10 Healthy Chicken Wings Recipes
Steaming chicken wings photo via Shutterstock
Whether its for a quick appetizer, a fun dinner, or as a party food for the big game, chicken wings almost are always on the menu. To kick wings up a notch, it’s all about the marinades and sauces. Whether you like to slow cook and baste your birds with sauce, or marinate and grill them, the recipes below are sure to please. Tips: To get your wings out-of-the-fryer crisp without the excess oil and calories, pat dry the wings before seasoning and cooking. Of course, anytime you fry something you lose any “healthy” factor. So, that’s why we suggest baking or grilling the wings instead. For a quick clean up, line your baking pan with foil. Then, after cooking, just throw the foil out, rinse off the pan and you won’t have to spend any time scrubbing burnt sauce spots.
1. Honey Mustard Chicken Wings with Dijon/Lime Dipping Sauce
via Honest Cooking
This recipe is the best of all worlds. It uses a variety of spices before cooking, bakes the wings slowly, turning twice in the cooking hour, and has a spiced, citrusy sauce for dipping. For quick clean up, line the baking sheet with tin foil.
2. Sticky Sweet Teriyaki Wings
via Feed Me Seymour
Don’t be scared by “teriyaki” because there is no salt-laden bottled teriyaki sauce in this recipe. It’s great to have control over our ingredients and cutting out the extra, unwanted stuff found in most processed foods.
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3. Healthy Caribbean Spiced Chicken Wings
via Behind the Bites
Using a dry rub can help cut out calories that inevitably hide in gooey barbeque sauces. Don’t be shy about getting down and dirty when massaging the rub to the chicken. The more of the rub that’s worked into the chicken, the more flavor the chicken will hold onto during cooking.
4. Grilled Buttermilk and Beer Wings
Nothing seems healthy about this recipe at all: it marinates the chicken in buttermilk, beer, and spices so the wings are going to take on a tangy kick and stay super moist. The glaze even uses brown sugar, but swapping honey or agave syrup will cut down on the calories. You can also swap the beer for a light beer. Go ahead, splurge.
5. Thai Curry Chicken Wings
via All Day I Dream About Food
Using coconut milk and homemade curry to marinate and baste the chicken gives these wings a Thai twist. You can use low fat coconut milk but the majority of the milk will not be used after marinating so if you can’t find low fat, don’t worry about extra calories. If you really like the Thai curry, use the extra as a dipping sauce.
6. Skinny Buffalo Wings with Buttermilk Blue Cheese Dressing
via Skinnyluscious
To make a skinny buffalo dip, this recipe drops the butter and uses chicken stock and lemon juice instead. For the dressing, using low fat buttermilk, reduced fat mayo, and blue cheese crumbles will make for a creamy ending for your spicy wings.
7. Honey Mustard Wings Recipes
via Adora’s Box
If you like spicy wings, you can substitute spicy brown mustard for English mustard. You can use olive oil or vegetable oil in this recipe— whatever you have on hand. Since you aren’t adding a majority of the flavor until after the wings are fully cooked, it’s important to toss the wings with the honey mustard sauce as soon as they come out of the oven. Hot wings are much more susceptible to holding flavor and sauce than cold wings.
8. Healthy Chicken Wings with Curry-Yogurt Glaze
via Epicurious
This recipe delivers Indian-inspired wings with a creamy spiced yogurt glaze. Make sure that your oven rack is in the middle position. If it’s too low, the yogurt will be more likely to burn. If you like to use greek yogurt, you may need to add a splash of milk to loosen up the yogurt so it will coat the wings properly.
9. Sticky Sesame Wings Recipe
via Gourmet
Stickiness is one of the hallmarks of eating wings, and this recipe doesn’t disappoint. The combination of honey, hoisin, and thick sesame oil will become a gooey glaze once baked. Hoisin and sesame oil can be found in the Asian aisle of the grocery store.
10. Balsamic-Soy Glazed Chicken Wings
via Gourmet
Balsamic and soy are a classic combination for wings, and these are good enough to please everyone but special enough to serve for a fun occasion. While the recipe includes butter, it’s one tablespoon for four pounds of chicken, so you won’t be breaking the calorie bank by keeping it in.
