Chicken wings attempt #3

I'm starting this recipe in the middle of several attempts. My goal was to make basically good, classic, buffalo style chicken wings. For my first attempt, I tried a Bobby Flay recipe for sauce (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/hot-wings-with-blue-cheese-yogurt-sauce-recipe/index.html), except instead of deep-frying them, I steamed them for 10 minutes and then roasted them in a 400F oven for about 25 minutes (a la Alton Brown, http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/alton-browns-buffalo-wings-recipe/index.html). They turned out decently. I liked how the wings cooked. The sauce was really really good, but it just wasn't buffalo style. I'm not sure what was wrong with it, maybe the chipotle peppers in adobo made it too sour. All I can say is that something wasn't quite right. Also, I couldn't get the chipotles to grind up (even in a food processor), so there were big chunks that didn't stick to the wings. Plus, even the parts that were liquid didn't stick very well.

Take #2, I tried a recipe my sister had recommended (http://steamykitchen.com/7217-bbq-central-smokey-sweet-chicken-wings.html). This time, I skipped the steaming process and just cooked them at 400F for 35 minutes. Instead of making a sauce, it uses a rub, that seems like a pretty standard BBQ rub. They tasted good again, they had a really crispy skin, and on the inside they just tasted like chicken. But in the end, they weren't even close to buffalo wings, so I decided to abandon it.

Take #3 was tonight. This time, I used basically my own recipe. I used the 400F oven for 35 minutes again. For the sauce, I took some dried red chiles, and attempted to reconstitute them in boiling water. Once they had softened up, and I had cooked most of the water out, I added garlic powder, salt, pepper, vinegar, and dry mustard (so it would act as an emulsifier when I added the butter). I ran it though a food processor to the best of my ability, although there were still plenty of skin flakes that didn't grind. I then melted butter in. This time, when I took the chicken out of the oven, I wiped them off with a towel before tossing them in the sauce.

The taste turned out just right on the sauce, but I had a few problems. First, the wings were really greasy (and slightly slimy) when you bit into them. I think I might switch back to the Alton Brown method of steaming first, or maybe even deep frying them. Second, there wasn't much sauce that stuck. I think of really good wing places where I grew up, and they practically had a layer of sauce covering them. These, well, it was a very thin coating. In part this is because of how much chile skin did not grind up, but I think it goes beyond that. I'm not sure what to do here. Maybe a flour coating before the oven.

Thanks for listening. I wanted to say, if anyone out there in internet-land has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. And I have seen lots of recipes that are just hot sauce+butter, I feel like I want to do better than that (even if that sounds kind of snobby).

Also, I promise that when I get the recipes more solid, I will start posting measurements. This time, however, nothing was measured (just a pinch of this and a dash of that, and I think 1 T of butter for 4 wings).