Longos BBQ Wings

Do you ever do something once, and then regret it? But for some explainable reason, you do it again and again. And each time you do you know you shouldn't but you do it anyway? Like a bad relationship, or alcohol.

I do, and it involves wings that are in-house at grocery stores.

Here's the thing, many grocery stores serve chicken wings as quick and easy to go meals. And they are often not very good. Often breaded, they either are put in the containers hot where they steam themselves until they are fall off the bone, but are mush messes OR they are semi-cooked at the plant, frozen or sent very cold and sit in the container in a gloppy mess. And because of my wing sickness I have to try wings where ever I am.

So I was at Longos, a nice grocery store chain, where my location is waaaay too small, and waaay too expensive for my likings. I don't even know why I was in there, but I was, and I saw wings for $6.99 and my love of wings and cheapness said, that looks like a good deal. So I got it.

The instructions read:

"Keep Refrigerated until ready to consume. Pre-heat oven to 425F. Remove from packaging. Bake on cookie shet for 10-15 minutes. For microwave, remove lid and heat on high power for 2-5 minutes"

Um, microwave? No. Please don't.

Above are the wings straight from the, uh, shelf. They were very very cold, seemingly just from frozen. Very saucy though.

I put the oven to 450 degrees and placed them in a circular pattern on a pizza pan, on parchment. The wings won't stick to parchment.

Here are the wings before putting them in the oven, and the wings after 15 minutes. I then flipped the wings so that both sides got somewhat crispy.

Because they come pre-sauced, they were much harder to get crispy. I kept a keen eye on them because I did not want all the sauce to caramelize, then burn at such high heat.

The wings were tiny. Tender, slightly meaty, but small.

How did they taste? Well, not great. They were a very sweet BBQ (and I use the term BBQ only because they did), kind of sickly sweet. An off ketchupy taste, very artificial.

So, what did I do? I added my own sauce. Hot. Very hot. Drowned out the other sauce. This made them better. 

So Longo's, I gotta say, tres disappointing. Tiny, terrible tasting wings. What you think of as BBQ is really sad. And the chicken going from factory to the shelves just doesn't seem respectful of the chicken medium. Please let your chickens grow so that you can serve decent sized wings.

If you were really craving wings, and you were willing to really doctor these up, these would be ok. I guess. For $6.99 it wasn't bad, but this is a product that really needs to shape up.

Longos.com