After a break due to the holidays and multiple projects coming to a close for work, Rachel and I have completed another cooking night. With a bit of luck these should be happening every couple weeks or at worst monthly. Without further ado, here is what happened:

We decided to do the Sous Vide cooked Chicken Wings and make 2 of the sauces listed in the book. We will be visiting additional sauces later on and using some of the either wing recipes in the books as well. The two sauces chosen were a Buffalo Sauce and a Korean BBQ sauce. Both sauces have a bit of bite and spicy flavor that I love in foods.

Starting off this recipe, we used the Sous Vide setup to pasteurize some eggs. This kills off any potential bacteria on or in the eggs. Here in America our eggs are generally pretty clean by world standards so this step isn’t normally required, but with our Buffalo sauce we will be using the eggs raw and they won’t go through any cooking phases. We decided since the Sous Vide setup was out for cooking the chicken, might as well pasteurize the eggs. Better safe than sorry.

With the eggs going in the Sous Vide setup, we started work on creating the base oil for the Buffalo Sauce. This process involved taking our neutral oil (Either Safflower or Grape-seed oil, can’t remember which we used off-hand), onion, garlic, jalapeno peppers, chipotle peppers in adobo, smoked paprika, and cayenne all in a pan and letting it cook over low heat for about 30 minutes.

After that we threw it in the sieve lined with cheese cloth to get just the oil out. The oil came out a beautiful color, and is the first infused oil I’ve made. Very proud of how it looks and tastes.

Once the oil was completed, we put in our raw egg yolks and lemon juice. Ran the mixture through the immersion blender and came out with our final Buffalo sauce. This sauce starts off tasting creamy and full of flavor and finishes with a fairly strong heat. If you like chipotle and jalapeno pepper heat then you will love this sauce.

About this time this time we prepped the chicken and put it in the water bath to cook for about an hour. Earlier in the day we cut the chicken up and had it soaking in a basic brine in the fridge. This helps the chicken to maintain moisture and flavor in the cooking process. It also aids in speeding up the Sous Vide process cutting our cook time from ~4 hours to ~1 hour.

With the chicken in the water bath we set out to create the Korean BBQ sauce. Earlier in the week I took Rachel to the Ranch Market 99 asian market in Dublin, CA for the first time. This was mainly a supply run for some ingredients I had run out of, but also a chance for Rachel to see this awesome market that I so wish we had locally in the Modesto, CA area. While there we picked up so Gochujang (Fermented Red Bean Paste) and Shaoxing (Rice Wine) for use in the Korean BBQ recipe. Those two ingredients are combined in a bowl with sugar, soy sauce (We used Usukuchi, a lighter more flavorful soy sauce), garlic, and ginger. Once the sugar dissolved it was good to go. This sauce had a very strong red bean taste to it, very different from flavors in western food. I’m a fan, and you should try it if you have never tasted it before. The sauce also has a fair amount of heat to it as well. A bit surprising since only the Gochujang has a spicy quality to it.

With the second sauce done, the chicken was about ready after being in the water bath for ~1 hour @ 65C / 149F. The next step was to lightly fry the chicken. Since we cooked the chicken Sous Vide, it has no outside texture to the chicken. We fried the chicken in about 1″ of Safflower oil to give it a nice crisp outside, and the inside is still super moist and chewy.

With the chicken all done and both our sauces done, it was time to plate the wings.

This recipe turned out very good. Both sauces are very different from each other and surprisingly there is a difference in taste when the sauces are on and off the chicken. I would remake either sauces again in a heartbeat and with the Sous Vide method I could easily cook enough chicken for a whole party in about the same amount of time. I’m a bigger believer in Sous Vide everytime I use it.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading this, and hopefully I can do this on a more regular basis!