Momofuku Style Chicken Wings

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Chef Stevie (of Hainanese Chicken Rice fame) texted me a few days ago to ask if I would taste some Momofuku style chicken wings he was preparing for a family event. He doesn’t sell them apparently, but I sure hope he plans to. So keep bugging him until he relents and sells the wings… Sorry Stevie, didn’t mean to put pressure on you. They were DELICIOUS. I have been eyeing the recipe in the Momofuku cookbook for a while, but it looks like a LOT of work. If you are a reasonably competent cook, I suggest you try this recipe from the cookbook for yourself… it yields a great dish, with nice depth of flavor, interesting texture, and a finger-licking sauce that can be mild to wickedly spicy. If I weren’t on a diet, I could have eaten this entire serving platter of wings in the photo above…

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The original recipe calls for brining the chicken wings, then cold smoking them, then making them into confit, in lots and lots of fat. After sitting in the fat for a couple of days, you pan fry them and coat them with the sauce.

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You might think they are simply teriyaki style chicken wings, but there is more to it than that. The chicken wings are tender and extremely flavorful. The caramelized bits are seriously good, and the sweetish, salty and spicy sauce would make any pinoy scream for some steamed rice…

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So Stevie, when are we going to be able to order these diet busters??? :)

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30 Responses

  1. <— eyeing the cast iron skillet beside the saucepan (the chicken wings being seared/blackened?). what do you call that thingie that weighs down the food in the pan?

  2. calorie shmalorie, it’s a grill press. Pretty heavy steel that you can push down on to flatten small chickens, other meats on the grill. You can also use another smaller cast iron pan on top of the meat to do the same thing. Or a brick in aluminum foil. :)

  3. looks like it’s loaded with sodium and cholesterol. must be good to put over a rice bowl.

  4. Wow !!!! I gotta have that…MM missed the post about Chef Stevie’s outlet…can you please provide the link for that…Many thanks.

  5. A duck confit article in the NYT in January gave me the impression that the quantity of fat needed is optional, that it is imperative only when doing large quantities of confit (as in a restaurant) to easily manage consistency and surely enough, I recall Julia Child pronouncing that the fat is for longer storage rather than for the actual curing. But I´d just as soon follow the recipe to the letter first before experimenting with alterations.

    MM, you probably mean steel, unless you got the grill press really cheap.

  6. hmm more and more im convinced i should get myself a copy of david chang’s cookbook. looks like a great buy

  7. Joyce, have a look at it before you buy it. I like the recipes and will try several. Footloose, thanks, I did mean steel. :) aly, momofuku is a restaurant in New York, I did a post on it a few days ago, here. Jack, it’s in the link above, or under Hainanese Chicken Rice. ConcernedPinoy, yes, definitely great over rice.

  8. Joyce: there are sooo many cookbooks out there ….some recipes can easily be replicated at home and some are made for coffee table entertainment. There are some recipesin David Chang’s , that like MM, I will make and there are some recipes in there that I will give a second thought.

    For the recipe above, google….hubpages.com….Instead of pan frying it though, grill them or barbecue them after brining….tastes much better….also use the brine recipe I posted a while back….please don’t ask me where! For a short cut version of cold smoking (ifyou don’t have a smoker)….after barbecuing the wings over high heat just to get the grill marks, then finish them in BACON FAT to get the smoky undertones! But if you have wood chips, wrap some in foil and poke holes and place them over half the side of barbecur grill and when it starts tosmoke, turn off heat on that side and place the wings on other half and close the lid.

    Instead of wings, you can also use deboned chicken thighs…much quicker to cook!

  9. Then…if you have any leftovers esp. if you used chicken thighs, this is how I usually recycle them if kapitbahays dropby unexpectedly! ….caramelize some onions, chop or slice thinly some roasted red peppers, skinned ( I usually buy the peppers when they are dirt cheap and roast them and freeze them)and mix the chopped leftover chicken , caramelized onions and roasted peppers, add any leftover sauce just enough to bind everything together and serve them over MINI RICE CAKES. You have to serve them immediately!

  10. Wow…frying confit wings. Eating this must be a heavenly experience. Momofuku chicken is definitely a dish that will bring you closer to God.

  11. Yuumm..I love chicken wings, although the chicken thighs would be more meaty(?) as bettyq, recommended. I don’t like the idea of soaking them in fat though. Thanks, MM and to bettyq .. you always have great ideas and am just in awe of your knowledge. You must be a very wonderful cook and baker..this is from the bottom of my heart. Btw, friends and I are driving up to Vancouver tomorrow and check out what is going on there. Hope we will make a side trip to China town. I will be looking out for the fresh lumpia wrappers, teehee. Got my filling ready. If I can’t find them, I will have to try to make them as per that youtube video..ugh, don’t want to burn myself.

  12. would be great if filipinos would actually come up with original food.. instead of copying other people’s recipes.. originality, my friends.. is what filipinos don’t have.. kinda sad..

  13. annb, I wouldn’t generalize on this issue, as it seems you are the less informed. David Chang of Momofuku likewise takes inspiration from others, he has korean/chinese influences added to thai and japanese as well. He tries to reconfigure them, but they aren’t all original either. His pork buns are admittedly, by his own account, simply a version of the ones he had in Peking. His noodles are a result of his working in a ramen house in Japan. So I wouldn’t be so quick to put down the pinoy cook. Do you think sisig is pretty original? Did our kinilaw pre-date ceviche or is sufficiently unique given local ingredients at the time it was “invented”? Was our adobo an adobo in its own right, before the spaniards arrived and named it as such? I am curious which nationality you think currently leads the rankings of creating original food? Is it the spaniards with the El Bulli et al foam creations? The American chefs who assimilate the various immigrant cuisines of the world? The Japanese whose tempura you probably find delicious and think is original but which they probably learned that from the Portuguese in the 16th or 17th centuries? Or their ramen that is a national staple, which came from the Chinese? At what point is a dish truly original?

  14. Orignality is about taking the influences that you have and creating a dish that is delicious and that has never been done before. It would be difficult to create a truly “original” Filipino dish because our nation is a melting pot of different cultures. We will always have Spanish, American, Chinese influences with our food. That’s something we can’t excape. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to undo hundreds of years of influence.

    That’s why for me, true originality is being able to create a dish that is inspired by your influences. “American” Chicken Wings done with an Asian twist? That for me is an original dish.

    I agree with Marketman. I’d take a delicious dish over an original dish any day.

  15. Any reader who takes the easy effort of checking out the archives will be rewarded with a great variety of original Filipino recipe posts there. If one does not have the time, the curiosity or the inclination, perhaps just observe a short period of transition as lurker, you know, just to see what the water is like.

  16. As long as it tastes good, I really don’t care if it is original or authentic, or fusion or whatever! If I like it, I like it! And I’ll eat it! I love chicken wings – Asian style, Buffalo wings hot style, Southern fried, like David Chang’s! I don’t really care for Thai food or Mexican either, I just can’t take the heat! But I love Vietnamese food – especially their “pho” soups! Still, I think my favorite is Filipino dishes – Tagalog ones, because those are the ones I grew up with!

  17. with regards to taste, what difference would it make if you cold smoke them and let it sit in fat for a couple of days ?

  18. Ifoodtrip: cold smoking is usually done in the fall when the weather starts to get cold….that is why my native friends here starts to smoke their salmon in Sept. It is done at a usually lowtemp. and make take days to properly smoke the meat or fish. You need the cold weather to safely smoke the product. If done in the summer months, the heat outside would increase the temp.inside the smoker and thus it is called hot smoking.

    You can cold smoke using an ordinary barbecue grill….an old one without the propane tank woould do. Light up charcoal briquets and when they are grayish…add some wet wood chips and place on top of the charcoal. Oh, push the charcoal aside to one side before putting the wood chips…the other side has no heat at all. Replenish the charcoal and wood chips as often as needed. REMEMBER: the temp. inside should be about 80 degrees….so don’t get too carried away with putting charcoal …you are NOT BARBECUING!

  19. Thank you betty q. I’ve smoked using mesquite and hickory mixed with charcoal many times before but it is a bit difficult to cold smoke with the humidity and hot weather in the Philippines but i’ll try again. Thanks!

  20. If i crave chicken wings, i now go to “Wingstop” a franchise here in the U.S. and get me a 10pc lemon pepper and 10pc parmesan flavored wings with their honey-mustard dip. They are a bit pricey but i love them.

  21. original or not as long as it taste good- its okay with me. I think we pinoys are great. we can make things better or even the best from the original. thats why philippines is a melting pot. we are very creative and unique. We should not put our culture down. In this global world where competition is stiff- we should raise our shoulders and be proud of what we can offer and even better – living abroad is tough already – so we shouldnt be too nega.

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