Then I heard Rembert on House of Carbs. And found Rembert's article.
So tonight when I saw Lemon Pepper at Buffalo Wild Wings I ordered it.
Then I came home and watched the Binging with Babish on it.
Now I have a lot to say about Lemon Pepper.
I'm pretty sure that tonight was my first time eating Lemon Pepper seasoning in any form. It's great. I wouldn't be writing about it if it wasn't. But my Lemon Pepper Dry at BWW had two clear flaws.
First, wings are better wet. These were crunchy which is good, but too crunchy. All crunch not enough flavor. The texture is just off.
Second, lemon pepper, like any seasoning, needs to stick to something wet/sticky. It's obvious, sure. If they were fresh coming out of the fryer, you'd get some decent seasoning to stick, but if you wait a minute, not much is going to stick. I had a huge pile of lemon pepper left over at the bottom of my plate. (Which I then dipped my Jerk wings and fries in—both were great.)
I also noticed flaws in Babish's preparation as far as I'm concerned. For one batch he tossed the the wings in lemon pepper dry and then coated with buffalo sauce. This may be authentic, but I'd flip it. Toss the wings in buffalo sauce, get them sticky, and then hit them with the lemon pepper.
His second batch he added dry seasoning directly to the wings, then added butter and tossed. Which I feel like would sort of work. Again, flipping it would get more of a coating...but there's a huge missed opportunity. He peeled lemon zest and did all this stuff to make his own lemon pepper seasoning. Instead of doing all that work to get to a dry powder, why not create one lemon pepper sauce from the beginning. Something with lemon juice, lemon zest, butter, olive oil, garlic and lots of black pepper would make a killer wing sauce. (Or the lazy way would be to melt some butter and stir in lemon pepper seasoning.)
So here's what I'm thinking moving forward. I'm going to pick up some lemon pepper. I imagine being able to season cut up chicken for tacos and other things.
Next time at Buffalo Wild Wings I might get some medium or hot wings and ask for lemon pepper on the side so I can coat how I want to.
Some day I should try to at least make the lazy version of lemon pepper sauce.
EDIT: So 12 hours later, I made some Lemon Pepper Wings 2 ways.
I wasn't trying to impress anybody, I just wanted some quick lemon pepper wings. So I bought some frozen Friday's ready to eat buffalo wings. Microwaved them up. Half of them I just sprinked generously with the dry lemon pepper seasoning. Because they were fresh out of the microwave, they were soft, sticky, ready for seasoning to adhere. The other half I wiped with paper towels and made a quick lemon pepper butter sauce and coated them.
The butter sauce ones looked better.
As for the taste, they were both really great, but the butter sauced ones tasted like too much butter. A little too greasy. Turns out adding lemon pepper to buffalo wings is fantastic, much better than adding it to bone dry wings.
