The value of a boneless wing lies not in its flavor, but in its convenience.
Indeed, the standard sauces are easy to create in any moderately stocked kitchen, and therefore nothing special. You take butter, melt it down with some hot sauce and a dash each of Worcestershire and vinegar, and you end up with a deep orange concoction known widely as Buffalo sauce. For fans of the sweet chicken, there’s the classic honey BBQ, which relies on ketchup as its front person, along with the unapologetic presence of honey and a flurry of spices.
The chicken itself is nothing to write home about. We know, collectively in our hearts, that they are not wings, actually, but chicken breast. One can buy a 5 lb. bag of “breaded boneless chicken breast chunks” at GFS for a small price. Prepare the little nuggets of white meat as the package directs, toss them in your simple, home made sauce, add a side of ranch, and you’re in business, baby.
Never has there been a boneless wing that’s stood out as better than another. Never has there been one that has left a strong impression, and yet, still, they call us back to them. Why? Because they’re reliable, and the sauces versatile.
Beloved chain restaurant Applebee’s has experimented with many difference sauces for their boneless wings, offering as many as six options at one time. These included garlic parmesan, mild Buffalo, hot Buffalo, honey BBQ, “Sweet Asian Chile,” and something related to ginger. Although the first few bites suggested some thrill of novelty, the journey of the meal eventually became mindless, and the flavor lost in the ambiguous, pasty texture that is inevitable with a cooling, mass-produced wing sauce.
Were you working a 10 hour serving shift in the front of the house, this paste phenomenon would not matter. What matters then is the consumption of meat, the opportunity — however small — to take a bite of something.
There are 10 boneless wings in an order — one wing for every hour of a double shift. While patrons eat their wings in the light of eight big-screen televisions, employees crouch in darkness at a table in the far corner of the dining room, where the lights have been dimmed strategically to remove attention from the spectacle of servers eating, surviving.
Savages might argue that a boneless wing itself is bite-sized, but anyone slightly concerned with the possibility of a saucy mouth will disagree. Were there time, a boneless wing would call for a knife and fork service, the preparation of smaller, bite-size pieces. For the employee on the clock, this is no option. It’s chomp or go hungry, and so one stuffs the whole thing in at once, or else pulls the lips back from the teeth as far as possible to safely take a nibble.
Boneless wings are not a meal, they are either a fanciful idea or an emergency response. Either you think you want them, and later realize you don’t, or you’re starving and shoveling them in to stop your hands from shaking and your stomach from eating itself.
The true delight of the universal boneless wing is that it can always be relied on for the latter. They have the protein and the fat to bring a hungry body back to life temporarily.
There are no rogue boneless wings. They are a standard that is all too familiar, whether they be consumed in the corner of an Applebees or at the edge of a roller rink. For the dreamers and the hustlers and the absent-minded who forget to eat, the boneless wing is always nearby, somewhere, offering temporary sustenance at a low price, whether you like it or not.
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