Jerk Chicken

I'm Josh Ozersky, and I'm here on eHow.com making jerk chicken thighs for my tailgate. Contrary to what you may think it is not called jerk chicken because it is made by a jerk, although it is. This is a Jamaican kind of a spicy chicken. You may or may not have had it. It could easily be pork or ribs. I'm making chicken, it's a perfect tailgate dish. Basically I took a bottle of jerk spices. You can get it in a million different brands. The most important thing is that it has a lot of scotch bonnet pepper. I have been marinating this chicken with a little bit of oil and a ton of this jerk seasoning overnight and I'm going to put it on. I have a hot fire here, two zones. The hot zone and a cold zone. The hot side is very very hot. How do I know, one, ahh, usually you do the one Mississippi and like if you can get to three Mississippi, it's not hot enough. In this case I can't even get to one Mississippi which is good because basically I just want to get these brown and crusty. I want it to be wicked hot for that reason. I'm going to move it back over to the cold side and I'm going to smoke it so there will be both smoke and spice in my jerk chicken. This is one of the all time great tailgate recipes. Everybody loves this. Look the flareups are starting already. Now you may ask me Josh, aren't you alarmed at flareups, aren't you afraid the chicken is going to get burned. No, I'm not afraid. If I was afraid that the chicken was going to get burned, I wouldn't put it on top of a coal fire. The key thing is to get it off the flareup before it gets really blackened. You want it to get brown and crusty and crispy and in fact it may be necessary to move it off. I don't really want it to cook per say over that wood fire. The more it can cook when it's on the slow zone absorbing smoke, that's the happier I'm going to be because that's the smokier it's going to taste and just like that, it's ready to pull off. Now the reason I'm so careful about this is that these are boneless thighs which makes it fun and easy to eat but it also means that they cook much faster. I have taken a goodly amount of the jerk seasoning and I have added it with a little bit of honey and a little bit of orange juice. You can even basically take a store bought barbecue sauce if you want, I don't like doing it that way. I want a little bit of acid and a little bit of sweet and a lot of heat and spice because I'm going to make a glaze. Sometimes I'll put a little bit of beer in here to thin it down but because this is a small piece of meat with no bone it's going to cook fast. I'm going to give a little bit of a glaze on like this. So now there will be two layers of jerk flavor on it and what's going to happen is I'm going to close this up, there it is. It's just been a couple of seconds and I have a nice stream of steady blue smoke coming out. I've choked off the oxygen so there's less fire, the smoke goes up, the temperature goes down. Now I'm in perfect chicken cooking capacity and what's going to happen is that I just put that glaze on the chicken. The smoke is going to hit the glaze and it's going to flavor the glaze. Now what's going to happen? The glaze is going to get cooked on right? But, when that happens I'll take this off and I'll re-glaze it and I'll close this up and more smoke will get onto it. So basically there will be layers and layers of glaze and smoke and glaze and smoke and fire and pepper and sweet and underneath it that succulent dark meat chicken, this is really good. It's been six or seven minutes, I'm guessing that the glaze has sort of absorbed the smoke, that glaze has dried on. I'm going to give it a little bit more now. I'm not putting the lid right back on because I want the coals to begin to heat up again. The coals have been somewhat starved of oxygen, now they need to gorge on oxygen again so they can start burning so they can be choked off again, so they can start smoking again. Meanwhile, my chicken is still far from being cooked and it's going to need at least another 12 to 15 minutes. So let's see I think this should be about done, oh that looks nice. Like any other meat I'm going to let this settle and then I'm going to plate it and when you touch the sides the best way to describe this that it feels like cooked chicken like the chicken you would pick up and eat. So that's it, jerked chicken thighs. I'm Josh Ozersky, and this is eHow.com.