Smoked Sage Chicken

Of course I didn’t take any pictures.

Anyway, I smoked a chicken on the charcoal grill last night. I used applewood chips in two separate smoke bombs and kept the thing at 300F (would have been nice to have it a bit higher, but I’m still figuring out long cooking on the grill).

The chicken itself was about 5 1/2 lbs and was prepped with the following:

I stuffed it with half an onion chopped, half a lemon in wedges, and about a dozen sage leaves that had all been microwaved with a bit of water for about three minutes to steep. I then separated the skin from the breast to make enough room to rub the meat down from the inside with a butter sage sauce made of half a stick of softened butter, fresh ground pepper, garlic powder, a bunch of fresh chopped sage, and about a tablespoon of lemon juice.

I put the chicken on a roasting rack and placed it uncovered on the grill but not over the coals. It cooked for an hour until the skin started turning golden. Then I covered it in tin foil, threw the second smoke bomb on the coals, stuck a temp probe in the breast and let it cook for about 3 more hours until it was just over 150F. I took it in and let it sit while we steamed broccoli and cooked up rice in the rice cooker with a can of cream of mushroom soup.

Once the chicken had rested I carved it up, leaving the wings and drumsticks intact. I pulled the breast meat off and chopped it up, and then boned the thighs and took that meat too. I finished by flipping the bird (heh heh) and carefully removing the Pfaffenschnittchen, which are still my favorite part of a chicken. I’m getting pretty good at carving up birds.

I still have to figure out the sauce part, too. It definitely tenderized the breast but I’m not sold on whether it altered the flavor. It definitely made a nice-smelling mess. I ended up scraping the remaining sauce off the breast meat before I removed it from the bird. I think maybe a bit of coarse salt in the mixture might have been nice, or maybe a salt rub for the skin over the breast, since I always remove that before I serve.