Celebration Chicken!

This chicken is a great cook-out dish, best for a summer day where you have a few hours to spend smoking some meat while enjoying time with friends and family.


This morning, in the grocery store, Dan had a brilliant idea: let's finally smoke that chicken we've been meaning to smoke since Thanksgiving. My step-father had smoked a turkey for Thanksgiving, and it was so delicious that I would have eaten it all myself, had I not one small Alfred turkey in my belly already. (I did use the "I'm eating for two!" excuse to eat enough smoked turkey to feed a few grown men...)

We took our chicken home and immediately put it into a simple brine. We did this with limited time, so the recipes I'll include below will be for how we would have liked to do it had we better planned.

I rubbed the chicken with William-Sonoma turkey rub (that is composed of applewood-smoked salt, garlic, onion, thyme, and pepper, is available around Thanksgiving, and would have been delicious in the brine as well) and we "smoked" the chicken on the gas grill using a tinderbox full of applewood chips. The next chicken will be smoked in the proper smoker, but this chicken was delicious.

This is how you do it:

Brine:

2 quarts water
1 quart apple juice
3/4 cup salt
1/2 cup sugar

In a pot large enough to fit your chicken, boil the above ingredients until they are all combine, and then cool to room temperature or cooler.

Once the brine is cool, add a 5-6lb chicken. Your chicken should be thawed, but if it is still a little cool and you are brining overnight, that is fine. Make sure the chicken is completely covered by liquid. Add more water and weigh down the chicken if needed. Put it in the refrigerator.

Brine the chicken for as close to 12 hours as possible. A little longer wouldn't hurt it, either. Our brine did not have juice, and only soaked for a few hours, so don't worry if you do it all last minute.


Take the chicken out of the brine and pat dry. While your smoker or tinder box gets going (300-375 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal - poultry needs to be smoked at a hotter temperature than beef or pork) rub your chicken inside and out generously with olive oil and:

smoked sea salt
thyme
garlic powder
onion powder

then put into the smoker!

To smoke on the grill, put the chicken on a cookie rack over an aluminum pan (see the photo above). Your smoker likely has a drip pan for liquids.

For the drip pan, we used a bottle of Sam Adams LongShot 23 Friar Hops. You can use anything you like, including water or apple juice to add moisture to the smoker. A hops-y beer like Sams is ideal, and the Friar Hops is spiced. (I don't like it as a beer, but as an addition to a recipe, it is great!)

Smoke the chicken breast-side down for about 45 minutes per pound (up to an hour per pound - don't dry it out by over-smoking, not that you will be able to hold out a minute longer than necessary, it will smell so ridiculously tasty) or until the internal temperature reaches 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
I flipped mine for the last hour, but it was completely unnecessary.

Once the chicken is to temperature, let it set for at least 10 minutes. You can tent it with foil if you like, but it is not necessary. Just give the chicken a chance to suck all its juices back in.

Carve the chicken and serve with seasonal veggies. We had sweet potatoes and a spring mix with zucchini, carrots, and broccoli.