Bigly Mustard Grilled Wings

Nobody talks about the mustard wing. Everybody's got an opinion on Buffalo — everybody, the whole country, you cannot get through a football game without somebody telling you their Buffalo theory — and meanwhile the mustard wing sits there being BETTER and getting no credit. That ends today.

And we are going to be SPECIFIC, because this is where people go wrong. The mustard is Inglehoffer Sweet Hot with honey. Not the yellow squeeze bottle from the ballpark. Not the fancy grainy one somebody brought back from France. Inglehoffer — the orange one, the little round bottle with the man in the green hat on it, a gold medal from the World Mustard Championship printed right there on the label, which is a real competition and he WON it. That mustard is already sweet and already hot before it ever meets the butter, so when the brown sugar and the cayenne go in they're not building a flavor from scratch, they're stacking onto something that was already halfway there. Use plain yellow and you'll get a fine wing. You'll also get a flatter one, and you'll wonder why, and now you won't have to wonder.

Now here's the part that separates a real wing from a rubber wing, and it happens the DAY BEFORE, which is why most people never do it. You put the wings on a rack, on a sheet pan, and you leave them in the refrigerator uncovered overnight. Naked. Exposed. All night. Sounds insane. It is not insane — it is the single most important thing in this entire recipe. The air pulls the moisture out of the skin, and dry skin is the ONLY skin that crisps. Wet skin steams. Steamed skin is a tragedy with a bone in it. You cannot fix wet skin with heat, you cannot fix it with more sauce, you cannot fix it at all. You fix it the night before or you don't fix it.

And the cornstarch in the rub — that's the other half. A few tablespoons stirred into whatever BBQ seasoning you already own, and suddenly the outside of that wing goes from good to shattering. This is a pellet grill recipe, a Traeger recipe, 375 degrees, and the smoke does a thing here that an oven simply cannot do, no matter what the oven people tell you. The oven people have been lying to you for years. Forgive them. Then go outside and use the grill.

Toss them, pile them, and put the bowl in the middle of the table where everyone can reach it. The sauce is going to end up on somebody's sleeve and that somebody will not care. This is a house recipe — it comes out of my own kitchen, not off some website with fourteen pop-ups and a life story about a trip to Tuscany before it tells you the oven temperature. Mustard wings. Undefeated. Don't tell your friends, keep this one for yourself.