PESTO CHICKEN WINGS
The first recipe that I made from the new chicken wings cookbook, The Great Wings Book, is this Pesto Chicken Wings. But of course, in true Feistycook fashion, I took the idea and ran with my own version, sticking to how I make chicken wings. The cookbook calls for marinating the chicken in the pesto sauce then grilling them after which sounds delicious actually but our family loves my crispy fried style so I stuck with that.
You can make your own pesto sauce but this time I just used the jar version. The store was having a buy 1 get 1 free sale for $4 after all so I figured why not? I actually only used 1 jar for 1 pack of chicken wings. I’ve reserved the other jar for a pasta dish sometime.
Pesto Chicken Wings
Ingredients
- 1 pack chicken wings separated
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1/2 stick butter
- 1 sm jar of pesto sauce
- vegetable oil for deep frying
- blue cheese dressing for dip
Instructions
- Cut your chicken wings. Save the tips for making chicken stock.
- Heat up oil in a frying pan. If you have a deep fryer then that’s good. If you don’t, use a pot or a pan that’s kinda deep to handle oil for deep frying.In a bowl or a ziploc bag, pour about 2 cups of flour. Season with sprinkles of salt, black pepper, and chili powder. Mix the flour and seasonings together.
- In batches, coat the chicken wings with the flour mixture. Test the oil if it’s ready. Sprinkle a little bit of the flour into the pan. If it sizzles then it’s ready.
- Place chicken wings into the pan. Do not overcrowd. Fry the wings in batches. Cover the pan, fry the wings for 12-15 minutes on one side, uncover the pan, flip the wings and cook the other side.
- Place the cooked wings in a strainer with a bowl underneath to catch the excess grease. Repeat the process to cook the rest of the wings.
- Melt butter in a another pot or bowl. Stir in the pesto sauce.
- Coat 5 crispy wings at a time with the pesto mixture.
I cooked 2 packs of chicken wings. 1 pack was solely pesto flavor. For the other half I made hot wings and for experimental purposes I combined hot sauce and pesto sauce to coat 5 pieces of chicken wings. In all fairness, the combo was delish.
So here’s a trio of wings: hot, pesto, and hot and pesto, served with celery sticks.
