Baked Buffalo Style Chicken Wings

There are a lot of recipes out there for making chicken wings.  Most involve deep frying the wings, which can be rather messy.  We stumbled upon this approach to baking the wings and we were very pleased with the end result.  It takes a little time to make this recipe, but it is well worth the effort.

Ingredients:

- 20 chicken wings
- 1/2 cup all purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1/2 cup melted butter
- 1/2 cup hot pepper sauce (Tabasco, Frank's Red Hot, etc.)

Place a 6 quart sauce pan with a steamer basket and 1-2 inches of water on the bottom and over high heat, bring to a boil.  Place the wings in the steamer basket, reduce the heat to medium and steam the wings for 10 minutes.  Remove the wings from the steamer basket and pat dry with a paper towel.

Place the flour, garlic powder and cayenne pepper into a resealable plastic bag and mix.  Place the wings into the bag and toss the wings until they are well coated with the flour mixture.  Place the wings on a plate and refrigerate at least one hour.

Preheat an oven to 425F.  Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and spray the foil with cooking spray.

While the oven is heating, whisk the melted butter and hot sauce in a bowl.  Take the wings out of the refrigerator and dip them into the butter sauce and then place the wings on the cookie sheet.

Cook the wings for 40 minutes, and turn the wings after they have cooked for 20 minutes so they cook evenly.

Cook's Notes:

The wings were crispy and delicious.  We think that refrigerating the wings once they have been coated with the flour mixture really helped the wings adhere the butter-hot sauce mix.

We adapted the original recipe a little.  In addition to the butter-hot sauce coating, and we bought a bottle of teriyaki sauce.  We poured a 4 ounces of the teriyaki sauce into a bowl and tossed 10 wings with the flour mixture on them into the sauce to coat the wings.  I think that you could take virtually any wing sauce you like to coat the wings.  

Update 12/24/2013 

We are making these for Christmas Eve dinner and using our favorite Buffalo Wild Wings sauces.  The flour is key! 

Merry Christmas!