BWW Cooks: The Great American Super Bowl Chicken Wing

Coming up: the Super Bowl. Coming up: mass quantities of snacky stuff. The winner of Super Bowl 50 is yet to be determined, but the winner of snacking undoubtedly has become the chicken wing. Predictions from the National Chicken Council? Over 1.3 BILLION chicken wings will be consumed by Americans during the Super Bowl. This is over 37 million more wings than last year.

That's a lot of wings. You almost wonder what happens to the rest of the chicken.

It's true that many of these wings will be or have already been bought frozen. Others are scheduled to be picked up, prepared, from supermarket deli counters, from Pizza Hut and Papa John's, from Buffalo Wild Wings, and from locally owned pizza-and-wing joints across the nation.

Or you can make them yourself. Big advantage? They don't suffer from takeout syndrome. Disadvantage? Work. This writer confesses to having quit making wings from scratch after jointing a ten-pound bag of chicken wings once and getting quite tired of cutting off useless wing tips and removing skin from the lot. And even if either that doesn't bother you or you've gotten them jointed already, there is that problem of not having a TV in the kitchen.

On the other hand... fresh wings. If you set things up properly and prepare in advance, you'll barely miss a beat from the end of the first airing of Puppy Bowl 16 on Animal Planet to the start of the pre-game show.

It's a good idea to know how many wings you need. That's why the internet's Chicken Wing Calculator exists. Yes, this is a thing, available here (http://calculate-this.com/how-many-chicken-wings-buy-calculator). With this in hand on your phone or tablet, you can grab what you need at the grocer's without blinking.

Decide on your flavor or flavors in advance. Remember that many of the places offering a thousand varieties of wings are doing nothing but changing barbecue sauces on what are really simply barbecue wings. Don't fall into the fifty sauces trap. Do no more than three flavors, preferably ones that you can cook similarly; don't inconvenience yourself for the sake of wings unless you're running a Wing Bowl. And yes, the real Wing Bowl is a thing too, a great Philadelphia tradition now 24 years in the running. Last year's winner ate 444 wings, somehow - it's not held on Sunday, however, so the Wing Bowl totals don't count in Super Bowl Sunday wing consumption. And it's likely that your party, unless it's large, won't need over 400 wings.

How do you cook your wings? The main restaurant tradition is to bake in the oven and finish in the deep fryer before slathering with sauce. Other cooking methods, however, include oven alone, grill, and slow cooker/crock pot.

If you want to make traditional Buffalo wings, have on hand blue cheese dressing (preferably the refrigerator case variety), celery sticks, real butter, and Frank's Red Hot sauce. The combination of butter and Frank's Red Hot is the original Buffalo flavor. Easy alternatives to either Buffalo wings or barbecue wings include sticky honey wings, teriyaki wings, and mustard-coated wings. If you deep fry, consider the basic fried-chicken chicken wing as well; it's classic and easy, and evokes the thoughts of Sunday dinner as well as of game time wings. Platters of fried wings and French fries are sure to make people happy.

Barbecued chicken wings? Consider making your own barbecue sauce. Or, if a guest who barbecues is watching the game with you, ask them if they'll bring their secret sauce. Regional sauces are a great way to vary your wings - pair up Eastern Carolina vinegar sauce against Western Carolina tomato-based sauce, or Memphis sauce against Kansas City. Make an inter-regional barbecue-sauce face-off a contest during halftime.

Best of all, almost every sauce, barbecue or otherwise, that you can use on chicken wings as a delicious, messy flavor is also suitable to be slathered on shrimp. Substitute shrimp for wings, or vary your wing platters with shrimp platters - these make a great alternative to the all-too-common pre-frozen steamed shrimp tray with red cocktail sauce that shows up at almost every party.

Let yourself go, and enjoy. It's the day of the year that "junk food" reigns supreme, so turn that junk into fresh wings and shrimp with fresh sauces and a fresh veggie tray; it's not just celery sticks that go well in sauces and dips with your chicken.

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