Competition Chicken | Montana Outlaw BBQ

what's up everybody it's ty with montana outlaw barbecue coming back at you with one that you've been asking for it's the final one of our competition series we're talking competition chicken [Music] [Music] so the first thing we need to do when we talk about competition chicken is how do we get the most flavor into every chicken thigh we cook chicken thighs for competition chicken they are going to be very juicy naturally because they're dark meat they got a lot of fat content but we want a lot of flavor in there so we're going to brine our chicken the night before so first thing we're going to do is we're going to mix up our chicken soak we're going to be using the cosmos chicken soak we've got our nalgene bottle here for easy measuring and it's a good holder when you're traveling if you're going to a competition you can make this stuff up as far as three or four days in advance you could do it the day of as long as it has a couple hours to sit and kind of get incorporated with the water so that's why we always use these type of bottles just for transportation so i got about 40 ounces of water in this bottle here for that when you do the math we're going to add about a half a cup of our cosmos chicken soap we like this product it's got good flavor it's always consistent product and it always helps us get a really good juicy chicken so we're just going to make it really easy so we got a half a cup here of the cosmos chicken soap and we're just going to get that down in the bottle it's going to be it can make a little bit of a mess but that's all right we're not looking i mean it doesn't have to be exactly measured it doesn't have to be perfect we like that 40 ounces to a half a cup of the soak it seems to get the flavor that we want so we just put it in our nalgene bottle and we give it a shake shake it really good to get everything good and incorporate it in and then set that aside like i said before this can be made three or four days in advance if you're traveling to a contest like we do from montana we got a long ways to go we try and get as much prep done as we can before we hit the road so we don't have the mess of it while we're out on the road so these are really great bottles that transport that in but at least an hour or two before you soak your chicken if you're doing this at home and you just want that extra flavor and a breast meat or something give this a good hour or two in the refrigerator just good and get good and incorporated so now that we have this done we're gonna put it in the refrigerator for a couple hours but stay with us because we're going to talk chicken trimming chicken selection and everything you need to know to get perfect skin [Music] in this portion of the video we're going to talk everything you need to know about chicken itself again we cook chicken thighs for competition everybody has a choice you can cook cornish game hen you can cook chicken breast you can cook chicken thighs you could cook chicken wings you could cook chicken legs you can do whatever you want it can be bone-in it can be boneless it is totally at the discretion of the cook as long as you fall into some of those parameters on the general idea of chicken when we cook at a contest like the jack daniels competition the world championships you have to turn in both white and dark meat in that instance chicken wings are considered white meat so we would do a chicken wing or a drumette as and we'd still do our chicken thighs so for us it's always chicken thigh and if you're ever wondering how a competition like the jack works for us make sure you go over to our facebook page check it out we did go live there through the entire process so you could come along with us during the entire turn-in process and you can see what we actually do there so let's talk about chicken what do we look for in chicken the first thing that we wanna do is when we go and we pick up our chicken we're gonna go to a local grocer we're gonna go to someplace where we know has quality chicken could be tyson chicken could be an air chilled chicken could be a smart chicken depending on what's available locally we don't want to get it a long time in advance if we're traveling across the country because we don't want to open it up trim it and try and repackage it it could get a bad flavor in there and we just want to avoid that so we always do chicken on site when possible we look for four packets or chicken packages that contain four thighs in those packages we want two pounds per package that's going to give us a good consistent chicken thigh as far as size that we need for turning we also want to look at the color of the skin we're looking for something that has you know good white fat on it good white skin on it that's going to tell me that it's not overly corn fed it's not just sitting there and getting fattened it's going to render out it's going to help with that bite through skin that we look for in competition we don't want a chicken skin that's really thick and chewy so we're going to want that and again we just want overall size because we do trim these down quite a bit we want ones that have good size to them so we can get eight per small pan we do half pans we get eight per half pan we want consistent size in there so let's go ahead and get trimming first thing we're going to do with our chicken thighs is we're going to take the skin completely off we're going to completely remove it and just set it to the side it's going to be a lot easier to do this as long as you maintain them really cold so they get warm the skin becomes harder to harder to trim up so the first thing we're going to do we're going to come to this side and we're going to trim off and just square up our chicken thigh and we're going to come to the top on this side on the side that has the bigger kind of the bulb part of the joint and we're going to trim it off square it off there and then on this side because this is a smaller thigh i'm not going to do it but you can see this fat line right here comes up and it makes a t right underneath it or i guess for today's instance i'll go ahead and do it in competition if i was trimming up this side because it's not the biggest one i wouldn't do this but right where that t is on that fat line if you go down through it you can feel you can run your knife in there and you can feel it'll grab a groove and we're just going to take a thicker boning style knife or a thicker knife like this and go right down through it like that and get rid of that knuckle there then we're going to flip it back over we're gonna peel off that fat because we don't want necessarily any excess fat like say that's kind of a smaller chicken thigh than what i would really want for competition but that happens when you're buying those those four packs multi-packs of those so now with the skin we're going to lay it out and where you just want to square this off so you got a really fatty side on this side we're going to pull that off make sure you cut all the way through and on this upper side we're going to go to about where we think we can get a good square piece but we also want to make sure we're leaving enough skin on there that we can wrap it all the way around this thigh so then we're just going to roll it back over make sure that we leave ourselves enough skin to tuck it on the edges and then we want to make sure we have enough skin to tuck it up underneath that's going to help help us make sure that when the judge takes a bite and through the cooking process it's not going to shrink so much but when the judge take a bite takes a bite it's going to hold on there on the back side so it doesn't all come falling off once we have that done we're going to take our jacquard which is like a meat tenderizer and we're going to just jacquard the crap out of it think of it like perforations on your checkbook so now that we've done that when that judge goes to take that bite or anybody goes to take that bite it's going to pull away it's just going to be easier so we're not necessarily looking to tenderize the meat but we're more looking to just give that skin an extra break point in there and so you can do it no rhyme or reason do it a handful of times so and don't worry about these holes that you see on here there's enough fat in the skin through that cooking process when we flip it over in the butter you're gonna see it these holes will kind of go away they'll close back up on it we do that because it's so important that when that judge or when somebody takes a bite of this chicken thigh that the skin doesn't all pull off we want them to leave a nice tooth mark in there let's go ahead and do another one here and we'll just repeat the process one more time and go over anything that we might have missed so we'll begin by pulling the skin off set the skin to the side this is more of the size chicken thigh i'd like to see we got the long flap side over here so we'll come in and really i guess i gauge this i should touch on this i didn't know the first time we've got about an inch worth of meat three quarters give or take on this side so i want about the same over here we want a good square so i'm going to come off and that's what i'm using as my guide it's not just a random selection go to the top take off that top part set it aside grab our heavier duty knife you'll see that t is pretty clearly defined right here comes that t comes up that fat line comes across it's very easy to find that way and when you go down through there you can find it your knife will slide right into that groove that's in there makes it really easy just to get right down through takes that off gives me a nice square one flip it over that little bit of fat right there trim that off and then we set it aside pull out our skin [Music] square up our skin you see this skin's really good skin not a lot of excess fat on it so i'm just gonna more look for that squareness of it again leaving myself enough to overlap don't worry about it going on the exact same way that it came off and if you're doing a lot of these like when i'm doing these for competition i'll pull four five six seven eight off and set them to the side i don't even care if the skin goes back on the same chicken thigh that it came off of it's just i want to make sure that that we get the chicken thighs at the same size as a matter of fact i've had to get at different times maybe have to run to the store and grab a chicken breast a bone and skin on chicken breasts that has that bigger piece of skin on it because i just need that extra skin that's not not important where it comes from again we'll take our jacquard tool and we'll just kind of randomly however you guys want to do it but don't be don't be too worried about doing it too much just like that and again we have those you'll start to see those marks in there those grooves those perforations that's going to help but it'll all kind of grow back in or cover back up as we go through that cooking process that's all there is to my method of trimming chicken i'm going to go ahead and do a few more we'll get our panna 8 going and i'm going to show you the next step of this process is going to be to get that chicken soak out of the fridge and we're going to soak these chicken thighs for a couple hours [Music] okay so i've got all this chicken trimmed up it's ready to go it's just worth noting when i do competition i cook 16 chicken thighs um to turn in six i just like to have a good variety i like to have a good selection i like to make sure that i get really good ones that i can turn in so that's why you see nine in here today um but that's where we're at our soak's been in the refrigerator for a couple hours we got this all trimmed up ready to go so we're ready to go ahead and pour it in there's not much to it we'll take our brine put it in a half pan we want to fill it up to where it covers it nice and nice and level so that we get a good good soak in there so we want them completely submerged get all the good juicy bits in there all right so now this process for us in competition is taking place on friday night we're going to do this the night before soak our chicken for two hours it's a no rinse chicken soak for us so for after two hours we'll come back we'll strain these off they'll go back in the refrigerator where they'll sit overnight unseasoned just out of the brine sit in a tin foil roaster pan in the refrigerator and then we come back the next morning the following morning and we go ahead and season them so right now we're going to go ahead and go through that process i'm going to put them in the refrigerator for two hours and we'll come back and we'll get them seasoned up and ready to go on the grill so the last thing you guys saw us do is we put this chicken into a brine let me go over that again that process so it goes into the brine the night before for two hours it sits in the brine for two hours after which we take it back out of the refrigerator we just strain off the brine put it into a bucket put it down the sink however you get rid of it get rid of the brine we then don't rinse our chicken we don't do anything with it right in that same tin that it was brined in we just put it back in the refrigerator with a piece of tin foil over the top it sits in there overnight so at a competition that would be from like eight eight or eight pm until seven or eight a.m so we're talking 11 12 hours that it's gonna sit in the refrigerator before we go ahead and season it we've already done this process we didn't need to have a snooze fest for a video so you didn't need to see us do that so here we are 12 hours later our chicken's brined it's rested it's ready to season so let's jump into that so for us when we cook competition chicken we make sure we hit savory and sweet notes so we start with a nice base layer of cimarron docks it's one we use on our ribs we use on other products it's just really good combination of sweet and savory we move from there our second rub is gonna be our chicken rub we like this rub because it's nice it's savory with the salty notes in it it's got some sweet components but it's also got just a little hint of heat in there from the crushed red pepper that we add into it we finish it off with a very light coating of the cosmos killer bee it's got the honey component to it it also adds a nice little light color to it so you add all these up you get savory you get sweet a touch of heat and a really nice red color so we talked about our seasonings how we going to apply them let's go ahead and get that done but the first thing we need to do is we need to pull one of these chicken thighs out i only cook pans of eight i've got nine sitting on my board i don't need to waste the seasoning on one that i'm not going to cook so as i look for them i'm looking for uniform size i'm looking for uniform shape and so the one that jumps out to me right away is going to be this guy right here he's just kind of oblong he's not good shaped i'm just not really a big fan of him so i'm going to go ahead and pull him out set him to the side nothing wrong with him outside i just don't think he's going to cook to a a shape that i want a size that i want finished product that's going to allow me to have a product to put in the box make a pretty presentation so as we move on from there we're going to season these but i'm going to flip them all over we're going to season the backside of these thighs first because then when you go to put them in the pan there you've got your seasoning on the back you can always touch up the top so we're going to flip them over we're not going to move the skin we're not going to do anything like that we're going to start with our cimarron docks so we're going to apply a nice medium coat of our cimarron docks this isn't very thick so it's going to come out fast so you got to be very careful when you apply that because you could over season it very easily from there we'll move on to our montana outlaw chicken rub this is a little thicker a little coarser so as we use this rub you'll see the turpenondo sugars the coarse ground salt is a lot thicker on here so a nice medium coat you can start to see the way it's interacting that color change we're looking for that nice dark red color so we're going to finish our chicken off on the back side with a nice light coating of the cosmos killer bee again this is a really fine one so be careful because you can overdo it and we're looking for nice and light we use this one again because it's got that honey in it it's a nice sweetness and it just adds a nice layer of flavor all right so now that we've got those done we flip them over and we restart the process we go with the same rubs on top as we do on the bottom making sure that we pay particular attention to the back side the same as we would the front or the top skin side so from there now that we've got them all seasoned we need to get them into our pan and we need to slice up some butter and put some butter in there so that's our next step is i'm going to get these out of here i'm going to get them into a pan and we'll show you how we apply the butter to our pan so now we've got our seasoning applied front and back we're ready to go i cook again like i said i cook eight chicken thighs and i want to make sure that we start to set that presentation so we want to make sure that we we tuck the skin underneath like that as we start to place these into our pan and i'm just going to put them in the pan we want them off the edge all the way around enough that we can stick our sticks of butter down in there and then we don't worry too much about whether or not they're touching as we go up but we go too wide just like that they're going to touch a little bit that'll help them hold that form together so they don't flatten out throughout the cook we want to make sure that they look nice and plump like that and just tuck that skin in underneath you can see the difference that makes and the overall appearance and you can see how those are all nice looking really happy with how these are after the brine and i'm confident that out of these eight because i cook 16 in a contest i'm only really looking at a minimum i need to get three out of this pan three out of my other pan i'm pretty darn confident that i can get that out of this pan just based on what i'm seeing here okay now i've got them in there you can see we have our sides and our edges ready to put the butter in for me we always use challenge butter salted adds that adds that savory component salt's just that good natural enhancer so i take every stick of butter i cut it into six close to even pieces we're gonna put one behind each chicken thigh like that and we're gonna put one on each edge and we'll go up again like that i'm not superstitious about anything until i am and just like that so now what we're going to do is this chicken we want it to rest and sweat a little bit so 45 minutes to an hour ahead of when i'm gonna put this in for my competition cook competition cook is two hours we're gonna go ahead and let it soak inside the bath the butter bath at 45 minutes we're gonna flip this chicken over so then it'll go skin side down into the butter it'll stay there for 15 minutes and we'll flip it back over we just want to help make sure that we get some fat components onto that chicken skin itself it helps that rendering process through the last hour of that cook we're gonna cook this depending on the day depending where i'm at i'm gonna be somewhere between 300 and 315 degrees for a two-hour cook on this chicken but right now i'm gonna put it back in the refrigerator 45 minutes to an hour it'll start to sweat like all our other meats are it'll go right from there right onto the grill i want to recap a little bit before we move on to the next step of the process we'll recap our the seasoning so we seasoned these up we got our butter in there that's what we saw last in the video they went into the fridge for an hour brought them out of the fridge right onto the pit they stayed on the pit that was running about 300 degrees for 45 minutes just straight away in the pan we don't touch them we don't look at them 45 minutes we go ahead and flip those over so the skin is down inside the butter bath after that 15 minutes down we go ahead and flip them back over this is a super simple cook process we flip them back over they go anywhere from another 45 minutes to an hour we're looking at a temperature finish temperature of around 190 degrees on these today and we're going to spritz those throughout that last 45 minutes on an as needed basis just with water up here in the mountain air it's a little dry so we don't have as much humidity so we just want to make sure that skin stays nice and moist and juicy if you're in a more humid area you may not have to spritz at all as we work that so after that we pull them off the pit bring them in here we got our sauce going in our sauce today we have four cups of blue's hog original we've got a quarter cup of honey and we've got a half a cup of apple juice you can increase that decrease that however much you wanna do to get it but i like to put it in a pan about like this so when i go and i dunk it it's just sauced right in it's nice and easy i pick it up with my hands don't use a lot of utensils here but overall just a super super simple cook process that we have on our chicken today so without further ado let's go ahead and sauce some of these so we just take it like that into the sauce and out and you're left with that and we'll just put them right over here hot right off the grill i would always suggest hot gloves if you can i wasn't smart enough to put any on so once we get these sauce we're gonna return them to the grill for about 10 minutes just enough to set that glaze and make them pretty make them really nice and shiny and reserve your sauce for a touch up as needed we don't want a real thick heavy sauce i like a sauce that sets on there i don't want it to necessarily be sticky and coat the mouth of the judges i just want to have it on there for a nice little taste okay so now that we have that done that's really all there is super simple process to saucing our chicken there's our chicken sauced up ready to go back onto the grill still 300 degrees back onto the pit for another 10 minutes we'll come back we'll talk about it we'll show you how we would line it up in the box we'll try some let you know what our thoughts are on the cook today and then give an opportunity for anybody to answer or ask some questions or comments down below we'll make sure we get back to you with any questions on today's cook so we're about to wrap up our video here today on a competition chicken we've had it on the grill back on the on the pit i call it a grill back on our pit for 10 minutes setting the glaze on these you can see it's not runny it's got a nice texture to it it looks good and tacky and so now let's just talk briefly about when i go to plate these in a competition i would have two pans of these so i would be looking for three out of here three out of the other pan and a minimum but when we go to build our box for a competition i'm gonna try and put what i would consider the knuckle side like this side here inside so that they can kind of hide one another as we go so i'm gonna go through and i'm gonna try and find my best six my best six thighs as we work down through there and i mean those are three really good ones right there and that one really nice one and i've got a couple of smaller ones that probably in a competition i wouldn't utilize we're gonna go ahead and do that so in a box i'm gonna keep it really super simple i'm going to go three by three right down the middle this recipe is so simple it's so easy but to me competition chicken is one of the hardest ones to cook because it is so labor intensive from start to finish from the trimming is more intense there's more to it the seasoning the everything there's just so many more components to something that only cooks for two hours and something that's so small you would think it would be the easiest and i think it's the hardest to get right and if you're interested and in case you missed it going you want to see what competition barbecue's really like when we go to do tournaments check out our live stream that we did at the jack daniels world invitational in october it's a really good watch it is a couple hours long but you can learn a lot and see exactly what it's like to be in our trailer on competition day as you can see in this clip this is what a final turn in box would look like this is going to be my my hopeful plug that's only going to matter here for a short time but if you want to taste this if you want to see how we do it in person if you want to be able to ask questions please sign up for our barbecue class we have our first competition class coming up the end of march we will hopefully be doing more of those in the future but come check it out come meet with us come talk with us we want to show you all the tips and tricks we've learned in competition barbecue this is the last of our competition series unless we hear from you and you want to see a different way a different method let us know thank you guys so much for tuning in not only to our channel but to this video following us along on this journey i hope you learned something today i hope you have some takeaways today and until next time make sure you hit the bell hit the subscribe button check out all our socials and we will join you next time right here on montana outlaw barbecue channel [Music] you

Channel: Montana Outlaw BBQ

Views: 30,168

Keywords:

Id: cAqRljNzkdU

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022