Smoked Chicken Barbeque

Two days before Jenn went into the hospital to have the baby, I smoked three chickens. The reason was to fill the refrigerator with chicken for sandwiches for the upcoming week. The cook was a success. Here are the photos and the recipe.

I started with the three foster farms chickens, which are very nice. Say what you will about factory bred animals, but its nice to have three chickens that look like exact clones of each other.

I didn't do any marinade, but rubbed the chickens down with a mixture of soy sauce and virgin olive oil in equal parts. Then I sprinkled them with black pepper and paprika and rubbed it all in. Here are the chickens before they went in the smoker.

And here is the smoker setup in my backyard. Actaully, this photo was taken much later in the day, but it does show how I set up my kitchen. From left to right, the important things are: the smoker, the meat thermometer stuck to the leg (it needs to be out of direct sunlight), a bag of charcoal, and a little table with some water and wood chips. The black gate is to keep my son out. And, in the back corner, you can see my other grille.

Now, back to the birds. I've tried the “beer-in-the-ass” variety once before, and didn't like it. Still, I know that you need to use a water pan in the smoker when you do chicken. So, I filled a water pan with water and beer (Budweiser). Here's me filling the water pan. You can see the oven thermometer that I keep in the main chamber. I try to keep the surface temperature at 300 degrees or lower.

OK, so here they are on the grille. The meat thermometer is plugged into the thickest part of the breast of the middle chicken. Surface temp is a little low right here. But, it got better.

And, here is a nice picture of the birds mid smoke. I did have to move the one on the right over to the left, because it was too close to the fire and was getting crispy. You can see the crispy part on the right leg of the left bird. Cooking surface temperature is right at 300, which reads between 225 and 230 on the face of the smoker. These guys were on the barbecue from about 1:30 PM in the afternoon until just before 5:00 PM.

I pulled them off of the grille at an internal temperature in the high 170s. So, they were done. I wrapped each bird in a few layers of foil and let them sit on the counter for about a half hour or forty minutes.

I cracked open the foil and pulled on one of the bones. It pretty much just came out.

It wouldn't really be fair to call what happened next “carving”. I actually just pulled the birds apart with my hands. I had to try hard to keep some of the wings and legs together, so they could be eaten as pieces. So, here is the final. I only pulled apart two of the three. The third chicken was still in foil and I put it in the fridge to take apart later in the week.

Tech notes: this post was created with open office writer, then uploaded to Google docs and re-directed to the blog site.