Grilled chicken wings require some skill to cook to crispy, flavorful perfection. This collection of grilled chicken recipes has sauces and spice rubs that run from a gentle sweet glaze to a fiery spice. We’ll also teach you how baking soda can help you achieve the crispest skin, and how to utilize direct and indirect heat on your grill for perfectly cooked wings, every time. Let’s get to it!
Grilled Turkish-Style Chicken Wings
An improved setup for skewers brings these grilled wings closer to the heat, while a marinade based on Turkish hot pepper paste infuses them with flavor.
Hawaiian Huli Huli Grilled Chicken Wings
Sticky, sweet, smoky, and tangy, these chicken wings get their flavor from an easy-to-make Hawaiian marinade. They’re grilled until tender and brushed with glaze, and they’re as great for a barbecue as they are for game day.
Grilled Cajun Wings
A highly seasoned skin gives these wings an earthy and spicy coating, while the sauce has a complexity that goes beyond the standard Buffalo. They’re grilled over indirect heat until blistered and crunchy, then tossed in a simple sauce of butter, Louisiana-style hot sauce, and Worcestershire.
Grilled Spicy Chicken Wings With Soy and Fish Sauce
With great savory depth from a marinade, these wings are easy to prep, requiring only an overnight soak in soy sauce, fish sauce, Shaoxing wine, and spices for maximum flavor.
Grilled Sweet and Spicy Chicken Wings
These wings are coated with a rub, cooked over indirect heat with apple wood chunks, and finished with a sweet and spicy barbecue-honey glaze. There’s a lot going on here, including a succulent smoky meat, peppery rub, and a sticky sauce that starts sweet and leaves a pleasing, lingering heat.
Grilled Hoisin-Glazed Chicken Wings
These sweet and savory wings are grilled over indirect heat to crisp the skin, then brushed with a hoisin, honey, and soy sauce glaze that gets set with a quick fire over direct heat.
Grilled Honey Chipotle Wings
Here, cooking the wings over high heat caramelizes the sauce, tempering the spiciness and bringing out the sweetness of the honey.
Grilled Habanero Barbecue Wings
Rubbed wings stay juicy and get a nicely browned skin after 30 minutes of cooking, at which point barbecue sauce is applied and allowed to caramelize. These are coated with a roasted habanero sauce, because a touch of heat on a smoky wing just makes it all the better, right?
Grilled Sriracha Hot Wings
To double up the Sriracha awesomeness, these wings are first brushed with a rich Sriracha-based sauce during the last minutes of grilling. After that coating bakes in, they are tossed with the remaining sauce, creating two layers of hot garlic goodness, ensuring every bite is full of flavor.
Jerk Chicken Wings
The essence of jerk is the amazing mixture of herbs, spices, and chiles, and when it comes to wings, the marinade-to-chicken ratio tips well in favor of the jerk. That means more heat and more spice, with just enough juicy chicken to temper the seasoning to the perfect amount.
Spicy Cumin Wings
These wings feature a spice rub with a hefty portion of cumin, ground Szechuan peppercorns, salt, and baking powder, that latter of which helps achieve a crispy and textured skin on grill-roasted wings. The rub features red pepper flakes, garlic, soy sauce, sherry, rice vinegar for a bit of tang, and a little sesame oil for that roasted sesame undertone.