Recipe for Cooking (RFC): Cola chicken wings

Summary

This recipe prepares 4 whole chicken wings (including drumette and tip) in approximately 20 minutes. The wings are cooked in a 90s Chinese-style Coca Cola-based sauce with minimal ingredients. The final product is intended to taste salty and tangy, and nothing like Coca Cola.

This recipe could use improvement, as the wings produced are slightly dry (see §Discussion).

Ingredients

Food

• 30 mL vegetable oil
• 4 whole chicken wings
• 320 mL Coca Cola, or Coca Cola Spiced Raspberry (see §Discussion)
• 60 mL all-purpose soy sauce

Cooking utensils

• 1 stovetop
• 1 pan
• 1 spoon or spatula

Instructions

Before cooking

1. Create a mixture of all 320 mL Coca Cola and 60 mL of soy sauce.
2. (Optional) separate drumettes from the rest of the wing.
   • This will allow for better sauce coverage during cooking.

Cooking

1. Put pan on stovetop set at 350 °F (=medium heat).
2. Cover bottom of pan evenly with all 30 mL of vegetable oil until pan reaches 350 °F (=medium heat).
3. Sear all 4 chicken wings for 2 minutes per side.
4. Set stovetop at 400 °F (=high heat).
5. Pour the mixture of Coca Cola and soy sauce into pan.
6. Until the mixture has reduced into a thick, syrupy sauce, stir the pan thoroughly every 1 minute.
7. Press each wing down, on each side, into the sauce-covered pan to sear and caramelize the sauce on the wing. ∎

Discussion

Chicken produced is slightly dry

This recipe produces chicken that is slightly dry, probably due to overcooking. It may be better to reduce the searing time, or remove the searing step altogether. I have experimented with pre-steaming the wings for 5 and 10 minutes instead of searing, but there is no appreciable difference in quality.

If the wings are not pre-steamed, fat is noticeably rended into the sauce mixture about halfway into cooking, which reduces the juiciness of the final product.

Coca Cola Spiced Raspberry

The original Coca Cola may be substituted for the Spiced Raspberry variant which I prefer, since it makes the wings slightly more aromatic (a vague raspberry smell) and gives it some depth. The difference is fairly minimal.

If you have improvements

If you have improvements, please reply to my Mastodon post, or if you are on tilde.town, you can also email me there.