How To Smoked Chicken Thighs Recipe

Today, I you how to make delicious Smoked Chicken Thighs every time, on your Pits & Spits Pellet Cooker. The beauty of doing chicken is that it is simple and easy. You can make a delicious barbecue for lunch or dinner, and you don’t have to spend a long time doing it. All you need is salt and pepper, a fifty/fifty mix, and then your favorite sauce. The reason we choose bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs is very simple, moisture. And let me state this, moisture is usually not the actual presence of water in whatever you’re eating.

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The reason is, the fat rendered, and these chicken thighs contain more fat than a chicken breast. Now, we leave the bone in so we don’t expose too much surface area so it loses a lot of fat, and we have the skin because the fat under the skin will trap and provide moisture for the meat.

INGREDIENTS: Smoked Chicken Thighs

Chicken
Sauce
Salt
Black pepper

INSTRUCTIONS:

All of those things combined make chicken an ideal cut for barbecue. The reason we are using only salt and pepper is very simple. This is because we want to expose as much of that meat to the smoke as possible.

2. And with something like chicken, this is especially important for short cooks. So on a long cook, say brisket, you have a long time for the smoke to penetrate the meat and get a nice smoky flavor. With chicken, it’s a very short amount of time, so we want to maximize the amount of smoke that gets in there.

3. So, let’s lower these down and put them on the smoker. You don’t want to go too heavy, but not too light either. You want just enough salt to make sure the chicken is nice and tasty in the end. As always with barbecue, our salt and pepper will be kosher salt, and coarsely ground black pepper, about 15 mesh.

4. Now, in almost all recipes, I recommend using a fifty/fifty mix. If you’re really sensitive to pepper, you can cut back on the pepper. If you prefer less salt, you can cut back on the salt, but fifty/fifty is pretty standard when you’re using kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper.

Now, you need to know a few things about how we put this chicken on the smoker.

5. Number one, we put the chicken skin side down, because that’s going to be touching the metal, the skin that is, and metal conducts heat exceptionally well, and that’s going to render the fat under the skin. and making skin bites more likely.

6. Also, it’s going to get radiant heat from the bottom of the diffuser plate, and so those two things will combine, to provide that fat, and create crispy skin, which is exactly what you want.

7. Also, we’re cooking on 230 right now. We’re going to start at a low temperature because we’re going to let it come up slowly, and we want to make sure it’s cooked evenly, we don’t burn the outside while the inside isn’t fully cooked.

8. And then, lastly, in an effort to get that crispy skin that we want, and to render the fat really well, we’re going to bring the temperature up to 290. At that point, we’re going to glaze with the sauce, and you’ll finally have amazing chicken.

9. So in short, start at 230, when you’re almost done and you’re ready to glaze, we’re gonna use 290 degrees and a light coating of sauce, so at that point, the glaze will be on the chicken, and

10. it’s perfect. You can take it off and let it cool for a while, and then you’re ready to eat it. Now we’re on 230,

11. The chicken has reached an internal temperature of 155, so it’s not completely done but it’s close. So at this point, we’re going to take your favorite sauce, we’re going to glaze the meat side of the chicken because we don’t want to add moisture to the skin soften it back up, and make it rubbery.

12. So, we’re just going to put the glaze on the meat side, and when the glaze sets, that’s exactly when the chicken will be ready. We’re looking for 165 degrees of internal. Then we remove them, and then we have beautiful glaze on one side, crispy skin on the other, and hopefully moist and smoky chicken in the middle.

13. Chicken Smoking and Sizzling Now that we’ve got the chicken sauce ready, we turn the smoker up to 290 degrees because we want the sauce to set and get a glaze on top. And, we want to make sure that we actually render that fat under the skin, so it’s crispy and has a bite.

14. The internal temperature has reached 160 degrees, the skin underneath is crispy, and the sauce on top is glistening. The time has come to remove these people. I’ll put them on an aluminum foil tray, and then let them rest for about 12 minutes,