Barbecued chicken: respek!

[Fat Guy]

In barbecue-connoisseur circles, barbecued chicken is frowned upon. Yet, if you visit most any barbecue joint in barbecue country -- even one purporting to serve the most authentic regional style -- you'll find chicken on offer. Sometimes, it's really good. For example at a recent dinner at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in New York City, everyone at the table remarked how great the chicken was. It held its own against the brisket and pork ribs. Ditto for the chicken Blue Smoke did a few years back at the Big Apple Barbecue.

Given that barbecued chicken (and by that I mean slow-cooked with some smoke, not the rotisserie and grilled chickens that are so often mislabeled "BBQ") is omnipresent and can be excellent, I think it's time to give barbecued chicken some credit. First, by acknowledging that it's legitimate. Second, by perhaps talking about good and bad examples, what makes it good, etc. Or maybe you disagree and thing barbecued chicken is wack. We should hear that too.

[Doodad]

BBQ chicken is certainly present here in the South. I grew up with it either as whole roast or grilled pieces. That beer can chicken thing came out of needing to put a bunch of chicken in the smoker with some stability. And I have seen it either injected or slathered with sauce and I think it is the one meat that gets this treatment rather than after the smoke.

I have to say though that it is surpassed by turkey. I was on Thomasville, GA working one time and came across the Choo-Choo BBQ. If you saw the "building" that the pit and stand was constructed to look like you would understand. It was quiet and the owner and I talked about how turkey ended up being BBQed since it is a rarity. He explained that he had health issues and after research decided turkey was the solution to a healthier BBQ alternative. And his stuff was delicious. I have no idea if he is still around or if the choo-choo is still there.

Yeah, BBQ chicken is real and real good.

[TAPrice]

In barbecue-connoisseur circles, barbecued chicken is frowned upon. Yet, if you visit most any barbecue joint in barbecue country -- even one purporting to serve the most authentic regional style -- you'll find chicken on offer. Sometimes, it's really good.

I wonder if serious barbecue circles (or parts of the country that have a culture of barbecue) see chicken as home cooking. Sure, you can cook other types of meat at home and plenty of people do. But it still can be a bit of a production. Tossing some chicken on the grill and banking the coals to one side, well, that's just a weeknight meal.

[Fat Guy]

That's the argument the whole-hog Eastern North Carolina people use when they say all barbecue other than whole-hog barbecue is "just grilling."

[Doodad]

We go to the beach each year in Carolina and have a local guy do us a BBQ for all the folks. He does whole hog, but there are always a few chickens on the top rack for folks that should not or can not eat pork. It never creates even a mention.

[TAPrice]

That's the argument the whole-hog Eastern North Carolina people use when they say all barbecue other than whole-hog barbecue is "just grilling."

I don't see how that's the same argument at all.

The line from the whole-hog people is regional bluster and, frankly, nonsense. It's not grilling unless you have direct heat.

Has enough cultural attention been lavished on barbecue chicken that people would even recognize certain styles and approaches in the U.S., in the way we do with other smoked meats? Do these barbecue styles ultimately depend upon restaurants as a touchstone? And if barbecue chicken is considered more of a home dish, do we lack these restaurant reference points for fowl?

[Fat Guy]

I don't know that anybody has studied chicken variations carefully. And it doesn't as a rule track the regional style of the other meats. For example, most of the Lexington, North Carolina places I've been to have either chicken or turkey on offer but I've never seen it chopped fine and mixed with tomato-vinegar sauce. But there are two elements of chicken barbecuing that do see usually to reflect the regional style: 1. It's typically cooked in the same pit as the other meats (therefore same wood and temperatures), and 2. The sauce is generally the same (which especially matters when the regional style is sauce-intensive). But I do think there's a lot more flexibility with poultry. The same customers who will insist that the pork be a certain way (dry rub, wet mop, whole hog, etc.) only care that the pitmaster figure out a way to keep the chicken from drying out.

[TAPrice]

Last month I was in Hot Springs, AR, and ate a few times at McClard's Bar-B-Q restaurant. They only have chicken on Wednesdays.

Why? No idea. Maybe chicken barely sells, but then why make it all? Maybe the pit masters don't like working with chicken?

[i emailed McClard's. We'll see what they say.]

[Dakki]

No kind of authority on barbecue, I'm much more a high-direct-heat kind of grill guy. I do love the barbecue chicken (and the sausages) when I go up to Austin or Lockhart, and we had a pulled pork party planned for last weekend - unfortunately Hurricane Alex crushed my boyish dreams of 16-hours-plus grill time and unlimited beer.

Is beer can chicken grill or barbecue?

[Kent Wang]

I've ordered chicken on a few occasions in Central Texas. Sam's in Austin, which is otherwise a pretty good place, regularly turns out barely edible, dry as a bone chicken. Snow's in Lexington (TX) has been the only place I've had good chicken, no sauce, smokey and juicy. But only the first time I ordered it. Second visit was sub-par and dry.

[Holly Moore]

I've also had bad luck with barbecued (smoked) chicken. I so rarely have gotten decent chicken at BBQ places that I've mostly stopped ordering it. What's the point if I can get what I know a place does well - briskets, sausage, pulled pork, ribs, etc.

I'm not totally in agreement with the initial definition of barbecued. Blame it on Cornell - the recipe for Cornell barbecued chicken (grilled with lots of basting) that was developed by a professor in the School of Agriculture is consistently the best "barbecued" chicken I have ever tasted.

[Fat Guy]

I so rarely have gotten decent chicken at BBQ places

Yes, in a way it's more impressive for a pitmaster to turn out good chicken than a good pork shoulder. You need to have some skills to barbecue chicken; you have to be pretty ingenious at messing things up to ruin a pork shoulder.

[KatieLoeb]

My good friend and delightful host for a holiday BBQ this weekend made a dry rubbed applewood smoked chicken that was positively divine. Only the white meat was a little dry, but certainly at least as moist as many of the rotisseried chickens I've purchased at the supermarket. It was good. Next time he said he's going to brine it first. I hope to be there to taste that variant. I think that just might be the perfect smoked chicken.

Edited July 6, 2010 by KatieLoeb (log)

[Dave the Cook]

I'm not surprised that pitmasters have trouble with chicken. Slow-cooking a bird over a banked wood fire is conducted on a different time scale than a whole hog, or even a shoulder. The margin of error for chicken breast is much tighter than that for pork loin. Not to mention that pulling a loin out of a whole hog before the rest of the animal is done is much easier (and more portion friendly) than carving out a chicken breast and waiting for the rest of the order to be ready for the plate.

[Holly Moore]

I so rarely have gotten decent chicken at BBQ places

Yes, in a way it's more impressive for a pitmaster to turn out good chicken than a good pork shoulder. You need to have some skills to barbecue chicken; you have to be pretty ingenious at messing things up to ruin a pork shoulder.

Yes re chicken. My guess is that it doesn't have enough fat content to hold - that to be juicy it has to be served pretty much right out of the pit.

Alas, there are plenty of barbecue cooks capable of drying out or rushing a pork shoulder - though I agree the odds for good pulled pork are far better than for chicken.

Katie - the only chicken method I trust less than pit barbecue is supermarket rotisserie.

[TAPrice]

Direct from Scott McClard, here is why Bill Clinton's favorite barbecue joint only has chicken on Wednesday:

We have too much of our meat to cook Thursday thru Saturday..........Wednesday is the only day we have room for chickens.

Not sure it adds much to Fat Guy's original question, but there you go.

[Katie Meadow]

I pretty much gave up on BBQ or grilled chicken breasts until I discovered kosher chicken. The leg-thigh of a non-brined chicken seems to have enough fat in it to survive the dry heat if you are very attentive, but it's no mean feat to achieve succulent white meat; a sloppy sauce or a dry rub, it doesn't seem to matter to a thick breast. If it wasn't so easy for me to buy good kosher chicken here, I would definitely brine my own before BBQing.

[Dakki]

I am unfamiliar with kosher chicken, or rather I thought all chicken was kosher?

(I'm not a very good Jew, am I?)

What makes kosher chicken different and better for grilling and barbecuing?

[Fat Guy]

Kosher chickens have been slaughtered and processed according to the kosher dietary laws, but the thing that makes them useful for barbecuing is that they're brined.

[Dakki]

Would you say a kosher chicken is superior to a home-brined chicken for this purpose?

[Dave the Cook]

That's probably a matter of personal taste; I'd say no -- or at least that other factors such as how the carcass is chilled and what the chicken ate will make more difference.

[Fat Guy]

Kosher chickens can vary in quality just like regular chickens. So home brining should be totally effective.

[kayb]

Last month I was in Hot Springs, AR, and ate a few times at McClard's Bar-B-Q restaurant. They only have chicken on Wednesdays.

Why? No idea. Maybe chicken barely sells, but then why make it all? Maybe the pit masters don't like working with chicken?

[i emailed McClard's. We'll see what they say.]

Not too unusual for barbecue joints in this part of the world. I suspect it's because they use a different sauce and cooking time, perhaps a hotter fire. Should have gone to Purity; they have it every day.

[kayb]

Re: Barbecue nomenclature --

In Memphis barbecue circles, "barbecue" is pulled pork. Can be either whole hog or shoulder. Chicken cooked in similar fashion is "barbecue(d) chicken. Turkey, however, is smoked turkey; not sure why. Ribs are just ribs, the presumption being no one would be foolish enough to do anything with ribs other than barbecue them. Oh, and they're pork. Always.

Beef, when you see it on a Memphis menu, and you do more and more, is "barbecue(d) beef." Likewise bologna (which is a thing of beauty, barbecued).

Re: chickens. As a youngster, I was annually roped into helping with the annual American Cancer Society fundraising barbecue in my home town, where we generally cooked 1,500 chickens -- 3000 chicken halves -- and sold plates with chicken, slaw, beans and a roll for five bucks. (OK, it was a long time ago.) The cooking method was to grill about 24 inches above the bed of coals, flip every 30 minutes, and baste every time they were flipped with this sauce:

1 qt cider vinegar

1/2 cup salt

3/4 lbs butter

1 1/2 cup cooking oil

1 bottle Tabasco (small bottle)

1/2 bottle Worcestershire (small bottle)

1/2 tsp garlic powder

This is from a 1964 University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service publication. I can't imagine that a half-teaspoon of garlic powder makes much difference in the overall taste, but I promise, that baste (applied liberally with a dish mop) did in fact turn out some succulently juicy barbecued chicken. Best I recall, it took about three hours for a half-chicken.

I use this same basting sauce to cook my pork shoulders and/or Boston butts, if I'm not using a dry rub. But I like it better on chicken.

[HungryC]

If you're having trouble achieving succulent white meat & cooked-thru dark meat, you should try a spatchcock chicken. Cutting out the backbone & flattening the chix insulates the breast meat a bit, while exposing the thickest part of the thigh to greater heat. You don't have to turn the birds, and the breast doesn't dry out (as is common when doing half chickens). I generally go 1 hr 15 minutes or so for a 4 lb bird at around 350 degrees.