Favorites, Featured, Recipes

Best Grilled Chicken Wings for 2022

June 6, 2022

Best Grilled Chicken Wings (2022)

Why Grilled Chicken Wings?

In our opinion, grilled chicken wings are the best chicken wings you can make. Sometimes we want BBQ style food but have the time to make ribs like these. That’s where quick meals like these crispy grilled chicken wings come in. There are several ways to make the wings super crispy while still picking up that grilled taste and letting the BBQ seasonings shine through. Below, we will go over how we do it and hopefully help you cook some of the best grilled chicken wings you’ve ever had!

Preparing the Wings

When preparing chicken wings, we prefer to start with whole wings (sometimes called party wings). These are typically packs of full wings consisting of the flats, drumettes ands wing tips. To be efficient, we tend to go ahead and get the grill heating up before we break the wings down into induvial parts. If you choose to use already separated wings, you are already good to go ahead and season them. All you really have to do to have your full wings ready for grilling is break them down into the drumettes and flats. To do this, you just have to run your knife between the two pieces at the joint and do the same to remove the wing tips. Once all of the wings are separated and broken down, you could throw them straight on the grill as is and they will turn out great, but we have some improvements we can make.

Seasoning the Wings

There really isn’t much you need to do for grilled chicken wings to make them taste good. However, we would recommend at least hitting them with some salt and pepper. Around here, we tend to just use the same barbecue rub we would use for pork ribs or a pork shoulder. Sometimes, we will change it up and use a jerk seasoning or something similar. The easiest way to season the chicken wings is to place them into a bowl, sprinkle seasoning over the top of them and shake them (while covered). Doing this should get all of the wings coated evenly.

Getting Crispy Grilled Chicken Wings

If you don’t like your wings to be crispy, just skip this part. Otherwise, pat the wings dry from excess moisture. Usually, they will be sweating from the salt and being out at room temperature. So, removing the extra moisture will help them crisp up. The real key to making the wings crispy is from 1 particular ingredient: corn starch. It is not necessary (or recommended) to completely douse the chicken wings in corn starch. instead, a light, even layer should be spread over the wings. Less is more in this case, so just ensure there is some corn starch on the wings and you should be good to go.

Grilling the Chicken Wings

To grill the chicken wings, we typically have the grill somewhere around 425-450F. At this temperature, the wings should take about 30-40 minutes to complete cooking. The grilled chicken wings will need to be flipped a time or two while cooking to make sure both sides of the wings get crispy. As always, use a food thermometer (not an affiliate link, just a genuinely good product we use) to monitor temperatures as the wings are cooking to ensure the perfect doneness. For wings, taking them up to 180F or so like chicken thighs is ideal.

Finishing Touches

The final thing we like to do is toss the wings in some sauce. It really doesn’t matter what sauce you use to toss the wings in as long as it is a sauce you enjoy! We tend to use BBQ sauce we made ourselves, mango-habanero sauce, buffalo sauce or an Asian-inspired sauce and they are always excellent!