Then I saw an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown titled "The Wing & I" in which he outlined a better method for cooking up crispy chicken wings.

The major difference between my first attempt and Alton Brown's method is that he steamed the chicken wings for 10 minutes in order to render out some of the fat. This would help create a very crispy skin while retaining the moisture inside the meat.

We were missing a few of the necessary cooking tools for this job so we went to Linens N Things to buy a Pyrex expandable vegetable steamer, a Farberware non-stick cookie pan, a large cooling rack, and a very sharp KitchenAid Santoku Knife.

Alton mentioned that he doesn't like stopping for a salad when getting his wing on, but I like the palette cleansing ability of a piece of celery dipped into some blue cheese.

After a bite of celery and a few sips of brew, I'm ready to conquer another spicy hot wing with renewed enthusiasm.

Then I rinsed off the whole chicken wings, put on some plastic food service gloves, and began cutting the wings.

Below you'll see a picture of the wing tip being cut and the joint flexing technique for easily cutting the wing from the drummette.

Then I turned the oven range on to medium heat until the water in the pot was simmering, lowered the steamer in and covered the pot with the lid.

After 10 minutes I pulled out the first batch of wings and put them on the cooling rack with paper towels and a cookie pan below them to soak up any extra grease drips.

The water remaining inside the pot had a yellow hue and looked oily from all the fat that had rendered out of the wing skin.

While we waited for the wings to dry, we whipped up the two different types of sauce.

The first was just a traditional mixture of hot sauce and butter.

The other was an Oriental inspired wing glaze that included honey, rice vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar, pineapple juice, and crushed red pepper flakes.

We poured part of the mixture into another container and threw a few splashes of hot sauce into the remaining glaze to create a third type of sauce for our wings.

The butter was cut up into chunks and microwaved at a low power setting to evenly melt it.

Then we combined the hot sauce and melted butter in a large mixing bowl.

As soon as the wings were done baking we tossed them into the three types of sauce (traditional, oriental glaze, & spicy oriental glaze).

The aroma of the oriental glaze was sweet and appetizing while the traditional hot sauce just smelled like melted butter.

I found that the wings tossed in the traditional sauce with 5 tablespoons of butter was not as appealing as I had imagined they'd be. In the future I think we'll skip the butter altogether and just coat the wings in hot sauce.

What's the point of rendering out all the fat with the steaming process to just soak them in butter later?

The two oriental glaze varieties tasted better and felt healthier going down.