Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza, Part 3 — Wings!!

In this final webisode in our series from Marco’s Coal-Fired Pizza (now known as Racca’s Pizzeria Napoletana), in Denver, CO, we turn our focus to one of their non-pizza signature dishes: wood-fired chicken wings glazed with house-made limoncello sauce. Samantha and Heather, who you’ve already met in the previous two segments, take us step by step through their process and, as a guy who loves oven-baked wings even more than the deep fried version (which I also love, of course), they had me at “wings.”  As anyone who has tried baking wings in a wood-fire oven already knows, the challenge is how to get them crisp without burning the outside and under-cooking the little drummie. When I make them at home I usually do the whole thing in my regular kitchen oven and bake them at 350 degrees for about 60-90 minutes, flipping them over, about halfway through, when the top looks brown and lightly crisp. But, when I have my WFO fired up, I only cook them 3/4 of the way through in my home oven, and then flash them in the super hot WFO for about 2 to 3 minutes, or until they’re super-crisp. So I was really excited by the trick I learned from Samantha and Heather, to then drizzle them with lemon sauce (theirs is wonderful, made with limoncello that they make themselves by aging together vodka, whole lemons, and sugar till it becomes, well, limoncello).

Why waste any more time — see for yourself how its done and then, when you’re in Denver, drop by Racca’s Pizzeria Napoletana (they have a few locations but we filmed these webisodes at the original spot, 2129 Larimer St., just around the corner from the Rockies baseball stadium). The pizza is superb but be sure to add an order of wings too!