Hoisin Braised Chicken Drumettes | Sybaritica

Today’s dish is very flavorful and very simple to make. As long as you have the ingredients, you can put it together at the last minute without a lot of fuss… 

The Ingredients

• 12 – 16 Chicken Wing ‘drumettes’;
• ½ a small Onion, very thinly sliced in half-rings;
• 1 tsp. Garlic paste or puree;
• 2 tbsp. Soy Sauce;
• 3 tbsp. Hoisin Sauce;
• ½ cup Chicken Stock;
• 2 tbsp. Shaoxing Wine (or other rice Wine);

I rarely cook chicken wings whole. Rather, when I buy them, I break them down into their constituent parts and generally use them separately. As you may have guessed from the title of the post, today we will be using the ‘drumette’ section.

The first step is to lightly brown the wings as this gives them a bit more flavor and a nice texture than simply cooking them in the sauce. You can, if you like, do this in your sauté pan (and, indeed, this is the way I would usually do it) but, today, I was using the oven anyway and decided to brown them that way. I simply put the drumettes in a lightly oiled pan and popped them in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes or so, turning them once during the process. The idea here is not to fully cook the meat, rather to just have the visible flesh white, and the skin just beginning to brown.

Once the drumettes are sufficiently brown, put them in a bowl and stir in the garlic paste and soy sauce. Allow this to sit for at least 30 minutes or so, or until you are ready to continue.

This picture has nothing to do with the dish itself, actually … Normally, I use wing tips for making stock (they really add a lot of gelatinous thickness), but occasionally I like to make a nice snack out of them. Basically, you just bake them in an oiled pan at 250 degrees for about 45 minutes or so. This may seem like a long time but it makes the tips super crunchy and really delicious. Other than salt they don’t need much in the way of dipping sauce or anything, but a little chili paste is nice too… I made these while waiting for the drumettes to marinate.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a pan over moderate heat and sauté the onions briefly until they soften.

Now stir in the Hoisin sauce, stock and rice wine and, when it begins to really bubble, turn down the heat and let things simmer for about twenty minutes until the wings are fully cooked through and the sauce has reduced to a syrupy consistency. Serve Hot…

…