Do You Prefer A Dry Rub Or A Barbeque Sauce?

[oldsarge]

I've never had it, but have you heard of beer butt chicken. A guy where I used to work did it alot. He even has a special stand for the chicken. It hold it up right and you place a can of open beer up it's hind end and cook away. He would also use a rub on the chicken. I guess the beer steams it way throughout the chicken and keeps it moist. This same guy told me about cooking a turkey with a chicken inside it and a duck inside the chcken on the grill. How do people come up with this stuff. I'd have to be awful hungry to come up with that one!

[perchbutt]

Yes, please, both.

Rub on them when they're slow cooking on that smokefire or baking in the oven and sauce when they're just about done.

[jason]

Originally Posted by oldsarge

I've never had it, but have you heard of beer butt chicken. A guy where I used to work did it alot. He even has a special stand for the chicken. It hold it up right and you place a can of open beer up it's hind end and cook away. He would also use a rub on the chicken. I guess the beer steams it way throughout the chicken and keeps it moist. This same guy told me about cooking a turkey with a chicken inside it and a duck inside the chcken on the grill. How do people come up with this stuff. I'd have to be awful hungry to come up with that one!

I've done the beer butt chicken before, it was pretty good.

The turduken is gaining in popularity, but I have yet to have it. Someone told me in the olden days, as in castles and such. They would take a chicken and stuff it in something else, all the way up until they stuffed a cow.

[ChadTower]

I've been smoking meat and making my own sauces/rubs for years. I have tried a LOT of things in sauces. I have never liked alcohol in a BBQ sauce. Beer especially doesn't usually work because beer is mostly water. You would have to substitute some of the base water for beer and it would be hard to predict how the random ingredients in beer would react after 7 hours of simmering.

Really, a good sauce is sugar, acid, spice, water, flavoring agent. You have some room to wiggle with each one but if you want to control the outcome those are the things to think about. The more basic each of those things is to start with the better your control and eventual results. The best way to figure out which ones you like is, of course, to try them all.

Every BBQer ends up with their own style. Mine is light on the rubs, get the smoking/cooking part right, small but hard finish sauce right at the end, and then a sweet Carolina sauce right before serving.