When Thursday brought mostly sunny skies and, comparatively speaking, the relative warmth of mid-40s temps, it made for a good day to smoke a couple of beer can chickens on the kamado grill in anticipation of the pending snowstorm promised for the weekend.
I finally broke out the BBQ Guru CyberQ WiFi temperature control gizmo that my sister Allison had encouraged me to get. Not only does it monitor and report how the pit and the food are doing, but it also includes a powered fan to help maintain pretty precise temperatures throughout the smoking process.
And you can monitor and adjust it from your laptop or smartphone, which is mighty awesome.
Smoking whole chickens has proven to be a mixed bag for me, with the dual problems of considerably longer cooking times than most recipes suggest, and keeping the fire/coals going for that long process. The CyberQ sure helps with the second dilemma, but I still need a solution to the eternal smoke time to get up to temperature. I put the chickens on Thursday at about 3:30 in the afternoon. At midnight, they were still 30 degrees shy of done, so I gave up on the kamado and put them in the oven to finish off. By the time they'd cooled a bit and I could debone them, it was almost 1:45 am!
I say this only in retrospect, I'm sure, but I reckon it's worth it when you taste how good that chicken is as the hearty main feature of BBQ chicken soup:
It was perfect, on a cosmic scale, for overcoming the bitter disappointment of getting almost all sleet instead of the foot of snow we were promised this weekend.
And there was a ton of it left for sharing...
Personal Note: Since it's my sister and her husband Tom who brought this recipe (and kamado grills in general) to my attention, I might add that while I was making this soup, she texted me that Tom (who is a pharmacist at CVS in Rossville, IN) had just been held up at gunpoint at the pharmacy. They took money and left without delivering on the threat to shoot. Last I heard, the suspects were identified but not yet in custody.
 |  |
Kamado Meal #33
"Chicken on a Throne," from Smoke & Spice by Cheryl and Bill Jamison. Boston: The Harvard Common Press (2003), p. 171-173.
"BBQ Chicken Soup," from the folks at the Big Green Egg website.
No comments:
Post a Comment