Question:
Can I cook raw chicken wings in a flashbake oven and will they be crispy?
– Jim, Hot Diggity Dogz, Surf City, NC
Answer:
Flashbake ovens use a combination of intense light and infrared energy to cook items quickly at extremely high temperatures, most notably pizza. Their effectiveness with pizza isn’t coincidental: the ovens work best with thin, larger surface-area foods such as pizza, quesadillas, cookies, and hamburgers that can brown and cook quickly. With larger, denser food, you risk having a burnt outside and undercooked inside unless you adjust your settings accordingly.
There’s a difference between what you can do with a flashbake oven and what you should do. As long as it is consistent with the manufacturers instructions and they fit easily in the relatively narrow deck, you can cook chicken wings and they do come out brown and crispy. That said, given their density, the bone and their irregular shape, I would recommend batch cooking them conventionally in an oven or fryer. If you need to use a flashbake based on the setup of your line, it is best for finishing the wings.
Since there is variability based on models, the best way to know for sure is to test it and make sure you are happy with the result.
More on Flashbake ovens here.