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It’s a creepy statistic: On Super Bowl Sunday, Americans perched on barstools or crowded onto couches will eat more than 1.25 billion chicken wings. Make that "wing portions."
According to the National Chicken Council, the nation will be gnawing on just two of a chicken wing's three joints: the drumette (the part attached to the bird’s carcass) and the flat, or middle joint. For reasons nobody quite seems to know, the wing tip, or “flapper,” is hardly eaten in America, and instead exported to Asian countries. But why?
Christian Ciscle, who runs Wing Wings, a restaurant in San Francisco specializing in chicken wings, is as mystified as anybody about why his customers don't seem to want wing tips. “It’s a tasty little part, for sure,” he says. When the restaurant opened last June, Ciscle bought whole wings anyway, using the tips to flavor stock, but he couldn’t make enough stock to use up all the flappers, and the labor to remove them got to be too much. Ciscle now buys precut wings, without the tips.
“Eating any kind of meat on the bone is a stretch for most Americans,” says Andy Ricker, owner of Pok Pok, a largely Thai-focused restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Last month, Ricker opened Pok Pok Wing on New York’s Lower East Side, a takeout place built around a signature Pok Pok dish called Ike’s Wings, which are deep-fried, Vietnamese-style, and tossed with garlic and fish sauce.
Ike’s Wings, it should be noted, come with all three joints intact. Like Asian cooks, Ricker wouldn’t think of discarding the flapper—or any part of the chicken, for that matter. “You use the whole goddamned thing,” he says, “the bones, the bits and pieces, the blood, the feet. There’s so much flavor in them.” Try telling that to the drumette eaters you share a sofa with this weekend.
Image source: Ike’s Wings by Flickr member scaredy_kat under Creative Commons
I eat the whole wing not just the drumette. No need to waste perfectly good chicken parts
My flappers go into broth. Secret ingredient, shhh, don't tell anybody.
The wing tip is my favourite part and it drives me up the wall when packaged chicken wings in the store remove it! It gets lovely and crispy and charred and is delicious.
I grew up in a home where we ate all the joints and learning how to appreciate the crunchy goodness of the third joint at a young age.
In Nagoya, Japan. They eat only eat the second/ middle joint and the tip. The drumette is nowhere to be found.It's even called " Nagoya Style" they are nicely seasoned,a bit spicy and great with beer. I look forward to having them when I am there.
i eat the crunchy tips of the wings whenever i roast chicken, bones and all. it's almost as good as chicken butt when it's roasted right.
I eat the flappers, bones an' all, if cooked to a crisp.
Growing up in the South, we never discarded any part of the wing..hell, we ate the whole thing. It's just recently when the rest of America "discovered" the pleasure of chicken wings, that the third part came up missing. lol
Our Kroger stocks its brand of chicken wings, and all packages have the three sections. Takes a little effort resulting in greasy fingers, but the "flapper" does yield a small portion of goodness.