Cooking For Engineers

[BchrisL]

I get the feeling that most of you guys are west coast folks. If that is so, your winters are different from mine here in the east. The winters here in the WASHINGTON DC area are damp and cold, so a good fire is necessary sometimes to chase away the chill.

I have been running the wood stove at nights to chase off the cold in the basement where I have my TV viewing area. I got the idea to make some charcoal in the wood stove rather than slow it down to hold the fire over night. I rev up the wood stove and let the stove get it get to a good 700 degrees. This is the point where the wood breaks down into it hydrogen and carbon components. The hydrogen boils off and is consumed in the catalytic converter of my stove, and the carbon stays down in the firebox and slowly burns and produces carbon dioxide. It is at this point I shut off the oxygen supply for the night. The fire slowly dies but what is left is some of the most beautiful lump charcoal that one could hope for.

Tonight I used some of the charcoal I made for the very first time to cook some Buffalo wings and chicken legs for my adult children who have been working all day.

I brined the chicken legs and wings for about an hour with a brine made of 1/4 cup salt and 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 gallon of water. I am a firm believer of zip lock bags for containing things like chicken. I placed the chicken and the brine in the bags and let them go for an hour. I then drained out the brine and then put in enough olive oil to coat the chicken well. I then added some of Lee Kum Kee's SPIRACHA CHILI SAUCE and let the chicken soak in this mixture for about an hour.

I place the chicken in my BIG GREEN EGG, which was now burning my freshly made lump charcoal with a sprinkle of soaked hickory chips at the last moment that was running at 300 F. I let the chicken cook directly over the coals for 30 minutes. I then basted the chicken with the remainder of the olive oil/Spiracha sauce and turned it over, and closed the egg.

I removed the chicken from the egg around 30 minutes later, one hour total at 300 F. It was moist and tender. I basted it one final time with the olive oil/SPIRACHA sauce. A real treat and mostly I made it from my own fuel, rather than buying lump charcoal, very satisfying.

This can be adapted for your own charcoal cooker, just keep the temperature down to a MODERATE OVEN level, and put in water soaked wood chips of your choice just before you place the chicken in

Chris