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Of all the chicken wing recipes we’ve posted here, I like this one the best. Sometimes, you just can’t improve on an original, basic recipe and technique. You can, for example, make your own chocolate sandwich cookie, but with Oreos everywhere, why bother?

For your ease with Super Bowl planning, we are happy to make this recipe prominently easy for you to find. It’s right here! These wings are fried and use store-bought sauce. There’s some mess involved then with frying, but there’s no prep work. And the flavor is just what you want in a wing: fire with crunch. Deep-fried wings simply outclass oven-baked. And if you consult the great book Fat, then you know that some fat in our lives is not a luxury but a necessity.

The red sauce here, perhaps the cardinal ingredient, would make any Aztec or Mayan proud. We used Frank’s Original REDHOT sauce, the one specified in the recipe. Frank’s sauces are widely available, and they are terrific products. [Our market has three Frank’s flavors but we were careful to use the original, basic, fire-instigating sauce.]

This is a case where store-bought is just simply better than home made. Plan on enjoying the wings, and please don’t concern yourself with list of ingredients on the back label of the bottle.

Wings do not get better.

Santa Fe Chicken Wings

Yield: 25 Wings

Ingredients:

  • Vegetable oil for frying based on your fryer’s instructions
  • 2 ½ pounds (around 25 wings) trimmed and separated
  • ¼ cup (½ stick) hot, melted unsalted butter
  • ¼ cup Frank’s Original REDHOT sauce
  • ¼ cup chile sauce
  • 1 teaspoon chile powder

Preparation:

Heat the oil in a fryer to 400°F. Deep fry the wings for 12 minutes or until crispy and no longer pink. Drain well.

Combine the melted butter, hot sauce, chile sauce, and chile powder in a small bowl. Mix well.

Pour the sauce over the wings and toss to coat.

Notes:

We love our wings drenched. So, for 25 wings we doubled the amount of sauce in the recipe above. Every square inch of our wings was saturated. There was plenty of heat in every bite. And, these thoroughly coated wings were delightful to eat as leftovers the next day.

Source: Wings Across America by Armand Vandersitgchel