How to Smoke a Chicken

I got a Big Green Egg for my birthday and have been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since. This past weekend I decided to smoke a chicken. I dug around on the super inter web nets and found a few recipes to work with and this is what I Frankensteined out of it. This recipe is going to take some time to pull off so plan ahead or you will end up with a subpar end product and it will not be my fault. Really, I don’t want to hear you bitching and complaining if your chicken turns out raw or like jerky or like crap because you tried to get it done in 30 minutes or less. You have been warned.  

The Brine

2 qt water

1/2 qt ice (a little more will not hurt anything)

1 C beer

1 qt Cranberry, pomegranate, cherry juice

3/4 C salt

1/2 c sugar

4 bay leaves

couple sprigs of thyme

1 5.5Lb chicken (without the popup timer)

Bring the water, sugar, salt and bay leaves to boil. Stir the mixture to make sure the salt and sugar has dissolved.  Remove from heat. Add juice, ice and beer and thyme. Put in fridge and chill. There is no rushing this part. It will take a few hours. I guess you could freeze the juice in ice trays and could speed things up that way but whatever. Once the brine is chilled put the whole chicken whole chicken in the brine and soak overnight (10 –12 hours is good), I used a stockpot to boil the brine in and it was also big enough to put the chicken in. Just a friendly reminder, remove the bag of crap that is inside of the chicken before brining it. When you pull the chicken out of the brine you will be able to see where the chicken was touching something and the juice did not stain it. It makes the chicken look sick but don’t worry you will never be able to tell once you start cooking.

Dry Rub

1 T salt

3/4 T pepper

1 T garlic powder

Stuffing

1 Apple cut into 1/8s

A few leaves of sage and a few sprigs of thyme

Mix spices. Remove the chicken from brine. Season chicken both inside and out. Stuff the chicken with a few sprigs of thyme, sliced apples and a few leaves of sage. Take 2 sage leaves and 2 sprigs of thyme and put one of each under the skin of each breast.

Baste

1 C beer

1 C chicken broth

1/4 C tiger sauce

Mix all of the wet ingredients together. Get a turkey baster for application.

Now comes the fun part. Pull the chicken out of the fridge while you are prepping the grill. This will help bring it up to cooking temperature. 

Pre-heat the egg to 250 degrees (or your substandard smoker if you are using something else) with the plate setter in place. I put the chicken in the egg roasting basket and made an aluminum drip pan to put under it to catch the chicken goodness. While the smoker is coming up to temp and stabilizing I soaked 2 cups of cherry wood chips in water. Once you get your temp stable and holding at close to 250 it is show time. Throw the wood chips in the fire, put the chicken on the grate and close the lid and let the Egg do the work. The chicken should be basted about every 30 – 45 minutes.  The 5.5 Lb bird was done in 3 Hours and 45 minutes and given 15 minutes to rest after it was finished.

  

Put the sweet taters on grill when you put chicken on the grill. I put them on about an hour into the cooking process and they needed about 15 minutes in the oven to finish them off. Thankfully the G/F was baking something and I had a hot oven handy to do the trick.

Eat it like a cave man. Rip that bastard bird to shreds with your hands and let it know who is boss. No chicken gets out of here alive.  

Serves 4 Cave people or can be used as a snack if Vince Wilfork shows up at your door looking for his chicken.