Crispy Mojito Chicken Wings, Fun with Food

Mojito Chicken Wings

I was home alone for the evening, and craving chicken wings. Over the last couple days I had been having some stomach issues, so I didn’t want anything too greasy or spicy. The simple solution was to bake my own crispy mojito wings at home. Why mojito? Because it’s light, refreshing, and I had the ingredients already (the basis of most of my cooking decisions).

What you Need:

To make crispy mojito wings is a very simple recipe without many ingredients. You will need the following:

• Large pack of fresh chicken wings (about 40)
• 2 fresh limes or equivalent juice
• Fresh mint, about 8-10 stems
• 1 Tbsp coarse salt (I prefer pink Himalayan, it makes me feel fancy)
• 2 Tsp baking powder

Time from start to finish: 1 hour 5 minutes

• 25 minutes in the oven at 265°
• Apply mojito coating
• 40 minutes in the oven at 420°

Prepping the Wings

In a large bowl toss your fresh wings with the baking powder and salt. If it seems like you don’t have a lot of coating, that’s OK! The goal is not to give each wing a full coating, the baking powder is just to change the alkalinity of the chicken skin. This will help it to crisp up.

Place the wings on racks on baking sheets. Don’t squish them too close together, it’s important that they have air space all around them or they will not crisp up as well.

Put them in the oven at 265° for 25 minutes. While you wait you will make your mojito coating.

Mojito Coating

Chop your mint as finely as you can, removing any large pieces of stem if needed. In a bowl, mix the mint with the juice of 2 limes, and a dash of salt. Once again, it will not look like a lot of coating, but it is not a thick sauce and a little bit goes a long way.

Back to the Wings

After baking for 25 minutes, the wings will just start to be crisping up. At this point, they are NOT fully cooked, so don’t eat any!

This is the point where you apply the coating, so that the flavor will be baked in with the final crisping up of the skin. Toss the wings in a large bowl with the coating you just made, and re-rack them.

Put the wings back in the oven for 40 minutes at 420° (your oven may vary, so keep an eye on them). During this time a lot of the fat will render out, and the skin will crisp up nicely. The skin will keep that subtle infusion of lime, and the pieces of mint will bake onto the wings.

Enjoy!

After they are done cooking, take them out and let them cool a tad. Your crispy mojito wings are done! You can drizzle some lime juice over top of them for some extra flavor, or enjoy it as a more subtle experience.

The great thing about cooking home made wings this way is that you retain so much of the natural chicken flavor. Because you are tossing them yourself, you can make sure they are not drowning in sauce and thus drowning out the actual chicken flavor. This is a problem that I find with a lot of takeout wings, is that the meat is often secondary rather than the main attraction.

These crispy mojito wings have great flavor that doesn’t overpower the meat. Baking them on a rack gives them an awesome crispy skin with a lot of the fat rendered out, making them not too hard on the calorie count either.

I’ll definitely be making these again, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!