Bam Bams Chicken Thighs

hey folks my name is Cameron true I'm the owner of bam-bams barbecue here in Orem Utah today I'm here with thermal works we're gonna do a little bit of a chicken thigh training so when I teach my classes I like to show people a few different ways to do chicken thighs you always have guys that want to compete so they want them fancy and you've got guys that want to impress their neighbors and then you have guys that just want to throw some cheap quick meat on like if the mother-in-law comes over you don't want to do any prep work so I'm going to show you three different ways to do a chicken thigh so when you get a skin on chicken thigh skin it this is skin on bone-in chicken thigh they look kind of ugly so there's a few simple things that we can do to make these look a lot better and to cook a little bit more evenly if you're somebody likes to get into competition you got to fit six of these big boys on one of those little clam shells so obviously we've got to cut some things like the knuckle off and we got it we got to get some uniformity so I like to do things the simple way so I'll show you kind of a quick and easy way to do that but let's start with the mother-in-law cut okay so every chicken thigh looks pretty similar to this the skin one of the biggest problems people have with skin is just that it's rubbery and it's rubbery because it's full of fat so you can take it off pretty easy and we can kind of treat that but at the same time if you just want good chicken it does retain moisture and to just season this up and throw it on the smoker it'll cook just fine and so that's kind of how we'll start with this one so that the trick to any poultry is you just want to kind of cook even so you can kind of see how it tapers right so we definitely want to kind of fold it under itself so it'll cook even so if you don't want to take any skin off and you just want to season it at least just kind of fold it like that then you'll get an even cook all the way across you know if there's that vein or some extra skin right here that's a really easy thing to cut off and you can do that but again sometimes barbecue you just wanted to be quick and simple and you just want some chicken thighs now with this with this method of cooking you're not gonna get crispy bite-through skin it's probably just gonna have to come off at the end but that's okay the chickens still gonna be great so with something like this I'm gonna just open it up to expose the meat I'm just gonna take a little bit of rub with chicken it doesn't take much rub just pretty light okay then I'll flip it over and do the other side and you know you want good color so you want good even coverage on the rub and then when we fold this back under we don't want to put too many thumb prints in it we don't want to smear it so just kind of grab those corners fold it under and then if you need to touch up anything you can and just throw a little bit on there and that's it I call that the mother-in-law the mother-in-law cut right unless you like your mother-in-law then you can do the next one but this one this will still cook up really nicely and really with this all you need is your heat your smoke and one of these bad boys and you'll never mess it up so we'll start with that one I'll kind of show you the difference okay so this next one we'll just call it the neighborhood show-off cut we just want it to be a little bit prettier right maybe you're trying to impress the neighbor show off some skills so there's a couple things we can do just very simple to make it look just a little bit more uniform a little bit nicer so what I'll usually do with this is I'll start by just ripping the skin off now there's one side where it'll always kind of connect really easy to pull from one but this other one I'm just gonna take my knife and lightly cut that off now on every chicken thigh you're gonna see a line of thick fat on one side and a little bit more over here now my theory with barbecue is I never want to put anything in the smoker I know I'm not gonna eat right so with some of these corners at a rub rubbery and grisly are really thin I'm just gonna cut those off because I don't want to risk somebody biting into it it'll just be like char so we'll cut this little edge off throw it away and then this side we don't want to cut away any of the good meat so we just want to just kind of be light and we just want to get some of this fat off because with chicken it doesn't cook long enough to render away any of the fat that's the surface so we just kind of want to get rid of it so if you don't mind taking a little bit of time to get rid of that stuff it's a good idea so then with this I'm not going to cut any knuckles I'm just gonna kind of square it off so I'll straighten out the bone and then anything that's kind of excess over here I'm just gonna run my knife down it and that's it okay and then I'll kind of fold it back under now I'll take my skin now chicken skin is actually really transparent but when it's solid like this you just know there's a lot of fat in it so and the competition cut will show you some ways to kind of knock that down but for now we're not really gonna worry about it so I'm just gonna kind of spread it out on the table and if there are some really obvious high spots you can I'll move that you can just take your knife and let the knife do the work no pushing because you'll tear you want to just let the knife you know move back and forth and then I'll kind of cut through the fat but don't worry about this too much so all I'm gonna do is again create a little bit of uniformity and square it off so you know looks something like that now you always want more skin or you always want extra skin that will kind of wrap under because as the heat hits it that skin is going to tighten up and so if you cut away too much of the skin that won't cover the whole thigh because as it cooks it's going to kind of creep in and leave the edges of the actual meat exposed so we'll call this the neighbor cut but you can definitely see how it's a step up from the last one that we did right so a little bit prettier so same thing with the skin off that does give you the it does give you access to the underside of the skin so we can get seasoning right onto the meat which helps another fun thing with doing it this way is that you can layer your rubs meaning you can actually put a different rub on top of the skin if you want to do that but again it depends on how much you like your neighbors I don't know you so we're just gonna stick with the same rub okay hope you're not offended so kind of like the other one just can't kind of keep it light but keep it even and that's what we'll call the the neighbor chicken thigh so it's nice and uniform kind of same thickness throughout we got rid of some of the grizzly fat so nobody will be biting into that and that'll actually turn out nice and I'd say for 80% of the cooking that I do at home this is about how I do it because I still don't want you know we all eat with our eyes first right so we want things to look nice and if they look nice they'll taste better as weird as that sounds so when I cook in competition there's a lot of different ways to do it I'm like I said if I have to work too hard it becomes too tedious and I lose interest so I've kind of figured out a simple way to do this that's kind of quick that will allow me to render fat without scraping skins and also show you what I mean about that so the first thing I'm going to do just like the neighbor cut there is we're gonna cut this skin off and we're gonna work with that first okay so I'm just gonna kind of spread it out and see what we're working with now just because this skin came off of that thigh doesn't mean that I have to use it on that thigh there may be a bigger thigh coming up am I in my package that needs a bigger piece of skin so generally what I'll do is I'll square these off set them off to the side trim up all the thighs and then pick the best skin for the the fact so keep that in mind let's get a little pro tip right here we've got some pretty good bumps and so we want everything to render evenly so ever there's those kind of bumps I'm gonna come through and just kind of keep the knife moving and knock some of that fat off and you know if you're in a focused mood and you want to just do this to the whole thing you can but generally if you're turning in six chicken thighs you want to you know put 10 to 12 thighs and your cooker and then pick the six best so when you're doing what I just did with six to twelve thighs it can take some time so anyway so I will trim I'll turn this and we'll knock down one more high spot there's one more little high spot here and I mean this is just all fat that was under that skin so that skin kind of stayed intact so hopefully you can kind of see with the light the difference between those edges in that middle the middle it's kind of hard to see through but you can kind of see that transparency on the top and on the bottom here and that's what all chicken thighs look like so so we'll call that good okay so kind of same thing with the with the neighbor cut you've always got that piece of fat right here now with competition you're generally only gonna get one bite right judges are gonna take one bite so we want to be aware of what side we want to put towards the judge all right so when we put it in the box you can kind of feel with your fingers what's the thickest best side is on this one it's it's my right hand okay but we're still just in case some new judge grabs it and spins it around we still want to make sure that we get this fat off because like I said before it's not gonna render okay now next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to square it off just like I did on the neighbor cut so you'll see there's this line of fat right here inside of this knuckle now that's kind of my guideline on where I'm gonna pop that knuckle and shrink up this chicken thigh so we can fit six of them in a styrofoam clamshell okay so I just pop it with one of these but a lot of guys will use like garden shears those work really really well but you just want to make sure that your bone is nice and straight get right inside of that bone and just pop and then pull it aside so and then now we want to just kind of clean it up so you can have the most perfectly cooked chicken in the world but if there's one little bite of that grizzly fat when you're competing you're done and taste is your heavily you know most heavily weighted score so we want to make sure that all that there's any of the veins cut those out but you can kind of already see the difference now in mother-in-law neighbor competition right so now I'll have a string notes so now we're gonna wrap that up and like I said we want a lot of excess skin so it's it's got room to kind of shrink as it renders and still have good coverage so we'll kind of tuck those in I know some guys that use toothpicks to hold it some guys even use food glue shoot me if I've got to do that to compete I'm not gonna compete anymore so you know you got to make it fun for yourself there's lots of different ways to win ultimately it doesn't matter how pretty it is or what rub you use if it's cooked right and it tastes good you're gonna beat out 80% of the field anyway so so that's what to expect with more of a competition style so you can kind of see the difference so if your boss comes over to work that's a good one to use and it really isn't that hard once you get the hang of it you can kind of blast through those pretty fast so with this one though you want to be a little bit more aware of your seasoning you just want it to be really even so usually I'll hold it in my hand hold it on the side because we just want it to be really even and overly done or overly seasoned now what I do a little bit differently as I cook these upside down to start and some butter covered in foil but I allow that butter bath to render the fat inside the skin and then I finished them in the smoke generally with barbecue the smoke you want to hit you want to hit meat with smoke in the beginning you know the first couple hours well it's nice and cold it'll let smoke in but after a few hours or with big cuts smokes not gonna enter the meat anymore it's just gonna kind of build on top chicken fish anything poultry like this 15 20 minutes of smoke is all you need and you can really do that at any point of the cook because it's such a delicate meat it's still gonna go in even if it's partially cooked so I've kind of gone backwards where a lot of guys put it on the smoker first like this and then they do a butter bath I like to do the butter bath first get some of that skin rendered Reese's in it put it in the high heat and now that fats gone I'll kind of crisp up the skin and give you a bite through skin so you know this works great with like a muffin pan too so so you can kind of see the difference between the three different ways of doing it and I mean none of them are really that much work so this this we didn't really do anything to and it doesn't look much different than that the thing with this guy though is you know that you're not gonna bite into any fat you kind of squared off the skin knock down a couple of high spots and it's easy this right here is a little bit more tedious but I mean when that's done and put a nice sheen of sauce over it's gonna look beautiful so it really just depends on the guest so as far as temperatures go with with chicken generally with the big meat side I'm one of the guys that's from the low and slow school like 225 but with ribs and chicken I like a little hotter because it helps kind of render the fat down give it some color and give it some kind of some texture on the skin so I like cooking these at 275 and you can even cook them up to 300 if you want just kind of depends on the smoker because we still you cook them that hot we still want some smoke right so if you're on a pellet smoker you might want to start them a little bit lower for the first 20 minutes just to get some of that smoldering pellet smoke you know say 200 degrees but then crank it but with a Old Hickory or a southern pride I've got plenty of smoke and then we'll cook these at 275 so we just kind of cooked the simple way we didn't do any sort of butter bath you just kind of threw up in the smoke at 275 let them go so I'm looking for between 165 and 175 where we left the fat and the skin I feel like they can handle a little bit more heat you know before they're finished so I'm okay letting them go a little bit higher to get a crispy or skin so I'd say 175 is the sweet spot with the dark meat if you leave the fat the skin or use the butter bath so most of these are right about there so just like any meat when it's in the heat for a while we want to let it rest let those juices kind of redistribute so a chicken you don't need much time maybe just ten minutes if you're indoors just sitting on the counter if you want to rest a little longer you can maybe just ten them with some foil don't seal them up because they'll keep cooking just kind of tent some foil over it I like sauce on chicken so I'll probably put a couple different sauces that we have here in the restaurant on them just to kind of give them a little extra layer flavor and just serve them up so we're just gonna sauce these kind of simple but if you want to kind of get the sheen like you wouldn't a competition whatever sauce that you want to use throw it in the pot get it hot throw some butter in there to kind of lighten it up give it kind of a shine and then the thing that I like to do the best is just take one of those pigtail flippers or even some tongs keep your fingers off it and dunk it and just kind of let it drip off so it's just got nice even coverage and they'll kind of give it a shine especially when you can kind of see through and see those flood you know little flecks of pepper and salt and seasoning just kind of gives it some some depth but you know when we're cooking at home we just want good chicken so we're just gonna kind of do it the easy way and we'll just kind of sauce over to use the heat will if you do them well but while they're hot the heat will kind of thin the sauce out for you so we'll do a couple different flavors here and if you want to set the sauce you can always put them back in the heat for just a minute the sauce will cool the chicken off just enough to where if you put them in for five or ten minutes it won't overcook the chicken but it will help some of this sauce thin out spread over the chicken and set a little bit so we'll set these for a minute all right so we got the finished product here we just kind of kept it simple we've got the mother-in-law and we got the competition one right here so we definitely see a difference they're both pretty they both taste great next Saturday the 26 I'll be over at thermal works teaching this and a whole lot of other things we'll talk about brisket we'll talk about pork ribs chicken turkey really whatever you want to talk about will be about a four to five hour class so if you want to learn list and a whole lot more call bam-bams grab your spot there's a few seats left and hope hopefully we'll see you next Saturday

Channel: ThermoWorks

Views: 23,312

Rating: 4.8978724 out of 5

Keywords: chicken thighs, competition chicken, bam bams, bbq, smoked chicken, smoked chicken thights, thermoworks

Id: U_YRMY6akho

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019