Hot Wings

Most restaurant menus have them in the “Appetizer” section. They’re very popular. For a while, they also featured “Boneless'' Hot Wings for the same price. They weren’t boneless wings at all; they were strips of chicken breast. Now they mostly call that "Chicken Tenders"; perhaps a more honest moniker than "Boneless Wings"?

As we occasionally like “Hot Wings,” or "Buffalo Wings," I sometimes buy the 10 lb. bag when they’re on sale for $1.69 per lb.

Currently, chicken wings usually sell for around $3.79, and up, per lb. Chicken breasts usually sells for about $2.79 per lb., or about 1/3 less than wings. You can often buy “boneless, skinless chicken breast” on sale for about $1.99.

Today I finally did what I’ve wanted to do for a long time—I did a “test” on a lb. of chicken wings with my gram scale.

Five of the wings weighed exactly 16 ounces. They were on sale for $1.99. Of course that was an unknown brand and the regular premium brand was the usual $3.79 for wings.

Here’s what you get in 16 ounces of chicken wings:

• 7 ounces of bones
• 3.5 ounces of fat and skin
• 5.5 ounces of meat

That means that in buying the $1.99 per lb. of wings, I paid $5.85 per lb. for the skinless, fat-less, boneless chicken wing meat.

If you pay $3.98 lb. for your wings, the meat will cost you $11.70 per lb.

The 3.5 ounces of skin and fat doesn’t sound so bad, until you consider that it’s equal to a ¼ lb. stick of butter, minus just enough to butter your toast.

Rule of thumb: About 1/3 of the weight of wings is boneless, fat-less, skinless meat, meaning you're paying 3 times the price per lb. of wings for the meat alone.

I'll consider my options a little more thoughtfully next time I get a hankering for "Hot Wings."

Meat Tip of the Week
13 September 2010


Anyone who read the NY Times article of October 4, 2009, entitled "E. Coli Path Shows Beef Inspection Flaws", probably hasn't bought or eaten much ground beef or hamburgers since then. And that's too bad, because most of us love a great hamburger now and then.

It's easy to make ground beef safely, if you have a way to grind your own. You can buy a chuck roast, bone-in or boneless, or some portion of beef round if you want it completely fat free.

Simply unwrap the beef, rinse it under cold water to remove most of any surface bacteria that might be there, cut it into strips and refrigerate it for a few hours or overnight. Of course, if you get a bone-in roast, you have to remove them, but that's not very intimidating for anyone who cooks. Most food processors have an attachment for grinding and that is all you need. You can also buy an excellent stainless steel grinder for about $100 that should last a lifetime.

Once it's been ground through the medium grinding plate, you can grind it again through the fine plate, if you like. I never do that. I like it just coarsely ground; and nobody has ever even noticed that it wasn't finely ground-they just rave about how it's incredibly good stuff.

However you like it, the next thing to do is dissolve about a half teaspoon of salt per pound of meat in 1/4 cup of ice cold water per 2 lbs. of meat. Pour the salty ice water evenly over the ground beef, thoroughly mix it with a long handled fork or spoon and refrigerate for at least a half an hour. When you make patties, you'll find they form up rather easily. That's because the salt has broken down enough of the cell walls that the meat adheres to itself better.

What's the advantage of grinding your own? You know: it's clean; it's been under refrigeration constantly since you bought it and any bacteria that might have been on the meat were on the surface only. The difference is that after the meat has been ground, it has an infinate number of surfaces for bacteria to multiply on. In one large piece, the meat has only a relatively small surface area for breeding bacteria. Bacteria don't multiply at temperatures below 40 F. If you've kept your beef below that, (most refrigerators are set at 38 F) taken it out of the package and rinsed off the surface as soon as you got it home, you have almost no chance of ever making anyone sick. In 52 years, I've yet to make anyone sick through my mishandling of meat and if you follow the above, you won't either.