BBQ Chicken... Time is growing short.

Few things mean summer to me like Barbecuing chicken over a real charcoal fire... in many ways!  I spent the summers of my youthful prime working for a small amusement/picnic park in the Philadelphia Suburbs.  My main job was running the Chicken and corn pavilion, where we would turn out up to 5,000 pieces of chicken and corn on any given Saturday or Sunday.  My partner Steve and I have estimated that we probably cooked around 3 tons of chicken in the years we worked at "The Park"

The park was West Point Park, in West Point, PA, a small village about 20 miles west of Philadelphia.  The park is no longer in existence, and the site is now primarily the back lots of Merck & Co. (the pharmaceutical giant), and a few overpriced cookie cutter "fine" homes.
West Point Park was originally built in 1868 as a "Trolley Park" designed to give people a place to ride the trolleys on a weekend.  My friend Steve (pictured) and I worked there in the last years of the park, in the mid to late 1980s.

The largest part of the park's business was hosting company and family picnics.  The highlight of those picnics was the BBQ chicken.  The key to the chicken was the baste, which we sprayed on the chicken with brass sliding pump sprayers, like the one at left.

One person would carry the stainless steel bucket of sauce, stirring constantly with the end of the hose, while the other would pump the spray on the chicken.  With two full pits of chicken at full cook this was a very intense operation.  At left is the first spray, on only 3/4 of the pits, before the fire got really hot.  At peak heat, about ten minutes from when this picture was taken, you couldn't see the far end of the pits through the smoke.  you would take a deep breath and dive in, with fire masks on, frequently spewing fire from the end of the spray nozzle.  OSHA would have had a field day, to say the least! The baste itself was a simple concoction of one gallon of white vinegar to one pound of butter, with salt and pepper.  It had to be stirred constantly while spraying, or the sauce would separate.   We would lay out the racks of chicken bone side down as soon as the flames subsided and the coals were white.  We would then spray and flip the racks, browning the skins with the early peak heat of the coals.  This was followed in about 5 minutes with another spray/flip to put the bone side down again.  After this initial process, we would leave them on their backs for about 10-15 minutes, and then spray/flip at 10 minute intervals, until the chicken was golden brown, at about 45 minutes total.
The chicken was delicious and juicy, with the vinegar sealing in the juices, and the butter creating the crispy golden brown skin.  Over the years I have created many variations of this baste using different herbs and spices, and last year I picked up a tip from upstate New York, where they have a variation of the classic baste called State Fair Chicken which adds an egg to the mix and uses oil instead of butter.  Of course the simplest way to achieve similar results is to use Italian salad dressing, straight from the bottle, but that's too simple for me, and I have been using the following mixture, more or less, to great success.

Ingredients:
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted.
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 large egg
1/2 cup Vinegar (White, or Cider, or Red Wine, or White Wine... your choice)
2 cloves garlic (1 Tbsp), smashed and minced
Kosher Salt to taste
Fresh ground  black pepper to taste
Any or all of the following, to taste
Rosemary, Thyme, Parsley, Marjoram, Minced Dried Onion

You can really use your imagination, if you start with the butter or oil and vinegar mix, you will get good results.  The egg really adds a nice glaze too.

 The trick with cooking chicken on a charcoal grill is heat control.  You must brown the skin before you lose your peak heat.  So while on a gas grill I will usually cook at a low temperature, leaving the chicken on it's back for most of the cooking time, on charcoal I find the best success moving and flipping and basting frequently.  The easiest part to cook is thighs.  The kids love them the best, and it is hard to dry them out.  Breasts are the trickiest.  Here I am cooking two breast halves, and 7 thighs. I cook the chicken until the juices run clear, and the meat is falling away from the bone.  The absolute best cut for BBQ is 1/2 chickens, as the connected leg segments help protect the breast, keeping it nice and juicy!

 At left is the finished product.  Unlike at the park, I usually like to finish off with some red BBQ sauce of my choice.  Here I used Maul's, which is a great sauce Erika's Stepfather Jim buys by the case via the internet, and which I brought back from our summer vacation.  When this is gone I will go back to my latest favorite, Stubbs.  I could make my own, but with all the great sauces out there to try, why bother?