I had high hopes for a cut of meat I rarely eat

Difficulty: 1/5

Time: 1hr 45 minutes

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Turkey wings are a rare treat for me. The last time I had some, they were fried and glazed in a cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. That was the last time I made them, so when I saw a pack of two wings at the grocery store, I decided to pick some up and see what other recipes I could find. I wasn’t really in the mood for fried ones this time, so I settled on a baked recipe that looked pretty good and simple. I had never heard of this website or recipe author before, but there’s a first time for nearly everything.

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

When I went shopping for this recipe, I kind of assumed I already had a couple things: garlic and poultry seasoning. I really thought I had seen the poultry seasoning recently, but when it came time to cook, it was nowhere to be found. I substituted it for kickin chicken seasoning. I doubt that it was a very good substitute. As for the garlic, I just thought garlic would always be there either in fresh or jar form. You live and you learn. Oh, I also didn’t use the lemon and substituted beef broth for chicken broth. If it doesn’t come out very good, I guess I’ll take the hit.

Tools:

Nothing Special

Cooking Review:

Seasoning: 11 minutes

First off, the recipe starts with cleaning the turkey wings. I don’t really know what was meant by this. The turkey wings already had no feathers and cooking them would do a better job of killing any pathogens than running water over them. So, I didn’t do it. Also, they say to rub the wings with lemon wedges. I have no idea what difference this would make, plus I didn’t buy any lemons. I skipped that, too. Otherwise, I mixed the seasonings that I did have and sprinkled a lot of it over the olive oil coated wings. I then let them sit in the refrigerator overnight, which isn’t part of the recipe, so you don’t have to do this. I just did it because I was going to be busy the next day, so it saved some time. I did have a good amount of seasoning left.

Preparation for baking and baking: 5 minutes + 1 hr 30 minutes

Once I was ready to cook the wings, I transferred them to a baking dish and poured some beef broth into the bowl I had the wings in to capture the remaining seasonings. This was then poured over the turkey wings. I then baked the wings for an hour and a half. One step I did miss was covering the wings during the cooking. I also didn’t do the optional step of crisping the skin under the broiler.

Analysis:

As I said earlier, I didn’t do a few things that this recipe said to do and was missing some of the ingredients, so I wasn’t too surprised with how these turned out. The wings weren’t very tender at all and were on the dry side. This could totally be because I didn’t cover them while they baked, so I won’t hold that against them too much. As far as the flavors go, I was disappointed there, as well. I really think that there wasn’t enough salt in the recipe to bring out the rest of the seasonings. The 2 tsp of seasoning salt, which somehow could be replaced with salt free seasoning, couldn’t be a reasonable amount for two wings, much less the 2.5 lbs of wings this recipe is for. The most prominent flavor I could taste was the paprika, which is the largest proportion of the seasoning mixture. There’s not much more I can say about this one. I think it could’ve been pretty good, even with the lacking tenderness and moisture, if it had a larger amount of salt in the seasoning mix. However, it didn’t and I can only rate what the recipe gives me. Even with my mistakes and omissions, I can’t give this recipe a higher rating than a 6/10. I highly doubt that the rub of lemon, poultry seasoning, and minced garlic could have made up for the dearth of salt.