Smoking A Chicken Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

... but mostly, it's filled to the brim with smoky deliciousness!

Using our friends' offset smoker, we followed the recipe found here as described by Kentucky Hunting Forum member trust me. We butterflied the chicken and smoked it for three hours using hickory chips for the smoke. For the last hour and a half we basted it with the oil, lard, salt and pepper mix. I used a pork rub on half the chicken and left the other half alone. It proved irrelevant for reasons I'll explain later.

I wasn't sure about the sauce ingredient measurements, so I slopped about a third of a cup of lard in a stainless steel bowl, the same amount of vegetable oil and then about a teaspoon each of salt and pepper. As you can see from the photos, I stuck the bowl in the smoker, too and the heat melted the lard. It also kept the bowl handy, so all I had to do to baste was open the lid and slather the bird with the sauce. No need to touch the bowl at all. Since the smoker didn't get above 220, the basting sauce never boiled away or burned.

The end result was glorious. Moist and delicious through and through. For the most part, the skin was too leathery to eat, making the rub a waste of time. The basting sauce did make it's way into the flavor and the smell and taste of the lard added a distinctive richness to the meat without making it greasy at all. The whole affair was definitely worthy of a repeat performance.