Deconstructed: Stuffed Chicken Wings – Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

The Stuffing

You’ll find variations on the dish in Thai, Vietnamese, and Hmong cultures, with different ingredients for the stuffing. But the deboned wing is essentially stuffed with ingredients that go in egg rolls: ground pork, cabbage, mushrooms, carrots, and glass noodles.

Pro Skills

There’s an art to the deboning, making this dish a labor of love. The key is to not puncture the skin and to keep the drumette intact, making a pocket into which you put the good stuff before wrapping it up and cooking.

Glass Noodles

The thin noodles, sometimes called vermicelli or glass noodles, used to stuff the chicken are usually made from mung bean starch. Also known as cellophane noodles, their color can range from a cloudy opaque white to transparent. They’re typically gluten-free.

Dippable

Sauces may depend on the vendor, but you can find oyster sauce, sweet and sour sauce, nuoc cham, or a spicy fish-sauce caramel used to finish the wings.

Best Side

You can find more than a few stuffed chicken wings and drummies at Hmong Village. Bite into crispy skin, juicy chicken, and richly seasoned egg roll filling. Don’t forget the sticky rice as a side.

Level Up

At Yia Vang’s Slurp noodle pop-up in Uptown, he riffed on the stuffed-wing tradition with a fully stuffed duck. After deboning the duck, Vang stuffed it with noodles and seasonings and then stitched it together before cooking. “We’re looking for fun ways to level up, and this riff on the wings let us take it up a notch. We served it as a family-style dish with lots of little dishes on the side.”