Buffalo Thighs


 
BrianBishop

BrianBishop

TVWBB Member
A couple summers ago my girlfriend and I started making buffalo wings pretty regularly on the gasser. Following Steven Raichlen's Buffaque Wings recipe, we were hooked. Whenever we would catch them on sale we'd pick up a family pack or two and go to it. For whatever reason, we never see them on sale anymore. We would get them for 99 cents/# but now they never seem to dip below 2.39/# After regularly seeing thighs at 99 cents/# I figured it would be worth a shot to try buffalo chicken thighs... Today was my first attempt and I must say they were fantastic.

The marinade is as follows
1/2 cup Franks Red Hot
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tbsp worcestershire sauce
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp kosher or sea salt
1 tsp fresh black pepper

I only let them soak for a few hours but they could benefit from more time. Since I'll be doing two butts and 3 slabs of backribs saturday night/sunday in the WSM, I figured I would just fire up the gasser for these. I set up the gasser for indirect grilling around 300*F and loaded the smoker boxes with hickory chips.
I let them do their thing for almost an hour, at which point I basted them on both sides with a melted stick of butter mixed with 1 cup of franks red hot. I also added a little direct heat to help ensure bite through skin. Once the color looked good on the skin I pulled them to a platter and gave them another coating of sauce.



The skin turned out perfectly, crispy in spots but tender throughout. The meat was moist and tender with just a hint of smoke and plenty of buffalo goodness. I would have prefered a bit more smoke so I will certainly be doing these on the WSM next time but I'm extremely happy with the results.

Thanks for reading
 
Now that wings have been priced out of the "cheap eats" category , the thigh is coming into its own. This is another great idea. I will be trying this soon. Thanks for sharing.
 
That's an awesome idea. You could do drums the same way. I'm really liking what you did Brian. This could be a great grilling idea using the kettle too.
 
Gary S said:
That's an awesome idea. You could do drums the same way. I'm really liking what you did Brian. This could be a great grilling idea using the kettle too.
Click to expand...

Yup........looks like a great Performer project - indirect and smokey :D.
 
Thanks for all the positive comments! We've been out of town the last couple days so I haven't been able to reply. As mine were marinating I did a search on here and saw there were several other posts detailing a similar idea so obviously I'm not the only one tired of the crazy prices wings are fetching :p

This was basically an experiment for me, as only my second attempt at thighs (the first were in the mini and turned out quite good, but the skin wasn't as good as I'd hoped) and the first go at "buffalo thighs". I honestly couldn't have been more pleased with the results! There was a little room for improvement, but this was solid proof of concept for sure!

One thing I didn't emphasize in my original post that I thing deserves a little more attention, was that when making the sauce I use 2 parts franks red hot to 1 part butter. A lot of recipes I've found use 1 to 1. I feel that makes the sauce too hard to combine and gives it a greasy consistency... Don't get me wrong, I love butter, but in this case less is more. In my personal opinion of course.
 
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