---
title: 'The South''s Juiciest and Most Tender BBQ Chicken'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kuea0JD3sd8'
video_id: 'Kuea0JD3sd8'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 881
---

# The South's Juiciest and Most Tender BBQ Chicken

> Source: [The South's Juiciest and Most Tender BBQ Chicken](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kuea0JD3sd8)

## Summary

This video reveals the secrets to making competition-style barbecue chicken, focusing on achieving perfectly rendered 'bite-through' skin and tender, juicy meat. The host demonstrates professional techniques for trimming, scraping fat from the skin, and a two-phase cooking method involving low smoke followed by a hot braise.

### Key Points

- **The myth of great BBQ chicken** [0:00] — Most people have never had truly great barbecue chicken because they haven't used competition techniques.
- **Scraping skin for bite-through texture** [1:54] — Scrape the subcutaneous fat from the underside of the skin to ensure it renders properly and becomes 'bite-through'.
- **Clean vs. dirty smoke** [4:17] — Clean smoke is thin, blue, and sweet-smelling; dirty smoke is thick, white, and bitter. Always wait for clean smoke before cooking.
- **Two-phase cooking method** [9:41] — The cook has two phases: 30 minutes of low smoke at ~275°F, then a hot braise at 375-400°F in chicken stock and butter until internal temp reaches 190°F.
- **Understanding the stall** [11:40] — The stall is caused by evaporative cooling, where the meat's temperature plateaus. Patience is required to push through to the tender zone (185-205°F).
- **Glazing for competition presentation** [12:17] — After braising, the chicken is glazed with barbecue sauce in multiple layers on the hot grill to create a lacquered finish.

## Transcript

Now, I'd bet my last dollar that you've
never actually had great barbecue
chicken. Not because you haven't tried,
but because what most people think of
barbecue chicken is not even close to
the real thing. The real standard comes
from competition pit masters, where a
single bite can win or lose a trophy.
Competition style barbecue, where the
skin is so perfectly rendered that it
breaks clean when you bite through it.
No pulling, no tearing, just a perfect
bite mark through the skin and the meat.
both perfectly tender and juicy. That's
what we're making today. This is
competition style barbecue chicken. And
it starts with chicken thighs. But
before we get started on that, I need to
make a simple barbecue rub for them.
Now, we're going to omit salt and add
that directly to it. To our barbecue
rub, we're going to add about a
tablespoon of chili powder. Then about a
teaspoon of everything else. cumin,
coriander, garlic powder, onion powder,
a good bit of paprika for that color,
maybe a tablespoon, maybe a half a
teaspoon of cayenne for the heat. Then
about a teaspoon of mustard powder,
about a teaspoon of sugar, black pepper.
Give that a stir. Going to get that into
a little empty spice bottle where I'll
store my little spice blend for when I
need it. People make you buy this when
everything is just in your pantry. Now
that we have that ready, we can get into
our chicken. What we have here is some
nice bone in skin on chicken thighs.
First thing we want to do, we have this
little knuckle sticking out here. And
take my knife and just square off that
edge.
I'm just going to trim up the bottom.
Then we've got all this skin here, which
I don't need all that excess. So, we're
just going to remove it.
Now I'm going to take where the skin is
starting to kind of pull away. And then
it's just sort of barely staying
attached to the chicken down here. And I
want to take my knife and I want to
start to scrape the inside of the skin.
There's this subcutaneous fat under the
skin that doesn't render at low
temperatures. And so scraping it is
what's going to give us that bite
through skin. Now you can take that skin
and we're just going to wrap it. And now
they should hold on their own, but if
you want you can stick a little
toothpick in there and that'll hold it
together. Once it cooks it sort of
congeals and stays that way. Now we're
going to take them season with salt.
Then our rub and then get only the meat
side on the top. Try and avoid getting
the skin too seasoned. Now we're just
going to assemble them back up. And
again, you don't have to do this, but
you can kind of cinch them closed with a
toothpick. Now you don't have to do all
the trimming and all that stuff. I'm
giving you a general technique and
generally trying to show you how you
might do this in a competition, but it
all applies at home. Generally, you want
them roughly equal size so they cook the
same and they're all the same sort of
product to a judge. So, these are going
to go in the fridge uncovered. Then,
we're going to take them over to the
grill in the morning. And before we get
started on the chicken, we need to get
our grill fired up and preheated. And
whether you have like a Komado style
grill like this or Weber kettle, you can
set this up the same way. First, in this
corner right here, I've got this little
sear box. If you just have a kettle, you
can just put it off to the corner. And
I'm going to take some big chunks of
some lump charcoal. Good quality
charcoal. Couple little pieces. Couple
big pieces. Then we're going to place
our starter. Fire it up.
What we're looking to do here is create
white hot coals in this section as like
a way of getting it all started. Once
that's white hot, we're going to fill up
the rest of the basket or just bundle it
up into a corner. We're going to add
some wood to get it nice and smoky. Then
we're going to close the grill, open up
the vents, and try and slowly bring this
up to temperature and work our way
towards clean smoke. Now, if you don't
know, my first job on YouTube, the first
thing that paid me was a barbecue
company hiring me to make the videos,
make the recipes, and if you know
anything about the barbecue community,
they're passionate group of individuals
who can spot a fraud from a mile away.
So, I worked hard to be a truly
competent pitm. And one of the keys to
becoming one is knowing the difference
between clean smoke and dirty smoke.
clean smokes. What happens in the
beginning when the fire is not hot
enough, the smoke becomes thick and
white. When you smell it, it's bitter
and acrid and those compounds connecting
to your meat. It's going to be a bad
smoky flavor. You never want to lift the
hood of the grill and have white thick
smoke billowing out of it. That's the
sign of somebody who doesn't understand
smoke. Good smoke, also known as blue
smoke. There's even a restaurant named
after it. That's the sweet spot. It's
when the smoke clarifies a bit, becomes
almost a bluish hinge, and the aroma is
sweeter. That's the smoke you want to
adhere to your meat. And that's why you
need to warm this up before you start
cooking anything. Now, you can already
see a little bit of white hot spots
starting to develop. Nowadays, we got
these cool little handheld fans,
blowers. This is going to help
supercharge and speed up this process.
You know, a fire needs air and oxygen,
and this creates a whole lot of it. So,
it's almost like using a flamethrower to
warm up those coals and get them going.
You'll probably burn through the starter
a bit faster, but those coals are
starting to glow white hot now, which is
what you want. So, now we got our coals
going. We just supercharged the process.
Took a couple minutes rather than like
15 to 20. I've got some apple wood here.
You can use the wood of your choice.
Going to place it down on the bottom of
the grate. And I'm going to go ahead and
toss in and fill up the basket with more
coals. Get that cooking again. That's
going to be all the fuel we need to cook
these chicken thighs. Then we can close
that grate. And you can see this thick
smoke starting to acrue. This white
smoke,
that's not what you want. We need to
allow this to warm up to so that white
smoke sort of clarifies and turns into
that blue smoke that we spoke about. So,
what I want to do now is close the lid
to about one or two. And I'm going to go
to the bottom and close it to about
three. And I'm going to use that to just
slowly bring this temp up and try and
hit about 250 degrees ambient
temperature where the food is going to
be cooked. After about 3540 minutes, you
see what's going on here? You see that
thick white smoke? That's gone. The
temperature has gotten hot enough so
that all that coal and wood burns
cleanly. The thermometer says about 325
and that thermometer is up top. So that
means on great level, cooking level,
it's around 50° lower, about 270. That's
about the temperature we're ready to
cook our chicken. Now, here we've got
our chicken at it been in the fridge
overnight. All I've done is I have one
of these uh pans that you get from the
supermarket. I filled it with some
chicken stock just to cover the bottom
and a few knobs of butter. That's going
to be the moisture that they both smoke
over in the first half of the cook. And
then the second half of the cook, the
liquid, we're going to braze it in to
make sure it breaks down and get nice
and tender. Now, to make competition
style chicken or any meat for that
matter, you need a vital piece of
equipment that's going to keep track of
the temperature inside of the meat so
that we can ensure we always eat the
perfect thing. Chicken thighs vary in
size, they vary in thickness, and so one
batch might cook for an hour, one might
cook for an hour and 45. Thanks to our
sponsor today, the Tyer Sync Gold Duel,
we can both manage the internal
temperature of our chicken and do it
basically from anywhere. And you need
wireless probes, right? Because this is
going to go inside of the grill. And you
don't want to be fumbling around with
wires everywhere. This thing's got six
probes running through it. Five inside
and one on the outside to monitor the
ambient temp of the grill. What's nice
about that is you can insert that
anywhere and the probes will
automatically find the lowest point. So
you don't need to worry about how you
put it in. It's going to find the lowest
temp. With our thermometers in, our
smoke is clean. All we got to do place
everything right onto the grill on the
indirect side and then close the grill
and we can start to monitor the cook.
Now we can do this from anywhere. We can
manually set the temperature. You can go
from anywhere from 185 to I like it a
little bit more up to 190. And the range
on this is crazy. I can of course
monitor it next to it or I can monitor
it inside. I can monitor in the
bathroom. I can monitor it 3,000 feet
from an unobstructed view and 700 feet
if it's obstructive, but we can do
better than that. Say you forgot some
barbecue sauce. You got to go run an
errand into town. With the Tyer app, you
can monitor all the data from your cook
with literally an unlimited range. With
this thing, you'll never screw up a
piece of meat again. And Tyer's Mother's
Day sale is going on through May 10th.
Prices are already marked down. So, if
you need yourself a reliable
thermometer, then use my code cook show.
They're going to give you an extra 10%
off. Check out the link in my
description. Now, as we arrive around
our cooking temperature, the ambient
temperature around 275. We're already
around 250. So, what I am going to do is
start to refine my vents. Right. I'm
going to go down and we're going to
close it ever so gently to lower it back
down and simmer. So it just gently
arrives around 275. And the same with
the top. These little adjustments are
what make you raise the temperature and
lower the temperature. And you do it in
very small increments so you never flare
the heat up too high and lose control.
But we've got control with our Typher
sink. The ambient temperature changes is
this is obviously the one in the back
and this is the one closest to the heat.
So now that chicken is going to go on
for 30 minutes and it's going to soak up
that good blue smoke, that flavorful
smoke. After 30 minutes, we're hoping it
arrives around 140 or 150 internal
temperature in which we're going to then
cook it in that chicken stock and
butter. We're going to do that for
another 30 45 minutes until we reach our
final internal temperature of around
190, which we set into our sink. Now,
because I'm measuring two pieces of
chicken at different sides and they're
cooking at different temperatures now
about 15 minutes has gone by, I want to
rotate them and try and even it out. I
can see the temperature is getting a
little higher on one side than I want.
So, I'm just going to gently close it to
just a crack.
And the same down below. Soon though,
we're going to open these back up
because the second part of this phase,
we need to get the temperature up to
400. So, the first stage is a low, slow
smoke. The second stage is a hotter
braze. Now, we're about 5 minutes away
from the end of phase one and the
beginning of phase two. Now, phase two
requires us to get the temp inside of
the grill up to around 375400.
So, what I'm going to do now, open the
grates back up. All we're doing is
managing air flow going in to get more
heat kicked up. And then to lower the
heat, we close the air off. Subtle moves
make a bigger difference than you think.
Our chicken's now about 150° internal.
Now, here's what we want to do. Going to
set the grade off to the side, but we're
going to use it later. We've got our
broth here with our butter in it. Just
going to take our chicken, remove the
toothpick, and then place them in the
broth, cover them in foil, and then get
them back on the grill. Then I'm going
to place the grates back on and lay one
of these foil sort of bread tins with
your favorite barbecue sauce. And we're
just going to get that back onto the
grill.
Now, I'm going to give that another 30
minutes, and we're going to see where
we're at. Now, as you'll see on our
Typer sink, that 20° gap is now about
10. And that's because of a thing called
evaporative cooling or the stall. It's
something you hit with a brisket, a
pulled pork, any sort of tough, dark
meat. And so, while the other one was
ahead, that reached the stall quicker.
Just like when we sweat, we cool
ourselves down. The meat is doing the
same thing, preventing the temperature
from increasing at the same rate it was
30 minutes ago. But this is when this
the cooking process slows down a bit and
you got to be patient and allow it to
get through to that tender zone, which
for me is around 185 at minimum all the
way up to 205. So, we've reached our
target temp. Let's get it off the heat.
We got our barbecue sauce here ready to
go. It's nice and hot, which we need.
So, now we can just unwrap them and we
can pull them out and take out the
thermometer. So now we're just going to
take our chicken, our little nuggets.
You want to be gentle, right? We're
trying to win a competition here. And I
want that lacquer on the surface to stay
perfect.
Now our grill's fired up. It's nice and
hot. We're going to get them back on the
grill. Close it up. And every few
minutes, we're going to take our
barbecue sauce and just spoon some more
over. Like to just pour it over. You do
waste a little bit, but what you do is
you get this really incredible looking
end result. Close it back up. And then
we just want to set that second coating.
Three times should do it. Almost like
glazing a cake.
Just going to give these a second to
cool down before we present them to the
judges. Now, I'm not sure why, but a
betetta kale seems to be the preferred
way to present it to the judges. So, out
of our cooked chicken, we're going to
select the four best pieces. What I'm
looking for is the equal shape, the best
looking, the most consistently shaped
four pieces.
Now, we're going to give one a bite.
It's a little tear, a little pull on the
skin, but as you could see, bite
through. Moist,
juicy, tender. Now, because of the skin,
I would have lost the competition. I
think these cooked a bit faster than
when I tested them. A little less time
in the braise, which didn't allow the
skin enough time to break down.
Everything else, 10 out of 10. Chicken's
cooked great. It's tender. It's moist.
It's glazed right. It's not a
competition cuz it's easy. When I tested
this, also brazed it uncovered. Allows
that skin to get a little bit more crisp
and have a little more bite- through
tenderness to it. So, you can experiment
how you want, but if you want the recipe
and you want to make this this summer,
which I recommend you do, recipe is
going to be down in the description.
Thank you, Tyer, for sponsoring this
video. That's all that I have today.
I'll see you next time. Until then, take
care of yourself and go feed yourself.