Maine Chicken Wings vs Grocery Store Chicken Wings

Darker wings at right are Mainely Poultry

Helen and I go to the farmer's market every week. Unlike Saint Louis, Maine has an extensive system of farmers markets. We live in Bath, Maine-- but the Brunswick farmer's market is only 15 minutes away. While Brunswick is far larger with about 40 vendors including year round vegetables, Bath actually has 3-4 "chain" vendors found at both markets which makes either acceptable for our weekly needs. Among these is "Maine-ly Poultry"-- predictably, they offer all parts of the chicken as well as farm fresh eggs at reasonable prices. This week, Helen and I decided to compare chicken. We bought 6 wings from Mainely Poultry, and 6 from Shaw's (our local supermarket). Shaw's rang in at 2.39/lb, while Mainely Poultry came in at a stately 3.38/lb. From that price coupled with their description of "broiler chickens", I'd expect that Mainely Poultry is raising non-heritage chickens in a more humane way.
Now, if you're a practioner of the wing religion, you will know that the best wings one can make are deep fried (thanks Slayer).  This crisps the skin in a way hard to duplicate in the oven, it allows the fat to fry the skin which creates pockets that can hold sauce as you continue through the wing process.  That being said,  we do not have a fryer large enough to accomodate ~24 chicken wings at once, so we emulate this process through baking.
The rough recipe is as follows:

Mainely Poultry is on the *left* now

1. Separate all drums from true "wings" with a knife, saving wing tips for stock production later
2. Toss the wings in vegetable/peanut oil.
3. Roast the wings at 430 (or the smoke point of your oil, if higher)  for 30 minutes, turning once
4. coat the wings in 75/25  Frank's Red Hot and butter (shake in between two large bowls)
5. roast 5-10min to set the sauce
6. if you have left over sauce, repeat and reglaze





Mainely Poultry is still on the leftserve with celery and dips

As we cooked them, we noticed the Maine-ly Poultry wings started and stayed darker throughout the whole proceeding.  Typically darker chicken meat is an indication of greater fat content, although it could also be a function of a healthier chicken, i.e. more red blood cells, more iron, etc etc..    After cooking, you can see that  it is tougher to tell the difference, but perhaps the Maine-ly Poultry wings still have a slightly darker sheen.  Our total cooking time for this batch was about 26 minutes per side,  dip into franks red hot and butter, 5 more minutes, dip again, 5 more minutes.

Fully prepared for luxury dinner what what

Taste review:  Even a blind taste tester would have no problem selecting the Maine-ly Poultry wings as more flavorful.  While both sources produced acceptable wings, the local wings had more taste and were approximately the same size after cooking as Shaw's wings.  Additionally, the store wings felt softer even though the cooking times were identical and the Maine-ly Poultry had been previously frozen (by us) and the chicken wings had not.  Perhaps if we altered our cooking methodology we could get a similar doneness result from the store-bought wings,  but across the board we noticed improvements in the local wings, predominatnely in color, taste, and texture.

For a dollar extra per pound, we recommend you buy local.