Bubba Stew's BBQ Chicken-n-Tater Soup

Twern't no pictures taken so if'n ya cant read, call in your best storyteller and sit a spell.

Needed a soup for for the church business meeting. Here's what i did.

First i started with some chicken broth ( about half gal) from another cook a while ago that involved boiled chicken... to that i added half an onion, chopped, and half a bag of baby carrots chopped up a lil bit. We had one of them rotisserie chickens from the  grocery sto, so the carcass from that went in to give it smore chicken flavor.

That all cooked up for a good long while with some coarse ground pepper, sea salt, granulated garlic at a low boil. I then strained out all the chunks.

Next i finished seperating the good chunks of meat from the bone and put them back into the strained chicken juice along with the UNCOOKED half onion, and the rest of the UNCOOKED bag of carrots, both chopped. 

then i prepped the chicken up, with a simple brine half n half sugar and kosher salt in enough water to cover the new chicken ( about 5 chicken breasts) let that set for a few hours, you could let it go over night, but this is all i had.

Now about an hour or so maybe two... i like to get the potatoes in the mix, this thickens the soup a bit too as they cook and let out their starches, simply peel, and chunk them up into manageable sizes and you are golden. 

The chicken goes on the (for me) Weber  22.5" kettle,  with about 3/4 full chimney of coals, with a good amount of wood, i wanted a nice HOT smoke on this one, i didnt even temp the fire, just let it get hot, and cook indirect. The wood was a mix of a few different woods, Hickory, California Pepper tree, and a lil bit of apple. The apple went in the chimney of coals the  CPT went on the coal grate, (under the coals when dumped out) and the hickory went on top.

As the fire heats up, it's time to get the chix ready for the fire. First ya gotta rinse off the brine, dont need any extra stuff cept the rub that you may choose. that done, pat the birdboobies dry, and install the rub, today it was simply OLD BAY RUB, which is old bay seasoning's foray into the rub world, seems to have a lil more brown sugar than the regular OLD BAY SEASONING. the stuff is good, it works! i actually use it in the Turkey brine recipe that i used a few times this winter.

With the fire ready and the soup almost at a boil again, it's time to get the chicken on, across from the fire, as to cook indirectly, it cooks till it's done.

Chopped up the chicken after it finished, and throw it in the soup, let it cook a lil bit longer, and BAM!! Done, Eat it up!!

It went well with the corn bread Crystal made, and we only brought back 1/3 of it from church, so they musta liked it a lil bit. With that, i'll let ya get to bed, or get cookin, or whatever it is you might do after.

OUT