How to BBQ Chicken | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone its Kenji and we're gonna barbecue some chicken so I'm talking barbecue today I'm talking about it in sort of the sense the sense of the American South you know slow and slow with smoke so the first thing we're gonna do with our kettle grill set up we do this over a gas grill as well but I prefer using a kettle grill with charcoal for what I'm doing to smoke and I'll explain why in a second but we got a charcoal briquettes but for barbecue you know for low and slow things I find briquettes to be better than lump charcoal because briquettes are come are dense and they're reliable today they have a sort of slow even heat whereas lump charcoal tends to be a little more and even it can burn hotter but it's harder to predict exactly how fast is gonna burn and it tends to burn up a lot faster so I got a chimney starter here let's tear off a bit of the bag crumple it up and get it under here chimney started by the way the best way to get a grill going you don't need to bother with lighter fluid don't need to definitely don't get the match light stuff because that stuff always ends up smelling like lighter fluid when you're done so basically all you got to do is get a piece of paper under here get it going just like that and then that fire is gonna basically take care of itself all that coals gonna light up on its own it'll take about 15 minutes and it'll be ready to go I'm in the meantime I'm going to geared and I'm gonna rub my chicken um so chicken legs it's what I'm going with so thighs and drumsticks I'm actually savate these pieces individually already portioned thousand turban sticks tend to work better than breasts breasts tend to dry out when you're when you do this kind of low slow thing although you know if you want to you can sort of brine breasts and and check them and do all these kind of things that will help them stay more juicy but thighs and drumsticks they do see on their own so you don't need to really worry about that so I've got a dry rub going on here this rub is the recipes on serious heats it's about 1/3 cup of paprika 1/3 cup of brown sugar I believe a 1/4 cup of chili powder then there's also a little bit of cumin some coriander seed some black pepper garlic powder onion powder I'll put the exact recipe up on the screen here I'll kind of I'll show it to you as I browse on serious eats in them but you can always follow the link in the description and get the exact recipe also you don't have to use a BBQ ler barbecue rub you can just kind of use your your favorite recipe or use a store-bought blend it doesn't really matter too much barbecue is really more technique than it is a specific flavors I'm gonna be pretty generous with this rub here really nice like coat all the pieces this is one of those times on a quarter sheet pan or half sheet pan like this comes in really useful actually this is a quarter sheet so really get it all over it's called the rubs and I call this sprinkle so you really want to rub it in there and so the reason we use the reason I prefer charcoal over gas is because gas by its very nature has to it requires lots of little be cars more oxygen than the charcoal to to combust and you can't really control the the vents on a gas grill the idea I mean the reason you can't control the vents on the gas grills because the guests your manufacturers don't want the flame tax don't they go out because of lack of oxygen and then you end up building up gas inside there and then when you try and ignite it it all explodes so gas grills are designed to always have a constant flow of oxygen going through and if there's a way for oxygen to get in it means that there's a way for smoke to get out so even if you put wood you know you get one of those little smoking boxes which I have for your gas grill even when you get one of those and stick it on there you're never gonna capture the smoke in there in the same way that you can on a charcoal grill a charcoal grill you have basically as much control as you want you can close off the bottom vents and close off the top vents and really trap that smoke in of course it makes the flame go lower but that's fine for when we're doing barbecue wares on a gas grill you can not all right so now I'm going to wait for this charcoal chimney to go and so I guess I will be back I'm gonna wash my hands in this jar in the meantime I'll be back in about 15 minutes so now what we're gonna do so you can see all the charcoal is lit what I'm gonna do is I'm going to spread them over one side just like that it's like that into a nice even layer I'm gonna get my grill grates on and if you do have grates that have these openings like this I'm gonna position them so that you can add more coals later on potentially you might not have to but you definitely want to be able to add some wood all right and so then what I'm gonna do these greets are nice and clean if they're not you can you get a scraper like this if they're really cruddy what helps is if you first cover the whole thing with a lid let it preheat with the vents open so that it preheats kind of a maximum heat let it preheat for about five minutes and then all the crud should come right off once the grill grates are hot but this one's pretty clean - why a great grill brush that's the best kind of grill brush to use and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get I have a little bit of oil here and some wadded-up paper towels and you dip them in the oil this is kind of like you know seasoning your skillet you want to get a layer of oil on there just so that the chicken is not gonna stick because you know the chicken has sugar on it so that can tend to stick quite a bit and then chicken skin just generally sticks on its own so you do want to oil them up nicely all right and then we just go right on on the cooler side of the grill so this is what's called a two zone fire I'm a one zone fire would be if all your coals are sort of spread evenly across the cooking surface a two zone fire is when you have all the coals on one side and no coals on the other and then there's a thing that we call a modified two zone fire and that's where you have most of the coals on one side but some of the coals on the other side and most of them almost I would say about 99% of the time that I'm grilling and maybe 90% of the time I'm grilling I'll use a two zone fire like this it's good for low and slow cooking because you get indirect heat but it's also good for high heat cooking because you get a really concentrated zone of high heat over here but if your things start to flare up or overcook you can easily shift them to the other side or you can rotate them around like that to get them off the heat real real easily all right so we got our chicken on I'm gonna go with some wood some people tell you to soak your wood your wood chunks or your wood chips I have not found it makes any difference at all so I don't I'm going with Applewood here I'll start with a couple chunks and then as those go down I will add some more so wood on you want the vents so chicken cooks relatively fasting that's like a 30 to 40 minute thing so you don't need to go super low heat you know something like ribs or brisket you go real low heat these ones which means that you would keep the events mostly closed and use your coals for this one we're gonna leave the vents about halfway open what I'm gonna leave these top vents halfway open I'm going to position it so that the vents are over the chicken that way as the heat goes up into this thing it's gonna see it pulls air from the bottom it goes the hot air travels up and over that way and it kind of kind of creates a convection current that goes around this way and pulls the smoke over the chicken those chicken pieces which is what we want so there we go so I'm gonna leave this sitting here for I'm gonna let it cook for well we were aiming for the chicken to be at about a hundred thirty degrees or so before we start to finish it 120 130 degrees so I'll be back in about half an hour or so all right so we're gonna check on this chicken my hose so we're looking for like around 120 130 and that's where we're at yeah perfect around 120 to 130 that's one we want to brush it with our sauce so this is also a homemade barbecue sauce but you can use really it you can use your you know store-bought sauce is fine this sauce is made with a mixture of chicken broth molasses ketchup dry mustard vinegar brown sugar what else is in there some of this spice spice rub is in there some of the spice rub is in there and I think that's about it Oh some also some grated onion and grated garlic again the recipe I'll put it up I'll scroll through it as I'm brushing here I'll show it to you on the screen and then I'll also link in the description I'll link to directly to the recipe on sir your seats so we're brushing the top side of this chicken here okay and now the idea here you don't want to put on your barbecue sauce too early when you're when you're making barbecue chicken because if you do it'll burn by the way this is like a Kansas City style barbecue so sort of sweet and sticky it's what it's what when you think of what most people outside of the American South when they hear barbecue that's what they think of although they're of course many other types but many other styles of barbecue as well but this is kind of the sort of you know if I went if I went to a cafeteria and I ordered barbecue something this is what it would come out come out as sticky and sweet of course ours is gonna be a lot better than what you got in your scamp cafeteria all right so first the chicken cover up again and we're gonna let it go for another five minutes so all right so you can see the sauce it started to dry out a little bit now we're gonna add a second coat it's just like painting a room you know you want to go on to multiple coats that you can build in that flavor in layers and that rub is kind of like your paint primer kind of helps that flavor stick on there this brush is a little better than the last one I had there's one of those oXXO silicone brushes which are you know I find them to be nice they they hold sauce well but they don't distribute sauce as evenly as a real good quality sort of you know boar bristle brush does although you know the advantage of these brushes is that they last basically forever and you never have that problem where you accidentally get like bristles on to your onto your food all right so at this point what I'm gonna do actually were gonna close up one more time and let it dry a little bit longer let's see where our temperatures at we want it to be finished at at least 100 155 260 degrees at the end and I think we'll get there easily all right I'm gonna do this for another five more minutes all right so now we're gonna carefully flip this chicken over just like that so that the sauce side is down and then we're gonna take this whole great spin it around set the chickens over the hot side yeah we're gonna brush that second side [Music] [Applause] and I don't know if you noticed but when I put these drumsticks down initially I position them such that you know drumsticks there's one side that has more skin than the other where you can kind of pull the skin over the top of the drumstick so I positioned it at least a try to I might have missed up messed up and one or two of them but I'd position it so that that side was up first you always want to present you with with barbeque chicken you want to do the presentation side that is a side with like the most skin the nicer-looking side you put that side up to start with that way it gets that it gets the most of the glaze and then it gets sort of crispy at the end we're gonna crisp these up over this coal over the ends of these coals all right so lid back on one last time from this is gonna go for one another mmm about five more minutes all right I think we are pretty much done here just check on that yeah that's what I'm looking for you know oops nice alright so this final side will just go for just like like another two minutes or so and then we're ready what I'm doing is I'm serving this with this um this salad I made so this was some leftover grilled grilled corn from the other night that I combined with some lime juice olive oil cote crumbled cotija cheese dice nectarines and peaches cherry tomatoes red onion and then I tossed that all with some arugula that's it very simple then we'll do is we'll put this from that plate there then these guys serve just like this so people who want extra sauce can have it people who like their chicken but people like their chicken appropriately sticky can have it as is and people who want it extra sticky can get that extra sauce what someone's got a drone up ahead by the neighbors neighbors definitely know when I'm shooting out here so maybe they maybe they're spying maybe yeah I think they actually watch my videos too that they do hi hi Benji I came I've Steve all right okay I'm on you want a little you want a little piece of chicken let's see if what can we grab for him there's a piece of chicken that had a little meat sticking out okay you go on okay oh really okay shop yes who gets up to here you know I'm gonna take a bite just so I can do my mmm thing for the camera all right char you ready you were definitely ready three all right shabu sit sit good girl no sit sit good girl I'll take a bite then you can have a better least shabu hmm hmm that is hot you know it's on the outside show I almost just called her tribal Galicia which is my daughter's name that's it good girl all right see you later guys gals non-binary pals [Music]

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 263,281

Rating: 4.9455252 out of 5

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Id: i_jRNESxR-M

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020