The Case For Smoking Your Chicken in Pieces

Pork butts and briskets tend to dominate the smoked meat conversation space, but smoked chicken is a real delight. The low, aromatic heat renders the bird supple and juicy, with tons of flavor and very little work. All you need is chicken, salt, fire, wood, and time.

How much time you need depends on the size of your bird and how much or how little you prep it before it goes on the grill. A simple spatchcock helps speed up the process by flattening the body, but it still takes at least a couple of hours to smoke a five-pound bird, assuming you’re keeping your heat in between 225℉ and 275℉.

Why you should smoke a chicken in pieces, rather than a as a whole bird

Photo: Claire Lower

I will admit that opening up my Weber Kettle to reveal a beautifully browned whole chicken is fun. Whole-animal presentation makes me feel alive—like I’ve accomplished something primal—but breaking down a chicken into parts lets you cook those parts faster and better.

Over the last holiday weekend, I bought a whole chicken, plus a few legs, as I value dark meat over the breast, and didn’t want to run out. The individual legs (predictably) cooked more quickly than the whole chicken, beating it by over an hour. By the time the big bird was ready to come off the grill, my guests had (somewhat gleefully) filled up on legs.

Fancy grilling toys for fancy grilling (gender neutral) boys:

Even though I had crowded the coal-less side of the grill, the free legs browned more evenly than their attached counterparts, as they weren’t shielded by the folds and crevices of the bird’s body.

If you are a breast lover, breaking down the bird makes even more sense. Even when spatchcocked, with the breast pointed away from the coals, the white meat and dark meat stayed within 10 degrees of each other. I like to cook my thighs to at least 170℉, to give that collagen plenty of time to break down into silky gelatin, and I keep my breasts around 155℉, so they’re nice and juicy. This simply didn’t happen with the spatchcocked bird. (The breast meat of the chicken you see above hit 165℉; it was still good eating, and by no means dry, but it was not as moist as it could have been had I prioritized the white meat and pulled it off 10 degrees sooner.) You also don’t have to use a whole bird at all. If your family loves thighs, just get thighs. They’ll be done in no time, and you won’t have to contend with leftover breast meat.

Break down your chicken completely, and you can remove each piece as it reaches its ideal temperature. Use a digital thermometer to temp each one, and you might be surprised by how two similar looking legs cook at different rates, as each one will be affected by its size, fat content, and relative position to the coals.

Serving pieces may not have the dramatic flair of a whole-bird presentation, but each one will taste better having been cooked to the temperature that suits it best, and that’s really the point of all of this. (You also don’t have to carve a whole, piping hot chicken, which makes your life as the host a tad bit easier.)

Simple Smoked Chicken Pieces

Photo: Claire Lower

Ingredients:

Salt the chicken pieces on all sides and place them on a wire rack set inside a rimmed baking sheet. Place the baking sheet in the fridge and let it hang out for at least 8 hours, up to 24.

A few hours before you plan to serve the chicken, fill a charcoal chimney with coals and set it over a couple of lit fuel cubes. Once the coals have stopped smoking and the top layer is starting to ash over, dump them on one side of the grill, scooting them into as tight of a pile as possible. (I finally used the Slow N’ Sear I was sent a few years ago, and it really does make the pile of charcoal a little more manageable.)

Close the charcoal grill and adjust the vents to bring the temperature down. Open vents provide more oxygen for the coals, increases the temp of your grill. Use an external probe thermometer for best results, as you cannot rely on the little dial on top of the grill. Bring a kettle of water to a boil as the temperature approaches 300℉.

I usually open my grill up once it drops below 300℉, then add the wood to the coals and arrange the chicken. By the time I close it up again, the heat that built up inside has escaped, bringing it down somewhere in between 225℉ and 275℉, which is right where you want it. (Yes, you are exposing the coals to more oxygen when you open it up, but it’s for such a brief amount of time, you lose more heat than you gain from that exposure.)

Add the wood to the coals, and place a drip pan on the coal grate, under where the chicken pieces will be. Add a kettle of boiling water to the pan or, if you’re using the Slow ‘N Sear, add it to the water reservoir. Place the grill grate over the the coal grate, stick a few probe thermometers in the chicken pieces, and arrange them on the coal-less side of the grill. Cover with the lid, making sure the top vent is opposite the coals, so smoke will have to travel across the chicken to make its way out of the grill.

Cook until the thickest part of the breasts reach an internal temperature of 155℉, and the thickest part of dark meat reaches an internal temperature of 175℉. This will take at least an hour and a half, but is greatly dependent on how hot your grill is, so keep an eye on the ambient temperature and adjust the vents as needed. The longer the chicken is on the grill, the more smoke it will see, so keep it as close to 225℉ as you can if you’re a smokehead. If you want to crisp up the skin, you can move the pieces over to the coal side, skin-side down, when you reach a temperature that is 10-15 degrees shy of your target temp. Serve hot with sauce of your choice, though smoked chicken doesn’t need sauce at all.

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