Grilled Dry Rub Chicken Wings with C-Dub's Test Wing Sample

Tonight I fired up the PK Portable Kitchen outdoor cooker or grill and made dry rub wings with C-Dub's Hot Wings test sample. I'm friends with C-Dub on Facebook, and he was asking for folks to test out his new hot wing rub. I think most of the testers who posted up were general consumers. I'm a consumer too, but I write on barbecue and grilling and have this barbecue blog and Yes You Can Grill web site. That didn't rule me out which I think is a good thing. I'm a tough critic, so when folks let me check them out, they get what I really think as do my readers.

Dry Versus Web Rub Wings

I should probably first explain the dry versus the wet barbecue or Buffalo swings. That could be a little confusing.

If I'm doing wet Buffalo Wings, then I fry the wings and use butter in the frying pan with barbecue sauce to sauce the wings. These are wet and drippy and really yummy barbecue wings. Our wet hot wings here really are hard to beat.

On the grill, you are going to have a mess if you try to do wet barbecue wings, so you want a dry rub on grilled wings, unless you are using a cast iron skillet or perhaps a griddle with sides and just put those on top of the grill, and it's hard to get a temperature high enough to do the wings.

How to Make Dry Rub Buffalo Wings on the Grill

There are many ways to do chicken wings on the barbecue grill. I could talk about that forever, but I'll just go with the basic version.

I put my chicken wings (sans the tips which I cut off) in a bowl with buttermilk with C-Dub's Wing Rub sprinkled in. This is a very Southern techique (the milk thing) and adds moisture and makes the meat real moist and tender.

Afer a couple of hours in the milk marinade, I drained the chicken wings and then rubbed them with olive oil (vegetable oil is fine too) and then sprinkled on C-Dub's wing rub.

Grilling Chicken Wings


The Kingsford charcoals were going good in my PK grill. The heat retention is excellent in the PK. I had the coals offset meaning that I had hot coals on one end but none on the other in case the grilling got really hot which can happen with charcoal.

I put the chicken wings to grill close to the hot charcoal but not right over the flames. This is indirect or offset grilling. I let them smoke along for 25 minutes or so.

Then, I put the grilled chicken wings over the hot coals as you see in the top photo to crisp them up and to finish them off. That's really the trick with bone in chicken. You need to grill the chicken lower and then hit them with heat. This is easier to do with gas which is adjustable rather than charcoal where the longer you grill, the better and hotter the coals seem to get.

I do not Photoshop my grillig pictures, so you do get a real feel for what your food will look like. You see darker spots where the wings had more rub but not as much color where the rub was skimpier.

Right before I served the grilled chicken wings, I put them right over the charcoals to crisp them up and add color and flavor. That's where you see them in my photo.

What Did We Think of These Dry Rub Grilled Chicken Wings?


The grilled chicken wings turned out perfect in terms of the amount of time grilled. They were moist and tender. We could pull them apart or use a fork, and the meat was was really nice. The milk marinade and offset on the charcoal made a difference.

As far as the new chicken wing grill rub, it's not on the market yet. C-Dub's is just testing. I respect a company for doing that. You never know until you ask.

We found the rub to be really HOT. It was so hot that I could not really taste the chicken or the smoke. I had to get an ice cube and suck on it, since my tongue and lips were on fire. On the plus side, I am dealing with a sinus infection that has lasted several weeks. The hot dry rub by C-Dub's did help on that, since my nose and eyes were running after eating our grilled chicken.

I do love hot foods, so this one is pretty hot. Same with the boys' Dad. He goes for heat but found the wings tonight to be too much. My son who is a mild kind of guy when it comes to spicy foods just said, "A whole thing of celery and half a bottle of Ranch dressing for three wings. That is kind of a record I think. I hope I'm near a bathroom tomorrow."