Which Crispy Chicken Wing Recipe Will Be Your Super Bowl Winner? 

We tested three popular chicken wing recipes to find the best ones that don’t require deep-frying

Americans love chicken wings — so much so that the National Chicken Council’s projections for Super Bowl Sunday now stand at some 1.45 billion wings consumed in a single day. And while chicken wing accompaniments — Buffalo sauce versus barbecue, ranch versus blue cheese, and so on — are up for endless debate, the basics of a good wing are nonnegotiable: It should be both juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside, and hold up to sauce but be enjoyable enough to eat on its own. It should make you want another, and another.

The reality is that the absolute best chicken wings are fried. But it’s also true that not everyone wants to deep-fry at home, especially when cooking for a big event like the Super Bowl. So what’s a wing lover to do? To test alternatives to deep frying, I tried three popular chicken wing recipes from around the internet, each with a different technique for achieving crispiness. Afterward, I tasted the wings as is, and then tossed in Buffalo sauce and dunked in ranch, (though, for the record, blue cheese is my true dip of choice). Here’s what I found.

Air Fryer Chicken Wings

Yumna Jawad, Feel Good Foodie

When people sing the air fryer’s praises, they often point to the way it cooks chicken wings. Having never tried it, I was eager to put the technique to the test. Yumna Jawad’s easy recipe leads the search results for “air fryer chicken wings.” All you do is pat your wings dry, toss them in spices with some oil, and then air-fry them, first for 10 minutes at a lower temperature and then for 6-8 minutes at a higher temperature. This is typically done to first cook the meat without drying it out, and then to crisp its skin.

I’ll admit that after the first 10 minutes, I wasn’t optimistic. The chicken skin looked singed at the edges but otherwise too flabby in texture for my tastes. I wondered if the recipe as written would be enough to really render the fat. After raising the temperature as instructed and cooking the wings a little longer, they looked better but still not quite what I was going for, so I added a few more minutes at the lower temperature. I decided that with this entire recipe test, I’d add a little more time to each recipe within reason, especially since my wings seemed on the larger side.

Patience was the key, it turned out. After an additional 10 minutes, the air fryer yielded wings with taut, crisp skin and a warm, brown hue so appealing that they didn’t even need any sauce, though I tried them dunked in Buffalo sauce anyway. The garlic powder and smoked paprika made them tasty on their own but those seasonings also didn’t compete with the flavor of the sauce. Overall, these air-fried wings had a great combination of crispiness and juiciness and felt about as light as a chicken wing can feel — all the better for eating more of them.

Crispy Baked Chicken Wings

Chris Joe, CJ Eats

A sign that most people don’t want to deep-fry at home: The top search results for the term “crispy chicken wings” are all oven-baked recipes. These seem to employ the same general technique. You dry your wings, toss them in a mixture of salt and baking powder, and then bake them on a wire rack on top of a baking sheet until they’re evenly crispy. Like the set up of an air fryer, this allows air to circulate for even cooking and lets the fat drip off. As Chris Joe of the blog CJ Eats — whose recipe is the second result on Google — explains, baking powder raises the pH of the skin, allowing it to become crispier and more evenly browned.

This recipe was another “trust the process” situation. After the first 30 minutes, the wings looked pale and chewy, but after the next round of baking, they became beautifully crisp and golden brown. One thing I noticed, however, was that my cooked wings seemed to have more coating on them than the wings pictured in the recipe, which made me realize that I’d missed the note to sift the baking powder onto the wings for more even distribution rather than dumping it into the bowl. Still, the wings looked great — almost like I’d fried them.

My little flub aside, this technique produced crispy, juicy wings whose texture barely differed from that of a properly deep-fried wing. Since the recipe called for salt but no seasonings, the flavor on its own was slightly more subdued than the previous recipe. I suspected that I could taste the baking powder slightly, but they were still completely snackable and it didn’t matter much once the wings were dressed in sauce. I also liked that this recipe could make a lot of wings at once.

Pan-Fried Chicken Wings

Judy Leung, The Woks of Life

One of my favorite ways to ensure a well-seasoned, golden brown roast chicken is to salt the bird and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. As Serious Eats explains, this “dry-brine” approach draws moisture out of the meat and then allows the meat to reabsorb the salty liquid, promising moist meat and crisp skin. The Woks of Life’s Judy Leung leans on this technique for her take on chicken wings, in which she attempts to minimize effort, time, and oil.

The key to Leung’s pan-fried chicken wings is to salt them for at least 3 hours but ideally overnight. The next day, you bring the wings to room temperature and then pan-fry them in just two tablespoons of oil (compare that to the leading fried chicken wing recipe: 6 cups of oil). Leung notes that this technique works best with flats and that you’ll want to add more time and turning if you’re cooking drums.

Putting Leung’s recipe to the test, I was surprised by a few things. First, despite its ease and purported speed, it felt the messiest, so get the splatter screen out if you’ve got one. Second, while the flats certainly cooked better than the drums, I still longed for something like a chef’s press so that more of the wing could make contact with the pan and crisp up.

All of that being said, this technique still resulted in some pretty decent wings. They weren’t lookers, nor were they the crispiest, but they had enough variation in texture. What they lacked in shattering skin, they made up for in really juicy, flavorful meat. Plus, the visuals didn’t matter much once I tossed them in Buffalo sauce. Still, if you try this recipe I’d say skip the drums entirely — mine didn’t cook evenly at all, resulting in pale, chewy skin with few crispy bits. I wound up putting the rest of the pan-fried drums in the air fryer.

Winner: A Tie Between CJ Eats and Feel Good Foodie

In almost all regards, I really liked Feel Good Foodie’s air-fried wings. They were easy, tasty, and crispy, and stood alone without any sauce or dip. However, the technique’s biggest limitation was obvious: Unless you have a really large air fryer, it’ll take several batches to make enough wings to feed a crowd, at which point using the air fryer over the oven becomes somewhat inefficient. And here’s the thing: I’m never really making wings, except maybe for a Super Bowl party or another big gathering. For the hypothetical random solo Friday or late-night craving, I’d go air fryer wings all the way, but for most wing-eating occasions, I’d say that CJ Eats’s oven-baked method is a better bet. I doubt you or your guests will even miss pan-fried wings.

Chicken wing photos by Bettina Makalintal