Technically the first charcoal grille of the season a smoked BBQ chicken. The plan is to smoke a chicken beer can style vertically.
The bird was also going to be brined. After searching for a couple of recipes for brining I did the following.
Bag yourself a bird
Gathered ingredients for the brine:
salt
sugar, white
olive oil
lemon peels
orange peels
garlic
bay leafs
onion, white
black peppercorns
red pepper flakes
Brine Ingredients
Roughly cut the onion, fruit peels and garlic. The fruit skin sections were from frozen saved sections in lieu of lemon juice.
The salt amount will be the most required (about a half a cup) to brine, all other ingredients are for flavor and since the bird is going to be rubbed and smoked the flavorings and herbs are kept at a minimum.
Place the ingredients in a saucepan with about 1/2 the amount of water you need to soak the chicken.
Bring the mixture to a boil and remove from heat and let steep essentially making a tea for the bird.
Chicken Brine
Add cold water to bring the amount necessary to submerge the bird.
I am using a 1 gallon plastic bag in this case, better than a rigid container as it uses less water and allow the bird to be completed surrounded by the brine.
(The 1 gallon bag leaked so I had to double bag it with a burrito bag)
Prepare the whole chicken:
This is like giving the chicken a spa treatment, unwrap and wash and rinse the bird, place in a plastic Ziploc bag and pour in the cool brine solution. Let the chicken sit in the fridge 2 to 3 hours at best , more than this I’m told will make the bird too salty.
When the brine is completed, remove from the solution rinse the bird and pat dry.
All brined and ready for a Rub
Massage the chicken thoroughly with a seasoned rub to your preference, usually I make my own rub but I have many varieties that were gifted to me over the years.
Place the chicken in another clean plastic bag and you can add more rub at this point and massage it in the bag.
Application of the Rub
Let sit again for about and hour or two, prep the grille at this point and or find something else to do.
Originally I use a vertical roaster for chickens but wanted to try the beer can method, not having a beer can I immediately jumped in my car and went out to buy some beer…. NO WAY. Instead, I used a 14 ounce tomato can jammed into the chicken.
Now this will have to be referred to as tomato can chicken!
Allow the chicken to stand up on a tin foil pie pan and then fill the can with white wine. (The wine was what I had in the fridge you can use beer or whatever.)
After starting a batch of charcoal , yes, this can be considered an all day affair making this bird, the charcoal pan was lowered into the Charbroil smoker and filled with the prepared embers. Above that a grille grate with the chicken standing in the pie pan. The usual method I use to BBQ smoke is to add pellets, in this case a mix of oak and hickory, to the charcoal, cover and let it smoke away. Ahh what a aroma !!!
Never seem to get enough pictures outside of the grille setup.
The temp was in the low end for BBQ, so I roughly figured about 1 and 1/2 hours.
At 2 hours the temp of the bird was almost up to par.
That turned out to be more like 3 hours, adding more pellets along the way the temp stayed steady for those 3 hours.
Well now being at the late hour I didn’t get to taste the juiciness of the bird, as I decided to refrigerate it for the next day.
Now even cold it’s a tasty treat, smoke of course is the dominate flavor and the skin is like a smoked sausage skin, snappy.
The carved pieces were wrapped in romaine lettuce leaves and eaten to enjoy the smoky flavor.
I guess lemonade would be good to quench the smoky flavor.
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