Your Chicken Will Be Crispier With This Simple Addition

There's little that's more disappointing than anticipating a pile of perfectly crispy and delicious chicken wings and being served a soggy mess. A chicken wing's duty is to be crisp, while still remaining moist on the inside. It's a tricky balancing act for sure. One solution is to brine and deep fry your chicken, as in our Pickle Juice-Brined Fried Chicken Recipe. The results are absolutely delicious, but many home cooks may wish to avoid deep frying and opt for the grill or oven instead. One interesting note about the pickle-brined chicken recipe: Our secret simple addition is one of the ingredients!

You certainly won't find a shortage of tips for getting chicken to cook up crispy, like poaching your bird in buttermilk before frying it. And, you can even achieve excellent results by carefully timing the application of sauce and turning your chicken wings regularly while they're in the oven. But, is there an ingredient that will help guarantee you crisp chicken?

There are several ways in which cornstarch, a simple pantry staple, can help your recipes succeed, as Bon Appétit explains. One is tossing meat or vegetables in cornstarch before pan frying. Corn starch — specifically a 50-50 ratio of cornstarch to flour — also helps in deep frying, producing a satisfying crunchy exterior. Further, "The corn adds a bit of golden color that all-purpose flour can't quite get to."

So, we know cornstarch helps make chicken crispier when you're frying, but what about on the grill? The simple addition of cornstarch works for this application as well. Kitchn explains that their grilled Buffalo wings use cornstarch to dry out the chicken skin so it crisps up better while grilling and stays crisp even after being coated in spicy Buffalo sauce. Cornstarch is one of those items savvy cooks should use more often, even for recipes and techniques like our favorite crispy oven-roasted vegetables.