Friday, July 31, 2009

Smoked Chicken

My hubbie and a friend smoked 60 pounds of turkey legs over the weekend. They have been seal-a-mealed and now the guys are set for hunting season and ice-fishing weekends. Reminds me of Hagar the Horrible – some of those legs are HUGE! Anyways, even though I’m a vegetarian I appreciate meat, and decided to give this meat-smoking a try. We don’t have a smoker – they used the one that belonged to our friend. But – we do have a gas grill. A large gas grill. So here we go! First I followed the instructions here for how to smoke meat using a gas grill. Then I found this website to be very informative about smoking all kinds of meat. So first I made the brine. Then soaked the 3 1/2 pound chicken for 3 and a half hours. Then I got everything ready on the grill -

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Is that just about the worst picture you’ve ever seen? The only reason I’m putting it out here is so you can see the placement of everything on the grill. The chicken is on a beer can chicken thingy – in a small roaster. The foil wrapped bread pan has one small hole in the top and is filled with some hickory wood chips and is placed directly on the burner. Then I let it smoke (with the lid closed) for about 3 and a half hours by using only the burner under the wood chip pan. After all that I served it and my husband said . . . it tasted like. . . like . . . chicken! Hrmph. I do have to say that the meat fell off the bone really easily. And now that I’ve done it I’ll probably do it again but this time soak in the brine for a couple days – at least. All in all, it was really easy – the leftover chicken has been added to pasta with bacon, black olives, and bacon ranch dressing with a dollop of Miracle Whip for extra creaminess. I think that has been a bigger hit than the chicken itself!!

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