TheBanyanTree: You're shoving what up my WHAT?

[Dee Churchill]

Oh man. Some adventures are just more -- uhmmm -- adventuresome than others, don't you think? I mean, when you set out to cook something that's called "Drunken Chicken" or "Beer Can Chicken" or "Beer Butt Chicken"...well, you know it's not going to be your regular, everyday cooking experience. 
This method has been around for awhile -- long enough to produce variations aplenty and lots of good tips to garner online. For those of you who question the safety of cooking with aluminum beer cans, there are increasingly numerous alternative gadgets that do the job same-same.

The appealing aspect of this procedure is its simplicity. Once you have the bird in the oven, you don't have to mess with basting or anything else. You have the dry heat of the oven cooking the bird from the outside and the moist heat of the steaming beer cooking it from the inside. Good old Google will give you tons of sites with the skinnies on what to do and what you can do it with. (Oh dear. That sounds slightly kinky.) I spent a lot more time surfing all that information than putting it into practice. 

My first attempt to inebriate a helpless fowl consisted of a single can of beer and an interesting dry rub mixture that I worried might blow out my sinuses. What I did was, I mixed 2 tablespoons each of kosher salt, paprika and brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon each of black pepper and cayenne pepper. Put it all in a shaker and stirred it up really good and then tasted a bit of it. 

"Oh," I said to myself in a very tiny voice, "this seems to be a skosh on the warm side." (As it turned out, once cooked, the thermal qualities were pleasantly perfect.)  I rinsed off the chicken and patted it dry with paper towels and then I sprinkled the Accidental Brimstone rub inside and outside. Looked mighty purty, that's whut. 

Then I popped the top on the can of beer and poured out about 4 ounces. Gotta leave a little head room in the can, I guess. Also, one is supposed to add a couple more holes to the top of the can with a church key-type can opener. Which I did. 

Then, in a burst of imaginative genius, I started stuffing a rounded spoonful of minced garlic into the can. Did you know minced garlic makes room temperature beer foam up something fierce? Trust me. You'd best be close to the sink when you do that stuff because it sure can make a mess. 

After the foam settled down a bit, I also added about 2 tablespoons of hickory liquid smoke. Since I'm cooking this in the oven instead of a barbecue grill full of hickory chips, that seemed like a reasonable alternative. 

Listen, I don't have a barbecue grill. I know. They'll never let me live in the suburbs. Well, guess what? I don't want to live in the suburbs, so there. 

Okay. The chicken was ready. The can of doctored-up beer was ready. I whipped out the broiler pan and set the can of beer in it. Then I carefully lowered the chicken onto the can and pulled the legs forward so it was sitting in a tripod position. Lord. Is there anything that looks more silly and vulnerable than a naked chicken on a beer can?

Since that first venture, I've learned a couple of nifty tricks. For one thing, add about a cup of water to the pan in which the chicken is perched. Saves your oven from splattered grease. The other thing is, plug the neck hole of the chicken with a potato or an onion or whatever will do the job. (I used an apple the first time, being out of 'taters and onions at that moment.) The plug prevents the steam from shooting out of the bird like Vesuvius and coating your oven walls with an oily mess. It also keeps the steam inside the bird, where it will do the most good. Furthermore, you end up with a tasty morsel to munch in addition to the chicken. Edible plugs are a Good Thang. 

At that point, the chicken goes into a preheated 350 degree oven for a two-hour sojourn in what must be Chicken Hell. But maybe not. When I peeked, the chicken was tilted just a bit to one side and had raised its arms as though about to clap for the band. I know...there's no band. The chicken didn't know that. Being infused with all that garlic-laden beer is probably a lot like a huge peyote experience. I'll bet it thought it was listening to Jimmy Buffet. I figure a chicken could easily get into the Parrot Head groove. 

At the end of the alloted time span, the bird was transformed into a most gorgeous crispy-brown delicacy, so tender I barely had to touch the knife to the critter because it was definitely in fall-off-the-bone mode. May I go on record to say I will never again roast a fowl the old-fashioned way? From here on out, it's beer cans up the butt! 

The skin was succulent and crispy and decadent...and I don't know what more you could ask from skin. The white meat was so juicy it actually gushed, for crying out loud. I don't know what more you can ask from white meat. Nor did the wing tips burn. They were, in fact, quite nicely crispy-crunchy. I like that in a wing tip.

You're supposed to be able to do this with turkey, too, but you'll have to use a bigger can of beer. Like Foster's or something of that ilk. Not to worry -- remember the beer you pour out to give head room when it starts steamig? You get to drink that because you're the chef!

Hugs, Dee...