Slow Cooker BBQ Chicken Wings

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These BBQ Chicken Wings are a great excuse for using your slow cooker for really good party food.

For me, chicken wings are the synonym of a great time with a friend watching some tv show or a game. There’s not better feeling than a couple of beers while eating some sticky and fall-off-the-bone chicken wings.

How to prepare the sauce for the slow cooker BBQ chicken wings?

This sauce is as simple as you can imagine because that’s the whole point of this recipe: easiness and tastiness.

I like to prepare a dry rub for my chicken wings using: brown sugar, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, dry oregano, and garlic powder.

After I coated the chicken wings with the dry rub, I prepare the sauce using what is left of this rub. I add some BBQ sauce and Worcestershire sauce to get a deeper flavor. All these spices combine to create a not-so-usual- BBQ sauce.

What is the benefit of using a slow cooker for chicken wings?

Fall-off-the-bone results. There is no denying that the ultimate technique to get tender meat that just melts in your mouth is through slow cooking. You can get a nice result using only your oven —like this soy and honey chicken wings recipe—, but if you want to achieve extreme tender meat, you will have to cook the meat for a long time over low temperature.

You can just toss the ingredients into the slow cooker and forget about it. This gives you the freedom to spend time with your guesses instead of babysitting the chicken wings.

Intense flavor. Slow cooking will allow the chicken to infuse with the sauce and to be even more flavorful than only using the oven.

How to get that sticky finish?

Sadly, we can’t make this entire recipe in the slow cooker. The reason is that the slow cooker does not allow proper evaporation of the sauce. For that reason, the sauce will be watery.

To get a thick and glossy sauce that sticks to the skin of the chicken wings I use the oven to broil. First, I cover the chicken wings with sauce — using a pastry brush. Then I’ll take them to the oven — in broil mode– for 5- 7 minutes at 180ºC. You can check how brown you want your chicken wings.