Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Gregory Gourdet and we are here at Departure Restaurant and Lounge in Portland, Oregon. And, today, we are making a wonderful and delicious tequila and lime glazed chicken wings. We're going to start off with a few ingredients. First, an all-natural chicken wing; be sure that you talk to your butcher, use something delicious and fresh, bright and pink. We're going to make our sauce with some fresh squeezed lime juice, brown sugar, some tequila of your preference, some ground chili, dried Thai chilies, and some chopped up garlic, a little sea salt and olive oil to finish. So, let's get going. We're going to take our chicken wings, add them to a bowl. We're going to season them very, very well with salt and pepper. You can kind of toss them to make sure they're all getting nicely coated. Chicken wings are pretty fatty, so you want a good amount of salt because salt is pretty hard to season. And no one wants bland chicken wings anyway. We'll add a little black pepper as well. Toss with olive oil; olive oil is very good for you, it's very delicious as well. We'll bake these off in nice single layers in a very hot oven, about 375 degrees to 400. You figure about six per person in your household. So, we'll pop these in the oven about 20 minutes, you kind of want to check them, turn them around, make sure they get golden brown and delicious. So, we have some ready. As you can see, our wings they've shrunk up a bit. They're a little golden brown, the skin is a little bit crispy and there's lots of natural juices in the pan. So, now that our wings are set aside, we're going to start our sauce. We're going to start with caramelizing some garlic, a little olive oil in a hot pan, as much garlic as you like. I like really flavorable things, so you can have add as much as you like. Here we have about a tablespoon and a half, you want to add enough oil to kind of coat the garlic and get it going. You always want to add salt in the beginning of the cooking process to bring out all of those amazing flavors, so we're adding salt now. We're going to get the garlic just really fragrant. It smells great in here right now. Take it off the heat; you want to control what is going on. You want to add dry chilies. Again, spice as much as you like; we like things really spicy here, so we're going to add about a tablespoon of sliced Thai chilies and you can use red chili flakes, you can use diced jalapenos. The chili of your preference is great. We'll add fresh lime juice, make sure you use it off the heat so you don't cause any fires, about almost a cup. And, then, we'll add some brown sugar, about equal part of brown sugar to lime juice, and we'll let that reduce. So, by reducing, we want to kind of let all of the water evaporate and we're going to turn this into a nice, thick glaze. So the sugars will melt, they'll start to caramelize, get really syrupy and they're going to make an amazing coating for outside of the wings and make them really delicious. And all those awesome garlic and chili flavors will just really adhere to the chicken wings. So, you see we're getting nice and thick, foamy, I think we're almost there. So, we're going to add our tequila, careful, cook off the alcohol a little bit. As you can see, we're very thick and foamy, the glaze is ready to go, nice, thick consistency. So, we're let our sauce cool off just a few seconds, we'll add a little cilantro to our bowl. We'll add our wings, they're nice and hot from the oven, still a little bit crispy. You kind of want to scrap off any of these yummy bits that stick to the bottom of the pan; they're really flavorful, kind of salty, kind of crunchy, all the peppers in there. All those meat juices have kind of reduced a little bit and add a layer of depth as well.