Famed Tennessee pitmaster Pat Martin isn’t just starring in new episodes of Tastemade’s Barbecue: Life of Fire—where he travels around the country and cooks over live fire with chefs, farmers and foodies—he’s also serving up a banger of an Alabama-style chicken recipe that just might take your Labor Day grilling to the next level. Martin highly recommends using a brined bird for this recipe excerpted from his book, Life of Fire: Mastering the Arts of Pit-Cooked Barbecue, the Grill, and the Smokehouse, and has plenty more to say about it below.
“This chicken is my ode to Alabama white sauce—a tangy blend of mayonnaise, vinegar, and spices that was created almost a hundred years ago at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama, about thirty miles south of the Tennessee border,” Martin says. “It has since become a cult item in the world of barbecue, and my buddy Chris Lilly [Gibson’s pitmaster and competition barbecue legend] has made enough of the original recipe to float the USS Nimitz. I started working on my own version of white sauce a couple months before I opened my first barbecue joint. While you’ll often see the sauce used on chicken wings, legs, or half chickens, I like to dunk a whole barbecue bird in the stuff when it’s close to being cooked through, then finish the chicken over the fire, which turns the sauce into a rich, shiny glaze.
“To help the chicken cook evenly and expose more of it to the smoky fire, I butterfly (aka spatchcock) it first. But my method is unconventional. Frankly, it’s backward: Instead of removing the chicken’s backbone (as is the established method), I split the bird through the breastbone. This technique was born years ago out of a screwup: I accidentally cut down the wrong side of a chicken, but I cooked it anyway, and I actually preferred the results. The breast and leg meat cooked more evenly, and to me it just looks right: When you lay the bird out flat, the legs fold neatly around the breast to create a tight square of meat. If you think I’m full of it, try my ‘reverse spatchcock’ method once, and see for yourself.”
Pit Barbecue Chicken
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken (about 3 1/2 pounds), brined or dry-brined
- Kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon Big Hoss Rub, or your favorite barbecue rub
- 1 cup apple cider vinegar
- 1 cup apple juice
- Pat’s Alabama White Sauce (recipe linked here)
Steps
- Using kitchen shears, split the chicken by cutting up from the cavity, through the breast side. Cut close to the breastbone and through the wishbone. Season the chicken with the dry rub.
- In a bowl, whisk together the vinegar and apple juice; this will be your mop.
- Prepare a bed of coals below the grill grate and let them burn down until they’re medium to medium-low (you should be able to hold your hand just above the grill grate for 7 to 10 seconds).
- Open up the chicken so that it lies flat and place it skin-side down on the grill grates. Cook, undisturbed, for 5 to 10 minutes. Flip the chicken over and let it cook for 5 minutes longer.
- Using a shovel, pull the coals below the grill grate toward the perimeter of the grill to make a four-sided bed of coals around the grate. Lay a few logs or wood slats around the perimeter of the grill on top of your coals. At this point, there should be nothing but smoldering ash below the chicken; the ring of coals will do the cooking from here on out.
- Flip the chicken over and wait 15 minutes, then rotate it 180 degrees (without flipping). Wait 15 minutes, baste the chicken with some mop, and flip over. Continue alternating between flipping and rotating the bird every 15 minutes, basting it with the mop every time you move it.
- As your wood burns down, push or shovel some coals from the perimeter of the grill inward (about a half shovelful per side) and add new wood to the top of the coal bed. You’ll probably need to do this about every 30 minutes, more often on windy days. Check the ambient temperature around the chicken with your hand every so often; you’re aiming for 250° to 275°F, or 7 to 10 seconds with the hand test.
- Continue this process until the chicken is almost cooked through (the thickest part of the leg should be around 160°F), about 2 hours.
- Pour the Alabama white sauce into a large bowl or baking pan and add the chicken, turning it until it’s well coated in the sauce. Return the chicken to the grill grates, skin-side down, and cook until the sauce is clearly reducing on the skin, about 10 more minutes. Coat the chicken in the sauce once again, then transfer to a cutting board and let rest for about 10 minutes; the heat of the cooked chicken will turn the sauce into a shiny glaze. Carve the bird into pieces and serve.
