First smoke

Ok, my first try at smoking ever. I decided to go with something I know how to cook in the oven well, a chicken




Free range chicken, trimmed and ready to start


Marinade for the chicken, juice and peel of 1 lemon, a handfull or rosemary (I have a huge rosemary bush in my garden so it goes in everything ), salt, pepper, 3 cloves garlic, a good few lugs of olive oil and mash it all up in my granit pestle and morter


Rub the marinade all over the chicken and leave it to sit for a while


The remains of the marinade ingrediets and the lemon get stuffed in the chicken


Been on for about an hour, there's also a bacon joint on the rack below and the white thing is a block of halloumi cheese I decided to try smoking. I guess it should work as it doesn't really melt.


Will post more pictures later

Looking good so far!

Should be done by now?

Just probed the chicken and bacon and both are only 150 so a bit more to go I guess........


I got to say, the chicken looks goooooooooooood

Looking good so far, cant wait for the results.

DM

I did post the final pics but they have vanished.... strange...

Turned out the chicken was actually at 170 around the thigh, my probe thermometer wasn't calibrated correctly (it is now)




Just cut up the chicken and tried some.... it's amasing... don't think I ever had chicken that juicy!

Now i'm hungry for chicken! If you open the lid and stay with the cooker you can raise the heat and brown it up a bit without drying it out.

I did this one yesterday..

Well done on your virgin cook Gandolf, looks like you'll now be as addicted as the rest of us now... you've probably heard of golfing widows and perhaps even fishing ones too, but BBQ smoking widows (they're the well fed ones)??

Man that pic of the chicken looks good Doc, looks like we may have someone to give Roxy and DM a run for their money in the photography dept

No such thing as a BBQ widow Ian..

We barbeholics are at home in the back yard cooking some Q.. Sharing what we love with out family..

Some of my best BBQ days have been spend with my wife, sitting on the deck watching the smoke rise...

Gandolf:

Heres a method I use for the herbed chicken that works great to get the flavours of the herbs into the meat. One of the problems with herbing the outside of a chicken is that the flavour is only on the skin.. We use this method at the restaurant I work at for roasting yard birds and it works great from the oven and even better off the smoker.

https://proq.forumotion.com/smoking-low-and-slow-f3/garlic-herb-chicken-on-the-probbq-t104.htm

Give it a try with your next bird and see if it works for ya.

Mack wrote:Well done on your virgin cook Gandolf, looks like you'll now be as addicted as the rest of us now... you've probably heard of golfing widows and perhaps even fishing ones too, but BBQ smoking widows (they're the well fed ones)??

Luckily (in some respects) I'm single so I can spend my money and time on what I want

The surprising thing was that I only drank 2 beers through the entire smoke probably 'cos I spent so much time fusing over the smoker, checking the temp etc etc I guess I need to learn to just leave it alone lol

That's probably the most difficult thing to get used to, once you go from grilling to BBQ/ smoking, is that other than throwing the odd chunk of wood on, there's not much else to do.
The up side is that you get to do other things, while you're cooking amazing food.