CHICKEN WITH BONES

We have cooking meat with fire and smoke for all our lives. I have learned that if you cook on a smoker at a high temperature, it is a lot like our regular gas grill. We cook outside twelve months a year and the food from the smoker and grill which is often chicken is a big part of our menus.
Our kids were all born in Fredericton, NB when we lived on a farm in Canada.  We kept a few chickens for the fresh eggs, and I milked Rosie our Guernsey cow so we could have fresh milk.  We had a huge garden, and since we raised cattle, there was always plenty of beef in the freezers.  Chicken was expensive in Canada but it was something we ate regularly.
Sometime between when we moved from the farm in 1984 and when our kids started leaving home in the mid-nineties, something to happened to their relationship with chicken.  I cannot for the life of me figure out exactly what happened.
We lived in Halifax, NS for a while but the most unusual chicken thing there is the Chicken Burger, which is exactly what its name implies, a place where you can get chopped chicken on a burger bun.
I have narrowed down the chicken relationship change to our short stay in Columbia, MD from 1987-89. Whatever the trauma was there, two of our three kids developed an aversion to "Chicken with bones." Chicken with bones is defined as any piece chicken that has a bone in it. 
The more bones the greater the trauma. Hence a half-chicken is a serious threat and a whole chicken requires evacuation. My theory is that Maryland being an urban area leaned more towards boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Fried chicken was perhaps too Southern. This is only conjecture is not meant to smear any Maryland residents who have a delicious friend chicken recipe in their heritage. We were in Columbia which was a little different being a planned community with the town square being the food court in the mall. There were no live chickens there that I saw.
My wife, Glenda, and I have a healthy relationship with chicken since we grew up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties where the odds of having fried chicken for Sunday lunch were well over fifty percent.  In my case, since my mother was one of the greatest chicken fryers ever, the odds were closer to ninety-eight percent.
Fried chicken was a staple of life.  It accompanied you on picnics.  In the days before fast food restaurants, it made the trip to the beach with you as your lunch since there were few restaurants along the roads in those days. The summer I learned to type at the Graylyn Estate, fried chicken made up seventy-five percent of my lunches,
My mom being a loving grandmother, fried plenty of chicken for our kids, and being good grand kids, they ate it until they started leaving home. Penalties for not eating my mother’s food would have been severe.
Katie, our youngest, was totally different than the other two.  Not only would she eat chicken with bones, she cooked it.  She must have been  too young to pick up that urban Maryland boneless chicken thing. The only good news is that in last ten years our oldest daughter has become chicken with bones tolerant.
Our son has gotten worse and will decline to eat a meal with us if chicken with bones are involved. As far as he is concerned there is a nuclear chicken with bones situation.  That is when I slap either a whole or two half chickens on the grill and cook them to perfection.  I have been cooking half chickens over fire since before I was a Boy Scout back in the early sixties.  There is nothing better than a half chicken perfectly cooked over fire.  It's a real tradition in the south, often done by volunteer fire departments to raise money.  I can still remember my Uncle Austin who lived in the East Bend, NC area bringing in some mighty fine fire-house chicken that he had helped cook over glowing coals for an annual fund raiser.
We have changed how we cook chicken over the years. I will share some of my experiences. A lot of people do not like handling raw chicken and there are good reasons for that. However, I believe if you are going to eat meat or fish, you should appreciate where it comes from before it gets on your plate.
My wife, who was not city girl, got an immersive lesson in where meat comes from when she moved to our old farmhouse on the shores of the Fundy. One Saturday morning she walked in the kitchen to find me working on a Lamb carcass that hanging from the lintel of one of the kitchen doors. While she immediately turned and left the kitchen, she got over it and learned to love home-butchered lamb chops. I was only glad she missed the year we cut a steer up by hand in the kitchen and the fall that we butchered six hogs and processed one for our own use.
Many are not fond of any meat but especially grain-fatten meat. Even back then the meat off our farms was grass fattened and certainly that was the case for the lamb. I have not quite figured out getting good grass raised chickens but I am working on it.
With that as a background, chicken is amazingly flexible on a grill or a smoker especially dark meat. If I cook chicken breasts, I prefer the chicken on the bones because the chance of it drying out before it gets done is less.
If you must, you can buy boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sprinkle Kosher salt on them and some sweet Paprika and throw them on the middle of three burner grill with the middle burner turned off and the temperature around 350F. Get your trusty meat thermometer out and pull them off the grill when they hit 165F. Depending on the size of the thighs it could be less than minutes.

However, I am all about the bones because whether it is chicken or steak, the best meat is near the bones. There is something satisfying about picking meat off the bones. Our ancestors ate all their meat that way and likely did not waste even a scrap of meat clinging to a bone.
Cooking a delicious half chicken is easy assuming you can find a good half chicken or someone good at a splitting a chicken. The recipe is also simple as the thighs. Salt the chicken and sprinkle Paprika on it and throw it on the middle part of the grill with no flame at 350-400F. I put the bone side down first and cook without opening the grill for twenty-two minutes. Then I turn it over and cook another 22 minutes. I test the temperature by the thigh bone at 45 minutes. A small chicken could be done in 45 minutes. A larger one could take another 15 to 30 minutes to hit 165F.
Half chickens are my favorites, but I am not a fan of splitting chickens so I mostly stick with whole chickens. Working together my wife and I can get a whole chicken ready in just a few minutes with minimal bleach and cleaning. Below is our recipe for beer can chicken on our smoker.
I place the shrink-wrapped chicken in one sink and a bag to hold everything I don’t want in the other sink. Once I get the chicken out of the wrapper and the innards removed, my wife shakes Kosher salt on it and I pat it in. We also do the body cavity. Then we liberally sprinkle sweet paprika on it. We use sweet instead of smoked because the chicken is going on a smoker. Next I transfer the chicken to an old cookie sheet and carry it and the ceramic container used to hold the beer. While we have been working on the chicken the grill has been preheating to 350F. Of course my hands and the sink get a good disinfecting before I head outside.

I pour most of the can of beer in the ceramic container and place the chicken body cavity on top of it. I usually bend/break the wings so they behave. The chicken goes onto the grill on the cookie sheet which keeps my grill spotless and is much easier to clean than a grill. I insert the temperature probe and set the alarm temperature for 165F. The grill is controlled by my phone so I can see the temperature of the chicken without opening the grill. I don’t open the grill again until the alarm goes off.

Recently the alarm went off t forty-five minutes which I knew was too early so I checked with another meat thermometer, reset the alarm, turned the temperature up to 380F. It was done in about another twenty minutes. I switched the grill to keep warm. While my wife was setting the table and preparing the asparagus, I retrieved the chicken and put a tent of foil over it.

While my wife cooked the asparagus, I carved the chicken up into pieces and removed the breasts from the carcass. Then we plated everything and had a seat to enjoy our Sunday lunch. Including clean-up it probably took two hours but at least an hour of that I was me just watching the chicken cook as I browsed the web.

My experience tells me that this is a lot less work than frying a chicken. Now I need to work on getting the best possible chicken that I can find. That is harder and more expensive. than finding grass fattened beef. I finished the meal with a bowl of mashed local strawberries and cream.

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