(guitar music playing) I do a lot of competition chickens. Win the money, and win the big checks, but if I was gonna sit down and eat chicken, this is what I'd eat. (guitar music playing) We are here with Myron Mixon the winning-est man in barbecue, and we're gonna do a whole smoked chicken today. (guitar music playing) To cook a great smoked chicken, the right brine is critical. So tell me what the brine does. What happens is, you have a chemical reaction. Opens up the cells of the meat, and draws moisture in. But, if you've got flavor that's in your water, when it's drawing that moisture in, it's gonna drag that flavor along with it. First thing we need to add to our brine, we got our kosher salt, we got one cup of white sugar, cup of black peppercorns, three crushed garlic, we got three bay leaves, we got a bunch of thyme, and I got course cut via celery sticks, course cut via carrots, a bunch of Italian parsley is cut one time in half, three spring onions course chopped. We got one lemon, and we got one gallon of hot water. I'll let you pour that over for me. And, this is all just for this three pound bird? That's exactly right. Or, this is enough brine here, you could do three of those birds. Gonna mix that up really well. Yup. Cover it, let it sit for five hours. First thing we're gonna do, we're gonna prep a chicken, which is not a lot of prep work to do. You wanna make sure and check for pin feathers, you don't want any of that to stay on. Not worried about the neck staying in there. That's some gnawing meat right there, for later on. I like to take a meat tenderizer, go in, and just prick it. That's gonna help it soak up more of that juice. You'll pick that up, kinda hit it in the center. We're gonna strain up our brine. All right. Now you see all that color? It's got that tint to it.
Oh yeah. How about that? We'll take it now, we'll cover it, stick it back over in our fridge for four hours. Bring it out of the brine. I'm gonna hold it while you apply the rub for me, I'm gonna give it a little turn, 'cause I want a good coating. We got one of our, you've heard it before, the beer can chicken rack.
Yup. All right, I'll need you to re-hit that again. Reapply a little bit. There we go. I think we're good. Okay. Now, the smoker we use is one of my pellet smokers we just came out with, our BARQ series. Gonna reach over here, if you would, turn the dial up to 275. We're gonna let the lid down. Now length of time on this smoker, for this chicken at 275, you're gonna be looking at about three to to three and a half hours. I cook hot and fast. You know, compared to what most people do, and I think cooking hot and fast seals in a lot of that juice. I don't lose as much of it by doing the low and slow. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you wanna do. Yeah. And, the thing about it is, by us, you know when we perforated the meat? Yeah, yup. That's gonna allow some of that fat render out from under it, thin that skin out, and make it where it's bite through. We gotta wait, but while we're waiting, we'll go ahead and make one more thing up. Very simple spritz. Start out with about 32 ounces of good apple juice. Then you got, this is a product of my own right here, about six ounces of clear hot sauce. You know you got a lot of hot sauce going in there. I like it hot. All right. We're gonna let this cook for one hour, and after the first hour we'll start spritzing, Yeah. And, we'll spritz about every 30 minutes. We'll see where we are in about three hours. Check the temp, we're pretty close. I'm gonna let you do the spritzing. Oh yeah, look at that. Let you get it around here on the backside. Get it on this side here too. I'll check. We're perfect. Well first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna cut him up, I'm gonna go in and take out a leg thigh, quarter. Yeah. Look at that skin, I'm fixing to let you try that right there. Oh yeah. Try that skin right there, with this breast. Oh, that's so good. Tell me about this sauce here. This first sauce that I ever developed right here, was a vinegar sauce. It's like a Carolina sauce, which Georgia barbecue is just like Carolina. I mean it's the vinegar based, that's what it's about. And, we're gonna take a little bit of that, and we're gonna hit. You could cook with this sauce on the meat. You know, a lot of ketchup based, you can't do that. Wouldn't that please anybody you know, right there? Look at that. Now we gotta just go and eat it. (laughs) Let's do it. (guitar music playing) Now the chicken you're eating right here is something that I associate with being pretty much traditional Georgia barbecue. Yeah. Mm. Myron, take me back before the four world championships, and back when you're nine years old, and you're first getting into barbecue, what was that like? Now, when I got in at nine years old, it wasn't voluntarily. (laughs) My dad used me and my brother. You were conscripted. Yes, I mean we were free labor. But, as bad as I might have thought it was as a kid, I was learning. I was learning things. As I got older, I got good at it. I watched him barbecuing and I learned, and when I started competing it was easy. I mean, I'm not taking away from that it was easy for me because my dad never owned a barbecue gauge. He never owned a meat thermometer, never did. Didn't have gauges on his pits or anything, he cooked old school chef. He could grab the meat by feel, by sight, by smell, tell when it was done.
He knew when it was done. He went and laid his hands on the tin that went over the pits, and when he could do a tin count, he told me and my brother to get up and shovel coals. He knew it was done cooled down enough, it needed to be fired. (laughs) Once you learn how to cook like that, and once I started competing, I was cooking with gauges, I had meat thermometers, I said "Man this is easier than spitting off a train, "right here", I said "This is easy". (laughs) Every time during the Fourth of July, I was starting to get calls from everybody in the media business, wanting you to give a quote about how to do the best barbecue, or give us a trick for Fourth of July cooking, and I tell them all the time, cook with a meat thermometer. And, a lot of people don't, even today, they don't. Every protein that you cook has got an internal done-ness that it goes by, to be done. Like, white meat, 160-165 dark meat on chicken, 180. Don't matter about the length of time. That's what my daddy said. Cook it 'til it's done. We usually ask a question, if you were to have one more meal, what would you go to? For me? Yeah. Fried chicken. (laughs) Fried chicken's my favorite food in the world. Myron Mixon thank you for coming. Glad to be here. All right.
Thank you brother.
