Whether you're rooting for the Saints or the Colts, we can all agree on one thing: Team Chicken Wing.
In preparation for the big game, Serious Eats ordered a mess of chicken wings from the biggest chains to track down the best. The players: KFC, Domino's, Popeyes, and Papa John's. Braving the threat of orange fingernails (we didn't have our trongs!) we found the spiciest, the slimiest, the meatiest, and best all-around wings, as well as the least nasty blue cheese dipping sauce. Before reading on, you may want to brush up on how to eat a wing.
Best All-Around Wings
KFC. They have everything you look for in a wing: good skin-to-meat proportions, good sauce (or a sauceless option), good bellyache of success after, and good leaning tower of bones to prove you ate too much. Case closed.
Meatiest Wings
It's a little scary how much chicken they fit onto KFC's new Fiery Grilled Wings.These gerbil-sized monsters pack in 50-percent more meat than the normal wings. As far as fiery goes, they won't burn your tongue off. They're more like fiery-ish. But as far as fast-food standards go, they're not bad.
Best Sauceless Wings
While finding sauce under the fingernails for days seems like a prerequisite, crispy wings are also an option. The only moisture here is from the grease. Popeyes offered the best sauceless wing, except technically, those aren't wings. They just give you the whole darn aerodynamic limb! So unless you're emotionally attached to the mini concept, embrace Popeyes. (And while you're there, pick up a batch of the Popeyes Cajun battered fries).
Best Non-Buffalo Flavor
If you're ready to branch out of the classic Buffalo wings, KFC's Honey BBQ wings are solid. The sauce had an appealing sweet-to-tang ratio; appealing enough to clean via licking, not the sink. Unlike the Domino's "BBQ" option, which had hardly any crunch, the KFC wings had an ideal chicken crust.
Best For Spicy Fans
If your taste buds have an ego for heat, go for the Domino's "Fiery" wings. These pack a punch, man. Sure, the real spicy freaks might scoff, but they're the hottest of the dial-up wings genre. To extinguish the flame-if you're not scoffing, but choking-get out the mini tubs of blue cheese and follow with a dairy extinguisher. (Milk contains a protein that washes away tongue-burning molecules, and luckily the Domino's blue cheese doesn't suck!)
Best for Spicy Wimps
Domino's realizes that not everyone can handle "fiery." They also offer mild, medium, and hot. And hey, "hot" is just fine for people who like a little heat, but still need to wear some tongue SPF to protect from the burn.
Most Slimy
Wings are usually fried before they're sauced-up, which provides the bird some crisp. But given the slime factor on Papa John's wings, they were probably broiled first. We learned that broiled is not good. Even dunking and re-dunking these in sauce couldn't mask the excessive gooeyness. There's such thing as good gooey (cinnamon rolls) but this was a bastion of bad gooey.
Best (or Worst?) Fake Chicken Taste
You know that airline and hospital fake chicken taste? The Pizza Hut wings have those. All you need to know: these are bad. Just bad. None of the others had such an unavoidable processed, preservative-rich aftertaste. Do not want.
Best Blue Cheese Tub
While Domino's and Pizza Hut were sickeningly sweet, Papa John's offered some zing. It was the least "bleugh" of them all.
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