Turbodog Chicken
About two years ago, Av and I drove to Hamilton (AL) and stopped at Jerry Brown’s pottery shop. Jerry Brown is a well-known Alabama potter who uses a mule-powered mill to help him pull clay up out of the ground, and he was also the recipient in 1992 of a National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship Award. There is a film about his pottery here.
At the shop, we bought a pot to cook chicken with. As you can see in the picture above, the pot has a cylinder shape in the middle. The idea is that you fill the cylinder shape up with orange juice or beer, or whatever you think might flavor the meat right for the dish you’re going to be serving.
What’s pictured above is my Jerry Brown chicken pot, a chicken that I’ve prepared with a coating of olive oil (to make the skin crisp) and a variety of herbs (I have one of those wonderful filled spice racks from Dean and Deluca that looks like a test tube rack, and for this dish I used the tube labeled ‘herbs for meat’ since it really does have a nice combination of herbs that flavor chicken and beef well), and a bottle of Turbodog to fill the cylinder about 3/4 full with.
Once the chicken is prepared for cooking, you just set him in the chicken pot with the cylinder up inside where you would otherwise put a stuffing.
Whee! I’m ready to be cooked!
I preheated the oven to 450* and cooked him about 1-1/2 hours. I put the rack on the lowest part of the oven to make room for the dish since it’s pretty tall.
I have to say, this is the best whole chicken I’ve made! The beer makes the breast meat especially juicy and delicious. No part of the chicken was dry – at all. Yum!
Cooling off a bit from the oven. Yummy!
I should also mention that you can cook chicken this way on the grill. Just take a can of beer, put it up inside the chicken, and let it cook that way. I’ll post pics of doing it that way later this summer.