Meat & Seafood

Chicken Wings (Raw)

Chicken wings are divided into three sections — the drumette, the flat (or wingette), and the tip — and most recipes and restaurant preparations use only the first two, with the tip typically reserved for stock given its low meat content.

Buffalo wings, tossed in a vinegar-based cayenne pepper sauce, originated at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1964, a specific, well-documented culinary origin rather than a generic regional style that evolved gradually.

Their higher skin-to-meat ratio compared to a breast or thigh makes them especially well suited to a cooking method that crisps skin effectively, like baking at high heat, deep-frying, or grilling.

The Buffalo wing's popularization is credited to Teressa Bellissimo at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1964, where she reportedly deep-fried whole wings and tossed them in a butter-based hot sauce as a late-night snack for her son and his friends, a dish that grew into the defining American bar food it is today.

A whole chicken wing is actually made up of three distinct sections — the drumette (closest to the body, shaped like a small drumstick), the flat or wingette (the middle section with two thin parallel bones), and the tip (mostly skin, cartilage, and little meat, usually discarded or saved for stock) — and most wings sold for eating are pre-separated into drumettes and flats with the tip removed.

Super Bowl Sunday drives an enormous annual spike in US chicken wing consumption, with industry estimates regularly putting the day's total in the well over a billion wings eaten across the country, making it easily the single biggest wing-consumption day of the year by a wide margin.

Wing sauces have diversified enormously beyond the original Buffalo style, with Korean-style gochujang glazes, dry-rubbed lemon pepper, Nashville hot, and countless barbecue variations now standard menu options at wing-focused restaurants, reflecting how far the format has traveled from its single-sauce origin at the Anchor Bar.

National Chicken Wing Day, observed each July 29 in the US, grew out of grassroots bar and restaurant promotion rather than any official government designation, but it's become a genuinely widely marketed date across wing-focused chains and local bars looking to drive traffic with wing specials.

Frank's RedHot, the specific cayenne pepper sauce originally used in Bellissimo's Anchor Bar recipe, remains closely associated with "authentic" Buffalo wing sauce today, and the brand has leaned into that history directly in its own marketing for decades since.

A persistent debate among wing eaters pits the flat (or wingette) against the drumette as the better piece, largely a matter of personal preference between the flat's higher meat-to-bone ratio along two thin bones and the drumette's single-bone, easier-to-eat shape closer to a miniature drumstick.

Some restaurants and home cooks bake wings rather than deep-frying them, often finishing with a brief broil to crisp the skin, a lower-mess method that trades a little of deep-frying's crunch for a genuinely lighter dish, though the skin's final texture rarely matches a properly fried wing's crispness quite as closely.