Smoked Spatchcock Chicken, Alabama style

Do you want saucy, smoky, juicy chicken? Do you want chicken that will make everyone lick their fingers and ask for more? Yes, you do! So do we, which is why we decided to spatchcock a chicken, smoke it, baste it, and dunk it in Alabama white sauce. The effort? Low. The results? Amazing! 

Table of Contents

• What makes this smoked chicken different?
• Why spatchcock a chicken?
• BBQ chicken temps: When is your chicken done?
  • Chicken breast pull temp
  • Chicken thigh pull temp
  • Spatchcock chicken pull temp
• BBQ chicken cook temp
• When to add the Alabama white sauce
• Spatchcocked chicken with Alabama White Sauce Recipe
  • For the chicken
  • For the sauce

What makes this smoked chicken different?

We’re always looking for new ways to cook chicken—one of our favorite meats. But there are only so many. While we’ve come nowhere close to showing you all the ways you can cook chicken, we did feel it was time to do a variation on something we’ve done before. After all, small differences in cooking can make a big difference in results.

What makes this smoked chicken different is two things: the Alabama white sauce—tangy, creamy, far tastier than it seems it should be—and the spatchcocking.

And yes, we’ve written about Alabama white sauce chicken before. But it hits differently when we spatchcock the chicken, dunk the whole bird in sauce, and baste it more generously. We combine a favorite method with a favorite sauce to make something unforgettable.

Why spatchcock a chicken?

If you haven’t been on this blog much, spatchcocking may be new to you. First things first, then. Spatchcocking is butterflying poultry by cutting out the backbone. This gives us…

• More surface area for better smoke penetration and faster cooking
• Protection for the breasts to prevent overcooking
• Exposure for the legs to cook more quickly and tenderize better (more on this and he previous one below)
• A fun presentation

Spatchcocking improves a chicken whether you’re roasting it in the oven or smoking it—and we love it.

BBQ chicken temps: When is your chicken done?

BBQ chicken has two perennial problems: overcooking and undercooking. These polar-opposite problems bedevil the chicken cook. Fear of undercooking leads people to overcook. Carelessness and an attitude of being too-good-for-tools lead people to serve chicken that is…more rare than most would like.

But thermal understanding helps us avoid both pitfalls. Chicken breast meat dries out starting at 160°F (71°C), so cooking breast to 165°F (74°C) is a terrible idea, from a taste standpoint. But chicken legs and thighs stay slimy, chewy, and rubbery until they get up to 175°F (79°C).

Chicken breast pull temp

To keep your chicken breasts juicy and tender, pull them from heat at about 158°F (70°C). Don’t worry, if they stay that warm for 26 seconds, they’re just as safe to eat as if you’d cooked them to 165°F (74°C). (You can aim even lower, if you give it even more time at pull temp. Read our post on Chicken Internal Temps to understand how that works.)

Chicken thigh pull temp

It takes more heat to cook the connective tissues in dark meat down into gelatin. The collagen and other tough proteins that make dark meat slimy and rubbery break down quickly, starting at about 175°F (79°C). Cook them to at least that temperature—but don’t worry about going even 20°F (11°C) higher! They are that thermally resilient.

That thermal resilience is why we often recommend thighs over breasts in almost every application. They’re far more likely to actually stay juicy and tender than breasts. As we’re cooking a whole bird, we’ll count on spatchcocking to get us the temperature differentials we want.

Spatchcock chicken pull temp

Great, so thighs and breasts have different pull temps—what do I do with my whole bird? Relax. That’s why spatchcocking rules the roost when it comes to chicken cookery.

Use your RFX MEAT™ wireless probe to probe the breasts and by the time they reach 158°F (70°C), the thighs will be at or above 175°F (79°C). With this method, we cook both parts to temp at the same time. Culinary genius.

We know that RFX will give accurate readings wherever it is, but that doesn’t mean we’ll always put it in exactly the right spot. Chicken is only as done as its least-done part, right? So we need to verify our pull temp when our alarm sounds.

For this, we’re using our new thermometer, Sizzle™! We’ll verify that we find no lower temps in the breast, then pull the chicken from heat.

BBQ chicken cook temp

And what temperature should we cook the chicken at? Cooking at 300°F (149°C)—relatively high for smoked chicken—avoids the leathery skin endemic to this cooking method. Use your RFX’s Airprobe to monitor the pit temp throughout the cook.

When to add the Alabama white sauce

We seasoned out birds with salt, pepper, and paprika before smoking them. But we wanted the flavor of the sauce to be part of the bird, not just something on the surface. We waited until the seasonings formed a bark that adhered to the surface when scratched, then basted the birds heavily with the sauce. That generous coating not only looked amazing when cooked, but gave the chicken the zip we wanted it to.

But that basting is not all! We made enough sauce to make a shallow pool of it in a big bowl. Then we held our chicken by the wings (the legs will fall off if you hold it by the legs!) and dunked the whole bird. Not gonna lie—that was fun.

To be clear, we didn’t submerge the whole bird, but we got the whole meat face in there, and it was dripping and saucey and delicious. We recommend it.

Give this method and sauce a try. Set up your RFX and check your temps with Sizzle. Remember that the breasts can be a little cooler than you may have expected, and the thighs can be a good deal warmer. Do it, and you’ll be back for more! In fact, you may want to make two birds at a time, like we did… Happy cooking!

Tool	Why We Used it
RFX Starter Kit	Wireless access to temps? Sign us up! Strong connections and high accuracy make it a winner.
Alternate:Smoke X	Long-range receiver capability and on-device buttons are our friends.
Sizzle	Fast and accurate temps, a super-bright™ backlight display, and 270° rotation for our left-handed ThermoWorkers.