As young boys, my brother No Grimace and I found ourselves out on the back lawn in a small tent cooking some chicken.  We were hungry and thought chicken would serve us well until mom got home and made us a healthy supper.  It was summer time but I don’t recall it being really hot outside or inside the tent.

We had captured us up a candle, matches and a chicken leg.  Gathered up a tin can lid out of the burning barrel and seated the candle onto it so the wax wouldn’t mess up the grass inside the tent.  The candle lit and we were in business cooking chicken.  We held the chicken by the bone end and slowly turned it over the flame.  As a team we would take turns holding and turning the chicken bone.

We imagined how wonderful this chicken was going to taste as we watched it turn from flesh colored to more of a blackened look.  It crackled and popped and started to smell like fried chicken.

I don’t know how long we did this before we decided it must be done and I took a big bite out of the side of it.

YUK!  Waxie, bloody, nasty…spit that out sort of a taste!  No Grimace decided he didn’t want any chicken after that and didn’t take a bite!  It’s funny I like chicken to this day, but I do, it’s one of my favorites.

Now I know this is in the recipe section, but I don’t really have much of a recipe for BBQ Chicken, as you just have to put it on the BBQ grill and keep turning it.

Chicken is a fatty meat and it’s always best to cook it with the skin on when using the BBQ grill.  You can peel the skin off at the last stage of cooking if you don’t like to eat chicken skin, but most of the time I leave it on and eat it.  There is medicinal goodness in chicken skin in my humble opinion.

Anyway, a layer of fat lies between the chicken skin and the meat and this stuff takes a long, long time to cook out.  That is one way to tell when the chicken is nearly done, it stops splattering and fire flaring when it is getting close.  With that, chicken has to be baby sat while it cooks.  You have to be standing right there with it or it will catch fire and burn to a blackened mess (see message above, yuk, but the blackened mess above was from the wax candle, not the burning of the meat on the grill).  It is dangerous to leave chicken on the grill unattended as well, as the fat will drip and catch fire and actually burn the grill to a fiery molten mess if let go.  Flammables around the grill are in danger as well.

So keep turning and moving the chicken parts around and away from the flare ups that will occur during cooking.  It’s a long and arduous chore I know, but one that treats you with a wonderful meal when done.

In the last stages of cooking, the meat will stop dripping reddish pink juices when poked with a fork and you know then the chicken is nearly done.  At this point I like to get a serving bowl and squeeze some BBQ sauce in it, about 1/2 inch deep.  (Oh ya, if you are inclined to take the skin off the meat, now is the time to do that).  Then I take the chicken pieces off the grill one at a time and put it into the sauce and roll it around.  Once completely covered with sauce I put it back on the grill and grab another piece of chicken.  I do this until all the pieces of chicken are covered and back on the grill.  Then turn them over and over until the sauce is cooked adequately on the outside of the chicken pieces.  Once they are done, they all go back into the serving bowl on top of the sauce that is left and they are ready to serve and eat!

As usual the chicken pieces that go into the bowl first are really sticky with sauce, but hey!  That’s what BBQ is all about!  Just serve with a lot of paper towels and a couple more brews!

Bears Butt

June 24, 2012