How to Smoke Chicken

look at this juice look at that juice juice hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to address something that comes up all the time i love barbecue but sometimes i don't have 6 hours 12 hours or even 16 hours to devote to making barbecue so i have to make something faster because i want real smoke flavor and i want to eat real meat but i don't have the time to do brisket or pork butt or ribs or something like that so today i'm going to show you exactly how to make amazing smoked chicken where you get smoked chicken that has flavor it's juicy and it's tender all three it's the trifecta of great chicken and you can do it yourself at home all right so to get these things ready for the smoker i've done a couple very simple things so first of all i got these at costco i think they were nine bucks so that's a lot of meat for nine bucks so that's the reason why a lot of people want to smoke chicken because they want chicken but with flavor which is actually very difficult to do so all i've done is i trimmed up around this entrance trimmed up around this entrance to the back of the chicken so i kind of cut off a little chunk of kind of the triangular piece of tailbone and now we're just going to season it up and it couldn't be any easier it's 50 50 salt and pepper and a lot of people ask me this and i'm always confused as to why they ask but they always ask is it 50 50 by volume or by weight it's 50 50 by volume because salt weighs a heck of a lot more than pepper and so if you did 50 50 by weight you'd have tons and tons and tons of pepper and not all that much salt so what we want is we want good color and good flavor on the exterior skin which we're going to crisp up at the end we're going to show you all that process but then i also want to get some seasoning on the inside so i get salt to penetrate through the meat from the underside so it's going to be really simple this is how i do it now one caveat 99 of the time when i'm doing catering events and i cook chicken i'm cooking bone in skin on chicken thighs the reason for that is because i think it's the best cut of chicken you can barbecue i think you have phenomenal results and that'll be the subject of a future video but if you're cooking for your family you may want a whole chicken just because it's got a nicer presentation it's got you know white meat and dark meat it's got a lot to offer there and it is dirt cheap so for this today we're going to do whole chickens so a similar process that you would use for a whole turkey but they're going to be some twists that i think will really help you out and to make great chicken all the time [Music] so that's all i'm going to do to season these chickens and get them ready to go on the smoker now if you want to be really particular you can get in there lift up the skin try to scrape out fat so you get crispy skin but i'm going to show you a way that's much easier and much less involved to get crispy skin on your chicken and i don't think it's going to be a barrier to the quality of the chicken at all i think it's actually going to improve it because some of that fat that's under the skin is going to baste the meat underneath and you'll have moist and juicy chicken and packed with smoked flavors you're going to have tender chicken juicy chicken and flavorful chicken if you get those three things that is a winner every time if you're making chicken all right so we're cooking these two chickens in the brazos but the same principle applies to any kind of smoker you have we're going to start at 225 degrees or if you have a pellet smoker i might suggest 200 degrees because at this point what we're looking for is flavor and a slow increase in temperature so we want to do that slowly because you want to build as much flavor as possible into the chicken because it doesn't have a long smoke time and therefore we have to capitalize on every bit of opportunity we have to add flavor so 225 degrees i'm just going to set them in there like this now you can tie a bunch of stuff up with twine all that stuff but the point of this video is easy at home smoked chicken you can go through a ton of hoops you can jump through a ton of hoops rather to make sure that you get everything exactly the way you want it but the point of doing chicken isn't because it's a fancy meal it's because it's an easy meal that tastes good and is very cheap so in that spirit we're just going to do this as simple as possible all we used is salt and pepper and i'm burning an oak wood fire and if you have a pellet smoker you can use whatever kind of pellets you want as long as they're good quality as long as they're made with real wood that it says on the bag you're going to be okay if you're using a smoky mountain you're going to be fine if you're using even a cheap offset the same principles apply we're going to do it the exact same way so start at a low temperature in my case 225 though i usually cook at 275 but 225 for the first hour or so and then we're gonna check temperature and then find out what we have to do to get it finished and they're going to be two stages of this cooking process so this is stage number one add flavor stage two is gonna be get crispy skin and get it to the final temperature that we need so stage one underway right now i'm gonna close this up i'm gonna check back in probably 45 minutes or so [Music] so it's been about two hours now and we have really really good color on the chickens right here so that deep kind of golden color is because of the smoke and we want to make sure that now that we have the smoke we get crispy skin on the outside and we don't want to cook it too long so that all the moisture kind of leaks out of the chicken so we've been cooking at 225 the whole time now it's time for stage two we're going to cook at 3 25 so we're going to jump the temperature 100 degrees for two reasons number one we're going to crisp up that skin number two we're going to finish off those breasts so those breasts are hanging on about 145 so we've got to make sure that those get done and we're going to accomplish both tasks in one single step of jumping the temperature up i should point out kind of the beauty of this method is that it's very very very simple just salt and pepper on there and i haven't sprayed it at all and guess what the dark meat is still going to be juicy because there's more fat in the dark meat and because we're not overcooking the heck out of these breasts they're going to be juicy too so when i'm poking the probe in juice is coming out it's looking phenomenal i know it's going to be really good i know people i've talked to people lots of people have told me that this is going to be the greatest chicken of all time it's going to be chicken like you've never seen so to build up the temperature what's that mean i add more logs to the fire let it climb up to about 3 25 and in maybe 15 minutes or so at 325 we should be done [Music] all right so it's been about 15 minutes and these things are done they might be showing up a little bit darker on camera than they are i guess in person in real life but to my eye they look a perfect golden brown amazing because that color is from not being burnt but being smoked and that's exactly what i'm looking for so check the internal temperature the rest were 165 thanks to my handy dandy thermapen regular thermapen you say no says ah guess what this is an ir thermapen so i think right now they're on sale for 104.95 so they're already discounted so i picked one up anyway all you have to do is hit this button and it'll tell you the temperature of whatever the surface is of whatever you're scanning so for these when i open this thing up the breasts were 165 the skin was 217 which tells me oh really good fat rendered on the skin exactly what i'm looking for because when i push this the skin kind of crackles and pops that's exactly what i want um normally i would say well actually hold on i got glove liners on so boom this is delicious chicken i cannot wait to get into this and as you can see it's it's still juicy it's just dripping rendered fat you see that's not water that's rendered fat which is what makes things juicy i preach that in a lot of videos but with chicken it's extraordinarily difficult to do because a lot of times you'll cook the chicken without rendering the fat properly i guess you know the only thing left to do at this point is try a piece now i could take it inside and try to set it up all pretty and make it look good but i'm off with that so there's some things that i'm good at some things i'm not good at that's one of the things i'm not good at but i'm going to tear off a leg here okay don't tell me that's not tender don't tell me that's not juicy i mean actually just even though it's kind of ruining this i'm just gonna squeeze this and you see the juice come out that's juicy but the real issue is taste and now i have squeezed some of the juice out of it i bet it's still moist because doing it this way you maintain moisture so here we go let's try this out still hot oh man does it smell good though it's perfect smoky salt pepper juicy tender perfect as my pappy used to say you can't beat that with a stick so if you haven't tried it this way do it two stages of cooking one at 225 the next at 3 25 and you're going to get good smoke flavor in the time when it's at a low temperature and you're going to get crispy skin when you cook it at 325 just to finish it off that's the way to do it i've tried i don't know how many different ways to cook chicken and i've cooked i don't know thousands of pounds of chicken for people and this is the way that they all agree is the best it's the way that i think is the best and i think you should try it at home thank you guys for watching mad scientist barbecue if you enjoyed the video hit the like button down below subscribe to the channel and also follow me on instagram at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 1,516,283

Keywords:

Id: -JJx4eZNmz4

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020