In writing this post, I imagine clone of myself drifting through Portland, full of bacon but wistfully wishing for a different form of crispy animal fat. I recommend these wings to said clone as a fine "fried bone-in" dose of chicken.
I skipped the sauce. My clones and I are not interested in using chicken as a foil for other flavors--I want my chicken to taste like chicken and chicken fat, plus salt. So when the menu promised me "Fresh Squeezed IPA, Thai chiles, togarashi spice, honey, fresh lime" on the Fresh Squeezed wings, I decided that those flavors would want to be the star, and I demoted them. I ordered my wings with no sauce whatsoever, and added my own salt.
They were very good. When a dish remains delicious despite my determination to strip the cook of all of his flavoring tools, I'm impressed.
Big drumettes with nice skin covering. None of the two-bone middle part--what DO you call the three pieces of a wing? I'll need to find out. I miss the middle part, but it means that the ripping and tearing that makes me feel like a chicken-focused sibling of the Cookie Monster is largely eliminated.
And good, crunchy but not excessive, coating. I tend to be a dust-with-flour advocate, since battery coatings often "protect" the chicken skin from frying and rendering, and then why did you fry chicken? But this is a thicker crunchier coating that still allows the skin to fry. It makes me think of rice flour, but the menu doesn't make any gluten-free claims.
In addition to being good hot, they're very good as leftovers; they don't get soggy or drop all their fried coating or develop that old-oil flavor or any of the other failings of leftover fried chicken.
So.
That is all.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
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