What do you have hanging there?
In a smoker?
Pork, we butcher our own pigs and steers in the small town I live in…
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That’s awesome. That’s the best way to get your meat other than hunting your own.
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Please shoot as many of those geese as possible! There are way too many around here. We call them shit machines.
Cobra chicken if you piss one off they hiss at you.
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Beautiful 
We rarely grill during the summer months because it just gets so hot, it’s almost unbearable. We gave up gas grills a long time ago in favor of the Weber One Touch grill after I started doing BBQ as a hobby. Most of you probably know how to use these, but I see a lot of our friends buying them and abandoning them because they don’t know how offset cooking works. This is just how I BBQ chicken with my Weber One Touch Kettle Grill.
I bought this 10 or more years ago, and it has spent all day of every day outside since I brought it home. These things are bullet proof. I paid $150 US for it. I’m afraid to see what they are now, but I heard they have made some improvements.
I use Royal Oak Lump charcoal. For those of you who don’t know what lump charcoal is, it is hard wood that’s burned in an airtight environment until all of the saps and moisture are burnt out of it and all that’s left is literally charcoal.
In the pic below, you can see that I have the charcoal on one side of the grill and a cheap aluminum foil drip pan on the other side. You can buy these pretty cheap from Sam’s club. I buy them in bulk, because I use quite a few during the fall, winter and spring seasons. Try to form the drip pan to the inside edge of the grill and stretch the two ends out to catch as much grease from the chicken as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
I use 91% isopropyl alcohol to ignite the charcoal. I personally can’t stand the smell of charcoal fluid, and this burns hotter. It used to be $2 a bottle, but I haven’t bought any in a while because I usually have several on hand.
Close the bottom vent of the grill and squirt the charcoal with the iso until there is a reasonable amount. It’s important to get it in the charcoal underneath the top layer. This is kind of a touchy, feely thing. Once you’ve done it a few times, you can eyeball the amount you need pretty easily. Use a Bic grill lighter to ignite one corner of the charcoal where you see iso. Keep your face turned away from it while doing so. I purposely leave a little trail of it to the side of the grill, so I don’t have to get my face too close. It will go POOF, but not too bad.
Now open the vent all the way open on the bottom of the grill. I close it to light the charcoal to minimize the POOF. The iso won’t burn very long, but leave the top off for about 5 minutes so the edges of some of the charcoal pieces catch. If the charcoal ignites and starts burning, put the top on the grill. The idea is to get a bed of coals, not flames. You can see the gray edges (embers) on the charcoal in the next pic.
Now I put my grate on, the lid, open the top vent all the way and wait. This is the point where I see a lot of people ruining their food when using lump charcoal. In the next pic you’ll see the smoke rising up out of the vent. It’s not super visible in this pic because there is a slight breeze, but on a calm day, smoke would be rolling out of every seam on the grill. This is nasty creosote smoke. You don’t want this on your food. It’s a combination of moisture that the charcoal picks up sitting in the garage and some impurities that haven’t been burned out of the wood during the charcoal process.
I only waited 15 minutes today because the humidity has been pretty low the last few days. Everything is dry. On a hot, humid summer day, I’ve waited as long as 30 minutes for the “bad” smoke to clear. An old trick is to hold your hand over the top vent then smell your hand. If it smells like creosote, it’s not ready. Below is what BBQ guru’s call the thin, blue smoke. It should look like this at the vent.
Here are 10 Heritage Farms thighs from Kroger. I find 10 to be the perfect number, but you could wiggle a couple more on there if need be. You can see the lump charcoal is nothing but red embers in the middle. Make sure when you put the top on that the vent is over the chicken. The idea is the air rises from the intake into the embers and is forced under and over the top of the chicken and out of the vent. Lump charcoal burns at ~1400°F (2552°C).
Pop the lid on and wait. You can tell by the bubbling noise in the pan when the chicken is close to done. It will start to bubble fast and hard, then it will almost stop (you can hear it outside the grill). Use a meat thermometer or your best judgement, but here it is after 25 minutes. The skin is nice and crispy, but the BBQ sauce is going to soften it. Just the way it is.
I like Sweet Baby Ray’s and I like a lot of it.
Turn the chicken over and baste the bottoms with sauce.
Turn them back over and baste the tops.
Bake the sauce on to taste and remove from the grill. The chicken is going to continue to cook for a while after it’s taken off the heat. I try to account for that when I do ours, but it’s hard to dry out thighs. I put them in the microwave to let them “rest.”
After I made this plate, I tore everything up and put it on the tortillas to eat. The thighs have an amazingly rich, smoky flavor from the Royal Oak. No fire, no flare ups, no burnt chicken.
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Nice, looks tasty. Don’t like chimneys?
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Too messy for me. I have to use newspaper and if it’s windy out, embers blow out of the bottom. I have one, I’ve only used it once. You certainly can accomplish the same thing with them, though.
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Very nice! I’ve never seen those before. Thanks for the tip!
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I just put two on the charcoal grate of my Weber, light them, and put the charcoal chimney on top. Works 100% every time.
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Admittedly, the iso seems risky, but it doesn’t light up like gasoline and it burns really hot.
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Just did some chicken wings and legs on my reverse flow stick burner. Comes out so juicy, wish I took some pictures!
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