How to Smoke Chicken Thighs | Mad Scientist BBQ

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to show you how to cook the most underrated barbecue item there is that is bone-in skin-on chicken thighs i want to take a minute to thank today's sponsor hellofresh america's number one meal kit they send you pre-measured ingredients to make meals fun and easy and it makes them affordable too because you don't have to buy large quantities of things that you're not going to use in addition to saving time and being delicious the hellofresh meals offer you flexibility so if you can't get to the grocery store guess what you have these meals with pre-measured ingredients ready to go and you can make something delicious for your family without a lot of hassle my wife sometimes gets intimidated when she's trying out a new recipe and she has to go buy all the ingredients and it's a big hassle especially with a little baby to take care of she loves that she can make restaurant quality meals at home and for fun we make them together everything that you need to know is on this convenient sheet and everything that you need to use is in this bag there are lots of options available so if you want meat there are meals with meat if you're a vegetarian you can order something vegetarian it's never been easier to feed your family go to hellofresh.com and use code mad scientist bbq12 to get 12 free meals including free shipping that's hellofresh.com use codemad scientist bbq12 to get 12 free meals and free shipping when i say that bone and skin on chicken thighs are underrated it's because it's not really a glamorous cut of meat so if i make a video about brisket people comment on it they talk about it they're planting their own next brisket cook but chicken doesn't inspire the same kind of excitement that's probably because people have eaten a lot of dry boring gross chicken in their lives and they don't get super excited about it now there's no reason that the chicken you cook on your smoker can't be great as a matter of fact when i was doing barbecue pop-ups people would come up after they'd gotten their food they would say the brisket like always was great but that chicken was amazing and for me that was disappointing because i worked really hard on the brisket spent hours and hours and hours doing it and the way i did the chicken was about the simplest way i could possibly think of doing it but it just turned out to be the best we're not going to do any trimming we're not going to do anything weird to it at all we're going to take the chicken out of the package season it and then put it on the smoker and we're going to season with just salt and pepper so a 50 50 mix by volume couldn't be any easier the total cost of this chicken was only 11.25 so it's a lot of food for not a lot of money but a couple important notes number one is make sure you season the skin side because that helps dehydrate the skin so that it's crispier in the end and it's not chewy and rubbery the second thing is i wouldn't use a rub that has a lot of fine granules because for some reason it seems to diminish the smoke flavor and the way we're doing the chicken today smoke flavor is going to be king so for ease of transport i put all the chicken thighs into one pan so we're going to take this pan out there and then put the thighs on the smoker we're going to put these chicken thighs on at 225 degrees it can drop maybe as low as 200 that's totally fine because right now i'm only concerned with adding smoke flavor because chicken cooks for such a short time it's really important that you build in smoke flavor early and quickly so we're going to do is low temperature build in all that smoke flavor and then we're going to dial up the temperature and worry about crisping that skin [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] it's been about an hour at this point so i checked the temperature on these pieces of chicken and it's in the 150s for all these pieces so at this point what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase the temperature of the smoke i'm going to bring it up to 300 degrees instead of 225 because at this point we've got good color on there we've got good smoke flavor so now what i want to do is crisp the skin and the internal temperature of these pieces is in the 150s but the temperature of the skin right now is in the high 180s sometimes even in the 190s so that means the fat under the skin is rendering properly it's going to do two things it's going to keep the skin from being rubbery number one and number two it's going to make sure that the chicken is juicy because what you're going to taste this juice in your mouth is actually rendered fat all right i'm going to add some logs to the fire and bump up this temperature to 300 degrees now the package says that these need to be cooked to an internal temperature of 185 so we're gonna go at 300 degrees until we reach 185 at that point we're going to glaze the chicken so we have the smoke flavor as a layer underneath and then we have the sweetness of sauce on top so to mix up what we're going to use for the glaze there are only two ingredients necessary number one barbecue sauce i have a bunch of sweet baby rays so that's what i'm using today if you want to make your own sauce then by all means do that and then apple cider vinegar so this is bragg's apple cider vinegar you can just get plain jane you know hines apple cider vinegar if you want but we're going to mix those together because i want the consistency to be thinner than the thickness of regular barbecue sauce and so i'm going to put barbecue sauce in this tray you're going to find out why we're using the tray later but i'm going to put barbecue sauce in the tray add vinegar until it gets to be the right consistency and we're going to show you how that works [Music] so i add vinegar until this sauce mixture is runny so it doesn't just glue glue glue because if you have a gloopy glaze what will happen is you don't get an even coat on the outside so i want an even coat so i want it to be runny enough but don't add so much vinegar that it you know has the consistency of water you still want some of the viscosity there so from everything that i've read dark meat for chicken should be safe to eat you know usually people say between 170 175 some places as low as 165 but i think on that package they're recommending to cook to 185 because it breaks down some of the connective tissues and stuff like that a little bit more to make it juicier and more tender and these guys are ready to glaze so they're done cooking all we're going to do is dunk them in that sauce put them back on the smoker to set the glaze so we don't need to increase the temperature anymore and the reason i get them to a final temperature before i glaze them is because when i dunk them into that cold sauce they're going to drop in temperature rather than continue to climb up but one thing i want to test is is this juicy so what i'm going to do i'm going to test the juiciness before i add the glaze because that way you know that there's no extra moisture being added by any other source so i'm going to pull a piece of this off we're going to see if it's juicy so here we have this piece of chicken and it looks juicy so far but let's see how juicy it is if that's not juicy and tender i don't know what is okay gosh it smells good i might eat this right now it smells incredible now this whole cook has been about making it easy and this in my experience is the easiest way to glaze a whole bunch of chicken at once [Music] [Music] at this point we're going to leave the chicken on only long enough for that glaze to thicken up a little bit so it starts to get sticky [Music] looking at this chicken i see the glaze on the outside it's nice and shiny which tells me that it's thickened up properly and then i know that i've already added a nice layer of smoke flavor underneath that so it should hit all the notes that we want in our chicken now another thing that's important to consider is that a lot of people aren't huge fans of dark meat chicken but what barbecue is about is taking something undesirable and turning it into something amazing and that's what we did with this chicken out there on that smoker perfect smoked chicken thighs really are the most underrated barbecue item out there what i would encourage you to do is go get a pack they're dirt cheap usually less than a dollar a pound and try this out you really don't have much to lose and you have a lot to gain i think you're really going to impress people with the quality of smoke flavor that you get and the tenderness and juiciness of these pieces of chicken so give this a shot let me know in the comments what you think about it and if you liked the video hit the like button down below subscribe to the channel and you can also follow me on instagram twitter and facebook at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 202,046

Rating: 4.9605966 out of 5

Keywords: offset smoker, smoked chicken, smoked chicken thighs, chicken thighs, smoker, barbecue, bbq, jeremy yoder, jeremy yoder smoked chicken, barbecue chicken, juicy chicken, mad scientist bbq, mad scientist bbq chicken, texas smoker, kentucky, barbecue chicken recipe, juicy chicken recipe, chicken recipe, smoked chicken recipe, bbq chicken, offset smoker fire management

Id: 5Qjfyz9AFXc

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021