In the summer, I get lazy when it comes to making supper. I want something that doesn't require much fussing. It doesn't have to be fast, but it does have to deliver flavor, without making the cook sweat.
I came up with such a dish the other day. I call it yellow chicken. You put a whole bird on a barbecue grill. You mop it with a sauce made with yellow mustard and peppers. You let nature, mostly smoke, fire and sauce, do the rest.
This is not speedy fare; I let my chicken sit next to that slow fire for a little more than 3 hours. But it is fine eating. The chicken meat was as moist as the morning dew. The skin, crispy and tinged with mustard, was so good it made me want to slap my face to make sure this was real and not a dream. (It also made me want to slap some sense into those sour souls who say to never eat chicken skin.)
And was it ever easy. The hardest part was fetching the chicken from the grocery store; but then again, shopping is often the toughest part of cooking. Anyway, right in the middle of this endeavor, I scooted down to my neighborhood swimming pool for a dip. When I returned, I lifted the lid off the barbecue kettle and supper was ready. That is my idea of summer cooking.
I confess that I came across this recipe the hard way, after first trying a complicated recipe that didn't work. I was paging through cookbooks, fishing for new ways to barbecue chicken, when I bit on a bad idea. This recipe called for marinating chicken breasts for several hours in a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil and mint leaves and kosher salt.
Then these grilled chicken breasts were served with a sauce made with yogurt and pomegranate juice. I think one of the lures of this treatment was that I had a lot of mint growing in the garden and a bottle of pomegranate juice in the fridge (doesn't everyone?).
This dish, from Mastering the Grill by Andrew Schloss and David Joachim, disappointed me. The two teaspoons of kosher salt in the marinade overpowered the mint and lemon and made the breasts too salty. The pomegranate sauce, while a pretty shade of pink, was just so-so in flavor. Moreover, while preparing the dish, I came dangerously close to perspiring. In short, it was too much work for too little satisfaction.
A few days later, I was once again flipping through cookbooks when I spotted a recipe for Carolina Chicken Mop Sauce in Barbecue Nation. The author of the book, Fred D. Thompson, is a food writer from Raleigh, N.C., not the former U.S. senator from Tennessee and oft-mentioned potential Republican presidential candidate. His book had 45 recipes for barbecued chicken - most of them, like the other recipes in the book, pulled from backyard cooks.
Usually, the presence of yellow mustard in barbecue means the dish hails from South Carolina. But this recipe, Thompson said, came from the late V.F. Talley, a family friend whom Thompson used to visit at White Lake in southeast North Carolina.
People have trouble barbecuing chicken, Thompson said in a brief telephone interview from his North Carolina home. The biggest mistake they make, he said, is putting sauce that has sugar in it on the chicken while the fire is too hot.
"If you sauce too soon, you get a towering inferno," Thompson said.
The only sweetness in this sauce, he said, was in the yellow mustard.
I fooled around with the recipe a bit, making it even less work for me. The original instructions called for making the sauce and putting it on pieces of chicken. But I put the sauce on the whole bird. If I had used parts, I would have to tend them, flipping them endlessly. I wanted to go swimming, so I used a whole chicken, figuring that I would have to flip it only once, then pretty much forget about it.
Also, I cooked the bird in an aluminum foil pan. I have become a fan of these 8-inch by 12-inch foil pans. They keep things juicy.
So I whipped together the sauce, and cooked it on the stove top. Then I slathered the yellow stuff on the bird and let it cook in the foil pan, with the lid on the kettle grill. The pan held the juices, and heat from the fire made the skin just short of crunchy.
I sliced the bird and served it with tossed salad. The mustard sauce, which had a distinctive bite, went on the side. The dish reminded me of slightly twisted lyrics from the musical Porgy and Bess: summertime, and the cooking is easy.
rob.kasper@baltsun.com
Mustard Barbecued Chicken
Serves 4 to 6
1 chicken, 5 to 6 pounds, whole or cut into pieces
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 to 3 sprigs fresh parsley
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup yellow prepared mustard
1/4 cup vegetable oil (divided use)
salt and pepper to taste
Rinse chicken under cold running water and pat dry with paper towels.
In a small saucepan combine the broth, red-pepper flakes, peppercorns, parsley and bay leaf and cook over low heat about 30 minutes. Remove the parsley and bay leaf. Stir in the mustard and heat thoroughly. Set aside. The sauce will keep, tightly covered and refrigerated, for up to 2 weeks.
Prepare a medium-low fire, charcoal or gas. If you have an aluminum foil pan, place the whole chicken in it. (If using parts, cook them directly over the fire.)
Lightly brush the chicken with oil on all sides. Add the remaining oil to the sauce.
Place the whole chicken, with or without pan, on the grill opposite the fire. Baste with sauce. Cover with lid, leaving vent holes slightly open. After 45 minutes, turn whole chicken using tongs inserted in chicken cavity, and baste again. Put lid back on and cook at least another 45 minutes, up to 2 hours.
If cooking parts, brown each side over fire by allowing it to cook about 15 minutes, then turn and baste. Continue cooking, turning and basting for about 1 1/4 hours.
In both cooking styles, juices should run clear when chicken is pierced at the joint with a fork.
Remove the chicken to a platter and keep warm with foil. Return remaining sauce to low heat and bring to boil. Adjust seasoning. Pour sauce over chicken and serve.
Adapted from "Barbecue Nation" by Fred D. Thompson
Per serving (based on 6 servings): 534 calories, 49 grams protein, 36 grams fat, 9 grams saturated fat, 1 gram carbohydrate, 0 grams fiber, 149 milligrams cholesterol, 451 milligrams sodium