This week is all about Competition Chicken, as my competition season starts in less than 2 weeks.
The various competition sanctioning bodies, unless it is otherwise specified, any part of the chicken can be turned in. Lots of competition cooks will say that while chicken is the quickest cook, it is the biggest pain. I personally cook chicken thighs, as most do, and I can vouch for the fact that it really is a ton of work and it is also more prep time than cook time. The reason for this is that if you are doing Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) style chicken, you not only want to pack a ton of flavor into your single piece of chicken, but you also want to end up with bite through skin.
Bite through skin? So basically, you want to be able to bite into the chicken thigh (in my case) and have a clean bite through the skin and not have the skin come off the thigh as you pull away, you want the skin to stay in the same place. The way that competition chicken is cooked, crispy skin would leave you with overcooked chicken, and nobody wants to bite into a soggy piece of skin and have it slap against your chin as you pull away. The best way to accomplish the desired bite-through skin is to pull the skin off the chicken during prep and scrape away the fat to the point that it is basically translucent. In trimming the thigh itself, I square the thigh up and cut off the knuckle bone. Once the skin is scraped, you wrap it tightly around the thigh and turn it into a little chicken pillow.
For KCBS, you need to turn in a minimum of 6 individual pieces, and you always want to make sure you cook more than 6 so you have some backups and a good selection to pick your best 6 pieces. Once I have my tray of finished chicken, I inject the meat on both sides of the bone in order to increase flavor and juiciness within the meat as it cooks. I personally use Butcher BBQ’s Original Bird Booster because it really is the best (it’s also available in our store, https://lovelyjubblybbq.com/products/butcher-bbq-bird-booster!). I then use my Lovely Jubbly BBQ’s And Then Some BBQ rub on the bottom of the chicken and let it sit for 15-20 minutes while it sweats into the meat. Then, I flip each piece over and season the rest of each piece.
Up until this year, I would use my Pit Boss Classic pellet grill for cooking chicken because the air movement using the fan helps render the chicken very nicely. Now, I am starting to use my Oklahoma Joe’s Bronco drum smoker, and as with any new thing, there is a learning curve. One thing I liked about the Pit Boss is that you didn’t need to cook it as long because of the airflow, but as I discovered this weekend, it needs to run longer on the drum, but hey! that’s why we practice! It also means I am going to have to do another test run this upcoming weekend to get it down and ready for the season.
There are a couple reasons why this weekend’s test didn’t go as planned. The first is that I did not scrape all of the fat out of the skin, just the thicker stuff like I used to do with the Pit Boss, but since the drum is different, a lesson learned. I also added the rub under and on top of the skin, and it was a bit saltier than I had anticipated, again, another lesson learned. The final reason is that usually you want your competition chicken thighs to be higher in temp, like 195-200 degrees internal, and I just wasn’t there yet. All in all, these are easy things to fix, and it’s just another reason to fire up the drum!
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As always, keep cookin’ and Lovely Jubbly!
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