to tackle one of my most favorite American foods: Buffalo Wings.

But, before we start, I need you all to know that I’m a purist. Always will be.

Buffalo wings are chicken wings, original Frank’s Red Hot and butter. You can’t say “But…” or “Well…”, because there is simply no argument. In 19fucking64, The fucking Anchor Bar in fucking Buffalo, New York made them with fucking chicken wings, fucking Frank’s and fucking butter. End of fucking story.

Cut up your wings - Separate tips & dispose or keep for stock purposes. Also: Separate drumsticks from wings.

I’ll help you through this, but we won’t be making Buffalo wings because we’ll be missing one key ingredient in the holy triumvarite of Buffalo wing ingredients. Instead, we’ll be making plain ole (paleo) hot wings. As long as we all agree on this point, we can get through this together and make something that is delicious.

Place, with love, one layer deep in your fryer. Fryer should be heated to at around 350.

Your first place to start is a deep fryer. Sure, Alton Brown is like “Hey! Baking Buffalo wings is fun and easy!”, and sure, his recipe is the second hit on the “buffalo wings” Google search. I’ve tried his recipe more than once. It’s pretty damned good, but it’s not Buffalo Wings and baking is NEVER completely a replacement for something that is correctly deep fried. To top this all of, Mark Sisson lays the science behind deep frying out and gives it a stamp of approval, so long as it’s not an everyday thing – this is a sometimes food. We’re trying to get as close as possible to the real thing, so we’re going to proceed with frying.

20 minutes like this should do the trick.

To deep fry these babies you can fill a pot/pan with oil and deep fry that way, but unless this is a real Buffalo Wing emergency (I’ve had those), get a fryer, have a fryer, or borrow your neighbor’s. The pot/pan method can be messy, easy to screw up (unless you get it at JUST the right temp every time), and occasionally dangerous. The fryer will be great for sweet potato fries (upcoming post), and a host of other paleo indulgences. I mean, seriously, have you ever had a deep-fried egg? You have not lived until you have.

Oil

I use Vegetable Oil, which I think is really just corn oil (paleo no-no). Why? I actually don’t make buffalo wings that often, Canola oil smells like fish at high temperatures (true!!), peanut oil is hard to find in large quantities (although BJs in West Nyack does have it in large quantities) and it’s expensive (and is also a paleo no-no). Some paleo folks suggest deep frying with coconut oil, but I have no experience cooking with coconut oil and no time to get up to speed with it before the game, so I’m going to be using what I’m comfortable with, even despite the risks of extra inflammation that comes with vegetable oil.

If we’re doing this right (i.e. cooking at a high enough temperature), there will be very little oil leftover on the wings, so we’ll risk it a little in this category.

Wings

Wings are Paleo/primal because we are basically cutting the wings off the carcass of a bird. If you don’t know that, stop trying to cook paleo, buy or borrow Robb Wolf’s book, and come back here in a week.

Frank’s Red Hot

Frank’s Red Hot is comprised of: Aged Cayenne Red Peppers, Distilled Vinegar, Water, Salt, Natural Flavor and Garlic Powder. I will be using it. Make your own call.

Butter

Ok, let’s talk about butter. I mean, we really already had this conversation, but let’s talk about butter in wing sauce. I’m being as strict paleo/primal as possible, so we can’t use the third ingredient in the holy Buffalo triumvirate. How do we make up for this? We have a few options:

  • Just toss in Frank’s (yawn!)
  • Use Clarified Butter (which is more Paleo-ish, but not Cordain paleo, and, honestly, less tasty in this use)
  • Dip our toes in the shallow end of the Coconut Oil pool with the sauce
  • Bread with almond meal and lots of spices and maybe some stevia to the Frank’s!
  • USE FUCKING BACON FAT

Oh, I’m sorry, I only see one choice up there – I thought I was going to give you five, but I must have gotten distracted by the fact that there will be FUCKING BACON FAT in my delicious, awesome, holy-shit hot wings. Now, we COULD fry in bacon fat (which is what I think the Bridgeview Tavern in Tarrytown does to their ridiculously good hot-wings), but, in a more reasonable and time-sensitive move, we will just be adding our filtered breakfast drippings to our gametime snack’s sauce. Plus, that means I get to have bacon for breakfast. Everyone wins!

Fry up some delicious smoked bacon!

Franks into a small sauce pot on low heat

BACON GREASE (good lord, my mother went wrong somewhere when bringing me up). I used about 1/4 of the drippings from 5 pieces of Smithfield bacon. Taste as you add.

I decided to overcook my bacon, crumble it into tiny pieces, and add it to the sauce.

It was tasty, but a bit watery. Almond meal as a bit of a thickener. Normally, I'd use flour or corn starch. Sigh. Not so much right now.

THE VERDICT: I didn’t take any pictures of the finished wings because the first batch went sour (not literally, I just messed up) and I was bringing the second batch to friends and it was already past halftime when they were done. But my friends seemed to like them – they finished the bowl I served with carrots and celery (no blue cheese – we’ll tackle that another day) I know I freaking LOVED them. I definitely ate a dinners’ worth as I was cooking. Self-high five!

Butter

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So: butter.

Wait: but, first, we have to talk about cake. So: cake. Remember that time I made a cake? So, I’ve made it twice more since then. During my third round of making the cake (6 ounces 100% bittersweet chocolate, 4 bananas, no nectar OR sugar), my baking companion looked at the blog I stole this recipe from, looked at my ingredients and said: “But is butter allowed on this diet?” Ugh. I knew I’d have to deal with this.

Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet doesn’t actually mention the word butter – one can assume it’s not to be considered, and therefore not worth mentioning. However, search for the words “butter paleo” in Google and you have all sorts of commotion about the stuff. True, it’s dairy, so strict paleo: THIS CAKE IS NOT FOR YOU. Sorry. I follow recipes, but I’m not a wizard and believe strongly in the power of butter. I’m not really interested in finding some other strict paleo substitute because if you’re strict paleo, you probably shouldn’t be trying to eat chocolate cake. This will only get you into trouble, so move along. Let those of us willing to fudge it a little for an occasional birthday feel OK about ourselves having not used flour or any of the other bigger nasties.

That being said, butter needs to be talked about. Just because many folks are like “yeah, whatever” with butter and paleo, doesn’t mean that your CROSSFIT COACHES are like “yeah, whatever.”

I made one of the wonderful folks at Crossfit Nyack this cake (second attempt) for her birthday last Thursday because I’m pretty sure her 8AM classes were the best part of my two week Christmas break.  Not that my Christmas break was bad. The classes just made it a little nicer. Anyway, I got a hug out of it and she was really happy, which was what I was going for. I told her what was in it (because I figured she might have been paleo-ing) and was clear about the butter – because I knew it was a thing.

Fast forward to Saturday and I caught a ride with her and another coach to a travelling WOD a few miles away and she offers us the cake, prefacing it with the fact that the other coach has not yet tried the cake because he’s being strict paleo and he doesn’t think cake can be part of that. I shrugged. No biggie. But, she does get him to try the cake (politeness? I feel a little bad now) and it went something like this:

Awkward.

The lesson from this is that we shouldn’t call this a paleo cake. “paleo butter” is a heavy Google search term for a reason. Call it a paleo-ish butter cake. Then, everyone is on the same page.

So, “paleo and butter.” I dunno. Sure, we can try coconut oil or some other thing that will keep the banana and eggs together, but I’m just too damned lazy. I’ll start calling this a butter cake. Solved.