Dry-Brine Your Chicken Wings For Shatteringly Crispy Skin

Achieving restaurant-level chicken wing crispiness at home can be a real challenge. Unless you have a deep fryer in your house, which most of us don't, the typical way to even get close to the crunch of commercial wings is to bake them in your oven until they're close to burnt. That method, however, dries out the meat. All is not lost, however, because there's a game-changing technique that can create shatteringly crispy chicken wings: dry-brining.

If you're not familiar with dry-brining, it's the easier, breezier sibling to wet brining, which is a popular way to prep Thanksgiving turkey so that it doesn't dry out. Wet brining involves soaking a piece of meat in a salty solution, which gets trapped in the muscle fibers of the meat and keeps it juicy when it's cooked. Dry-brining, on the other hand, is done by coating the outside of any type of meat with salt to draw the moisture out of the meat, then letting it sit long enough for the meat to reabsorb the salty juices. With chicken wings, because there's very little moisture remaining on the surface of the skin after properly dry-brining it, you'll get super crispy results thanks to the Maillard reaction (which is not quite the same thing as caramelization).

You don't need a recipe to dry-brine chicken wings. All you have to do is coat the chicken wings with some coarse salt like kosher salt and store them in the fridge overnight, uncovered. Use just enough salt to reasonably coat the surface of the wings, and don't worry about them tasting too salty; the salt sprinkled on the surface will season the entire wing, not just the skin, so the flavor will be balanced. The next day, all you have to do is bake the wings until they look brown and crispy. (Dry-brining works great for whole roasted chicken, too.)

Although dry-brining is easy, there are pitfalls. First, don't rinse the wings after letting them sit overnight because that'll only wet the skin, and you won't get crispy results. Also, if you want to add flavorings before baking, toss the dry-brined wings with a tablespoon or so of cooking oil, or brush the wings with some melted butter, then sprinkle on any herbs and spices right before baking. Any liquid flavorings are best left for the sauce so that the skin can get super crispy.

Finally, make sure to only apply the wing sauce when it's time to serve; if the skin is left to sit in the sauce for more than a couple of minutes, it'll absorb the moisture, and you'll lose all that shatteringly crispy crunchiness that you worked so hard to create.