How Long to Smoke Chicken Wings

What temp do you smoke wings at?

Two temperatures, in this order: 250°F to cook them and 400°F to finish them. A wing is mostly skin, fat and connective tissue wrapped around very little meat, and those three things want opposite conditions. The fat and collagen want time and gentle heat. The skin wants a hard, dry blast at the end.

You can keep them at one temperature the whole way, but you are choosing which half of the pleasure to give up. At 250 the whole time you get smoke and tenderness and skin like a wet paper bag. At 375 the whole time you get crisp skin and almost no smoke.

How long to smoke wings at 250?

Ninety minutes gets a wing to about 175°F with the fat rendered and the skin dried out. That is the point where it is cooked and still not worth eating, because the skin is soft. Take them to 400°F for another ten to fifteen minutes and they finish at 190 to 195.

If 250 is all your pit will do, pull the wings, crank a skillet or the oven to 425 and finish them indoors. Nobody will ask where they spent the last fifteen minutes.

How long to smoke wings at 275?

About seventy minutes instead of ninety, and the finish is the same. Running 275 buys you twenty minutes and costs a little smoke. It is a fair trade on a weeknight and a poor one on a Sunday.

Go past 300 and you are no longer smoking them, you are roasting them in a smoky room. That is a perfectly good way to treat a wing. It is just not what you lit the smoke for.

Why 190 to 195 and not 165?

The United States Department of Agriculture puts the safe minimum internal temperature for all poultry at 165°F, and that number is correct for safety and misleading for wings. A wing is joints and connective tissue. At 165 it is safe to eat and it is rubbery. The collagen does not let go until somewhere north of 185.

The reason you can push a wing that far without ruining it, when you could not do the same to a breast, is that a wing carries enough fat to stay juicy the whole way. Take it to 190 or 195 and it goes soft and tender instead of dry.

How do you get the skin crisp?

Three things, and you need all three. Dry the wings and toss them in baking powder and salt — about a teaspoon of baking powder to a pound. Leave them uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator, an hour at the least and overnight if you have it. Then finish them hot.

Dry is everything. A wet wing never gets there.

Baking powder is not a trick and it is not flour. It raises the surface pH so the skin browns faster and it draws moisture out of it. Use baking powder, not baking soda — soda in that quantity tastes like soap. The whole confession is in Letters to Dutch.

Sauce Them, or Go Bare

Sauce after the pit, in a bowl, off the heat. Sauce on the pit burns the sugar and undoes all the skin you spent two hours working for. Toss, plate, serve. If they lie around in sauce for twenty minutes before anyone gets to them, the skin goes soft again and there is nothing to be done about it.

How many wings per person?

About a pound and a tenth of raw wings per adult for a six-ounce plate, because wings lose more to bone than anything else on the pit — a pound as purchased comes back as about a third of a pound of meat. For a crowd, the meat calculator works it out from the USDA yields. For a room that is only eating wings, buy half again as much. They always do.