Sous vide, air fried sriracha wings.

This was something I made for the Super Bowl this year.  Two days before the big game the chicken wings were cut into drumettes and wingettes with the wing tips saved for future stock making.  They were dusted with the hot chicken spice mix from this post, vacuum sealed and cooked in a water bath fitted with my Nomiku and set to 64°C for about 5 hours, my Anova was nearby as a backup if needed.  After removing the wings from the bath they were allowed to rest for about 15 minutes before being stashed in the fridge until the next day.  I Removed the wings from the bag to a paper towel lined sheet pan and patted them dry as much as possible, they were them sprinkled with a 1/2 and 1/2 mixture of pink Himalayan sea salt and baking powder and put in the refrigerator overnight to dry.  This is a technique I saw in a Serious Eats recipe for oven-fried Buffalo wings which I figured  would work as well in the air frier as it does in a conventional oven.  To finish the wings I set my Avalon Bay Air Fryer to 400°F and let it warm up for a few minutes.  The wings were tossed in olive oil until well coated and placed in the fryer basket with as much space between them as I could muster, then the basket was inserted in to the air fryer.  After 5 minutes I shook the wings and returned them to the fryer for another 4-5 minutes.  At the end of that time the skin was nice and crispy and the wings completely warmed through.  The sauce was equal parts sriracha sauce and sweet Thai chili sauce (I usually use Mae Ploy brand but couldn't find it at the supermarket that day so I used another brand) and a touch of soy glaze.  They were served with blue cheese dressing for dipping.

I was pretty happy with these wings, cooking them sous vide resulted in an extremely moist and tasty wing.  The air frying worked ok, but I think finishing them by deep frying in very hot oil would have produced a more crunchy skin.  Since the wings are already cooked in the water bath you don't have to worry about cooking them through in the oil and can go for a short fry in hotter oil.  I'll have to try that next time with and without the baking powder to see how it changes things.

Sriracha-Honey "Caviar"

I've read about the process of spherification for a long time, but never tried to do it myself.  It always seemed to much trouble to order the sodium alganate and calcium salt by mail order and set up all the baths, but on a recent visit to The Spice House in Chicago I was pleased to find that they are now selling everything I needed to give it a try.  I had to wait a few weeks due to a planned vacation, but this morning I made my first attempt at spherification.

My first thought was to make something that looked similar to beluga caviar, those very expensive salted sturgeon eggs that can go for hundreds an ounce.  But I really didn't have any ingredients to pull that off (although I think a reduction of concord grape juice would probably work), so when I started to think of other similar things I could replicate I finally hit on hot sauce salmon roe.  Of course, this has already been done but it was a good place to start.  There wasn't any fresh hot sauce in the house so I decided to go with Sriracha sauce as the base, cut with some honey for sweetness.

The recipe I came up with for a first attempt was...

15 grams Sriracha sauce
10 grams honey
15 grams water (plus an undefined amount to thin the mixture)
2 grans sodium citrate (as a buffer)
3 grams sodium alginate

I wasn't using a particularly accurate scale so I may have added a little too much sodium alginate since the mixture seemed to gel up immediately.  I started adding water and mixing it in with an immersion blender until the mixture was a little thicker in consistency than maple syrup.  Then it was allowed to sit in the fridge for about an hour before I placed the container in a Food Saver Canister and applied a vacuum to pull out any residual air bubbles.  After several cycles we were ready to go.

I mixed 9 grams of calcium salt in 1 liter of water until everything was dissolved for a calcium bath and poured most of it in to a tall glass.  Using a 10 ml luer slip syringe I "borrowed" from the office I pulled up some of the sriracha mixture and while holding it about a foot above the bath slowly depressed the plunger so the sriracha would enter the calcium bath in drops.  The alginate in the sriracha drops instantly gelled when they came in to contact with the calcium ions in the bath to form spheres.  After a few syringe fulls of sriracha mix, I strained out the spheres, rinsed them in a water bath and then dumped them in a second water bath for holding.  This was repeated until all the sriracha-honey mix was spherified.  Here is the result...

I mixed a little olive oil and grape seed oil in with the sriracha/honey spheres to keep them separate, they really do look like salmon roe and have the same pop in the mouth feel to them but a completely different taste.  Since this was direct spherification I'm not sure if they will eventually solidify or remain liquid in the center, reverse spherification would certainly retain the liquid center.  I have a decent supply of the required ingredients so I'm sure I'll be messing around with this technique quite a bit in the coming months!