Description

The secret to moist, delicious chicken is not much of a secret: it’s adding moisture! Putting a chicken to roast on a beer can full of the beverage is a time-proven favorite, but it can be hard to keep from tipping over and spilling onto your grill. Steven Raichlen’s Beer Can Chicken Roaster solves this problem, providing a steady base for your chicken and your choice of liquid. Best of Barbecue’s Sarah shows you how to use the product, as well as gives tips for delicious barbecued chicken that is cooked to perfection.

Transcript

Steven Raichlen literally wrote the book on beer can chicken. Beer can chicken is the easiest way to make healthy, juicy, delicious chicken on your grill or in your oven. He also designed this beer can chicken rack that makes it even easier for you to make that great chicken at home. Let me show you a little bit about it.

There’s three parts to it: first is this stainless steel canister. Now the canister is meant to hold either some wine, beer, soda, juice, stock, whatever it is that you’d like to flavor your beer can chicken with. If you don’t want to use the canister or if you have something that’s already in a can, you can just put the can right into the rack itself, right here, which is what I’m going to be doing today. I’ve got a can of soda that fits just perfectly inside of there; it’s going to hold any twelve-ounce cans that you have. And then the third part of the rack is this drip pan which will catch all of the grease that drips down from your chicken, which is another great part about this product because you don’t have to worry about flare-ups because everything’s being caught in the drip pan.

So, I just want to show you now how to get the chicken ready for the rack. I’m going to drizzle my chicken here with little bit of oil so that my rub will stick to it a little bit better. Now this rack will hold any size of chicken, this is about a four-pound chicken which is an excellent size; it’s gonna feed by whole family. I have an all-purpose rub I’m using, this is Steven’s All-Purpose Rub. We say to use two to three teaspoons per pound, you really want to kind of go heavy on this because you want the flavor to really permeate the skin. If I were going to let this marinate overnight I might use a little bit less. But if I’m going directly to grill I’ll go a little bit heavier than I normally would. You really want to rub it in, and I’m going to be sure that I get a little bit inside the cavity as well.

And then I’m going to add a little bit to my can of soda. It’s important to note that when you’re using a can, you need to actually get rid of a little bit of the liquid inside so that doesn’t boil over and make a big mess on your grill.

So, that looks great. I’m ready to slip the chicken onto the rack. All right, so, I’m just going to take the cavity of the chicken and place at over the can just like that, and I got my legs in place like that and covering up the neck a little bit, so this is ready for the grill. We’re going to put this onto the grill over indirect heat; the ambient temperatures should be around four hundred degrees. It’s going to cook for about forty five minutes to an hour. I already have one that I’ve been cooking on the grill, and it looks beautiful, the skin is so crispy and beautiful. You can see that I’ve got all of this juice collected here, which would be great for a gravy if I wanted to make one.

I also want to show you how easy it is then to remove this from the rack itself. So I’ve put on insulated gloves, which means I can just grab the chicken and get off the rack so easily, like that. There we go! So there you have it: the beer can chicken rack by Steven Raichlen. Enjoy!

For more tips and tricks, check out our other videos.

Daniel Replogle

Daniel does business development and marketing at The Companion Group. When he isn’t writing you can find him rock climbing or doing ceramic artwork.