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Almost Naked Oven Baked Crispy Chicken Wings

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Yes, these Crispy Chicken Wings are oven baked, not fried. And, yes, they’re really freaking crispy.

Two things make that possible: an obnoxiously hot oven and my own grain free baking powder blend. Yes, baking powder. It sounds bizarre, but it’s the absolutely necessary ingredient that helps draw the moisture out of the chicken skin so that it gets crispy.

To make my own baking powder (without the hidden corn starch & other additives), I combined two pantry ingredients. Two parts cream of tartar to one part baking soda is the simple ratio you need!

I also used a bit of arrowroot starch (also called arrowroot powder or flour) to bolster the blend of seasonings and stand in for the typical flour that would dredge the wings before frying. Except, in this case, these crispy chicken wings were made in the oven, using oven safe wire racks to elevate the wings, keep them out of their own juices and allow air to circulate in the oven. That trifecta gives you a surprisingly shattering bite every time you make these.

For a quick dip to serve on the side, I thinned a little salted coconut yogurt and added my Dairy Free Ranch Seasoning to taste. Serve your crispy chicken wings with celery & carrot sticks for that classic wing night feel.

Looking for more game day recipes? Try my Creamy Artichoke Dip with Spinach, Sticky Honey Garlic Instant Pot Ribs or my Not Quite Queso Dip!

Almost Naked Oven Baked Crispy Chicken Wings

5 Stars 4 Stars 3 Stars 2 Stars 1 Star

5 from 3 reviews

A simple grain & gluten free seasoning mixture makes these AIP crispy chicken wings completely addictive. Perfect as is, or for tossing in your favorite sauce.

Author: Rachael Bryant / Meatified
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 45 min
Total Time: 1 hour
Yield: 2 dozen wings 1x
Category: game day, appetizers
Method: oven baked
Cuisine: American

Instructions

DRY: Preheat the oven to 450 F / 230 C. Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil and place an oven safe wire rack on top. For the crispiest wings, we need to make sure that the chicken skin especially is dry & free of any surface moisture at all. If the chicken wings are fresh, pat them dry with paper towels. However, if the wings were frozen and now thawed, I like to lay them out on several layers of paper towel and press down on them with several more layers of paper towel to get them as dry as possible. (If you have the time & space, you can lay out the chicken wings on the baking sheet & rack in the fridge for a few hours or up to overnight to really make sure they’re as dry as possible.)

DREDGE: Mix together the arrowroot starch, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt & all the remaining seasonings in a small bowl. Put the chicken wings in a large bowl and sprinkle with some of the seasoning mixture a little at a time, turning with your hands to make sure they are all evenly coated on all sides. Place the dredged chicken wings on top of the wire rack, evenly spaced out without touching each other so that air can circulate around them easily.

BAKE: Pop the chicken wings into the oven on the middle rack and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and use tongs to flip the wings over, then return them to the oven to bake for another 15 minutes. Smaller wings may be done about now, but if they are on the larger side, flip them again. Return the wings to the oven for another 5 – 15 minutes, flipping again as needed every few minutes, until the chicken wings are evenly browned & crispy all over.

REST: Remove the crispy chicken wings from the oven, place the baking tray on a trivet and let them sit – still on the wire rack – to cool for a few minutes for maximum crispiness, then devour while warm and, well, crispy! If you like, sprinkle with a little extra salt once they’re out of the oven. For a quick dip, add my Dairy Free Ranch Seasoning, to taste, to some thinned & salted coconut yogurt & serve on the side with the traditional carrot and celery sticks.

Equipment

Image of Oven Safe Wire Rack

Oven Safe Wire Rack

Image of Rimmed Baking Sheet

Rimmed Baking Sheet

Image of Arrowroot Starch

Arrowroot Starch

Image of Cream Of Tartar

Cream Of Tartar

Image of Baking Soda

Image of Ground Sage

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4 comments

Coral says:

February 2, 2019 at 16:42

Best ever!!!!

Reply
Erica says:

February 16, 2019 at 17:52

The best baked wing recipe ever!

Reply
1. Rachael Bryant / Meatified says:
  
  February 19, 2019 at 10:38
  
  I’m so happy you enjoyed them!
  
  Reply
Rachael says:

August 28, 2022 at 10:31

I made once and my partner had to had on the weekly rotation. So good. Wow

Reply

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The further I got into sobriety, the more I realiz

The further I got into sobriety, the more I realized I’ve been trying to make this food blogging thing fit when it doesn’t. You know when you’re kind of good at something, so you keep doing it because eventually that’s got to lead to success or happiness or something that you should want? But instead, I felt like I was constantly behind where I ‘should’ be, never able to make content fast or well or often enough. And nothing I produced ever felt good enough.

Later, I thought I was sabotaging myself to keep myself small. That I was scared to try because I was scared to fail. True and untrue, all at once. But underneath all of those ‘should’s, the real reason I never felt authentic or real doing any of these things is because, if I had really listened, I would have known that it has never been what I wanted.

I don’t want to be defined by a diet or how I eat, even when both of those things were a very true part of my life’s experience. I don’t want to be pouring myself into something that gives me nothing back. Which is exactly how slinging recipes into an abyss has felt for so long.

I haven’t been ‘doing it wrong’. I’ve been doing the wrong thing entirely.

For years of – perhaps all of -- my life, I’ve told myself that I’m lazy, unproductive, just not good enough. But I suspect my inability to do the things that I ‘should’ is intrinsically linked with my body trying its hardest to tell me what my mind refused to say clearly: “you’re not happy doing this, you don’t care about this, this isn’t who you are.”

And what is true about yourself is always, always worth knowing. Even if that means you don’t know what the way forward looks like.

The only part of this I’ve ever loved, the little snippet of truth in this mess my mind has made, is the creation. It’s the making of something from nothing, turning an idea into a tangible thing and then again into something intangible in the form of a photograph.

Turning nothing into something into a memory of what was.

Which means this tiny kernel of a beginning is that I’m not really a recipe developer or a food photographer or anything I thought or told myself I was. Maybe I’m just an artist?

Before & after // I didn’t take any photos for a $Before & after // I didn’t take any photos for a year. Sobering-up-me was a being of fractures. Sharp edges that didn’t fit anywhere, no matter how many times I rearranged or reimagined the pieces. People seem to think (or I apparently assumed) that becoming sober brings an automatic sense of the whole, of coming back together. That it’s as simple as taking away perhaps the only thing that was, in the strangest sense, holding them together in the first place. Magically yielding a version of the ‘before’ that is not yet broken in the ‘after’. Maybe that’s true for some people. But sobering me was an agonizing act of disassembly. It was heading back to cuckoo land and knowing that this time, the nest was never mine. It was realizing that I had always known I was the interloper, pushing others out of the nest to stay alive in a constant state of mimicry that became its own death anyway. Sobering-me wondered if her old creativity was another act of imitation pushing her ever closer to the edge. Hi, I’m the cuckoo, it’s me. When you’ve never known who you are, how can there be anything familiar to fly back to? For some, sobriety might be a reclamation, but mine has been a kind of excavation. Part extrication, part excommunication. I wasn’t yet a year sober when I picked up my camera again, my first foray into what may or may not be left behind. I picked something simple, a cozy soup as a placeholder to practice camera settings & styling again. But that March-cold light wasn’t what I wanted to see. I used to feel like editing photos after the fact was about ‘fixing’ them; that it was about finding what was ‘wrong’ with what I’d made in the first place. The same way that part of me wanted to portray my self-portrait last post as a sober ‘after’ without acknowledging the ‘before’. As though the after is a new version of me, as fixed as my stare. But any after cradles it’s before at it’s heart. So, just as I’ve warmed & brightened this photo to create the sense of contentment that I wanted to see, I’ve shown you the before, too. I can’t have one without the other. There’s no sobriety without what came before. No thawing tenderness that doesn’t follow the cold.$

Eighteen months of sobriety have me seeing myself,

Eighteen months of sobriety have me seeing myself, if not for the very first time, perhaps in the most honest way.

I learned to put on my makeup in a compact mirror, a whole face in shattered parts. Piece by barely framed piece, directing an abstract spotlight on only the detail I thought I needed to fix somehow.

I taught myself never to take a step back, never to look at the whole, never to see truly what was in front of me. To fold myself into my own palm, an enclosed prism. Click.

My face has forever been something yo avoid, a thing I reflexively glaze over, unfocused eyes with too much zoom in the lens, an intrinsic crack in the glass of my sight. Click.

I’ve always been the person behind the camera so that no one could direct it at me. When it whispered, the thought of taking my own portrait for the first time surprised me. Sober me is starting to raise her voice, even if it’s only at herself for now.

The part of me that over complicates everything pulled at me to turn taking a quick snap into an overwhelmingly stylized photo shoot. Another mask; another performance. That voice started listing all the things I had to fix or tidy or make pretty or palatable. Which I realized now was another attempt at staying hidden while pretending to be visible.

Instead, I promised myself that I would set up my camera as simply as possible. Just the same as I would light anything else to let it shine as it is.

So here I am. No distractions, just me looking into my own camera for the first time and meeting myself on the other side. Click.

It’s strange to look at this image - of myself, for once - and see my typical photography style poking through without meaning to. Limited styling, rich depths, pops of bold natural color, perhaps a little more darkness than makes other people comfortable. And still: just me.

Hi, I’m Rach.

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