she cooks…he cleans

…and a product review for Bone Suckin’ Sauce!

I love bbq chicken on the grill – especially the bits of crispy skin with sauce, blackened with caramelized sugar from the flames.  However some days grilling outdoors just isn’t going to happen, for instance when the cold winter wind is blowing rain.  Brrr!  Thankfully,  pretty-fine barbeque chicken can be produced inside.

This isn’t so much a recipe as it is a product review, since I didn’t make my own barbeque sauce.  I have one recipe for barbeque sauce here, but if you don’t want to take the time, it is possible to find a great sauce with no high fructose corn syrup, no MSG, no gluten, no preservatives, and no fat (if you care about fats in your sauce; I do not).  My new favorite sauce out there is Bone Suckin’ Sauce, produced for Ford’s Foods in Raleigh, NC.  The best thing about this sauce, aside from the taste and the name, is it is made using REAL ingredients.  It is sweetened with honey and molasses, spiced up with horseradish, garlic and peppers, and has a really nice balance of tomato vs. vinegar.  This might sound insignificant, but I also love the color of this sauce – a nice rich, vibrant red, not the dull, tired looking colors of other sauces on the grocery shelf.

If you can’t find Bone Suckin’ Sauce at your grocer’s, you can pick from a lot of styles (thicker, hotter) and flavors (original, mustard), here.

Back to the chicken… the goal was to bake the chicken in the sauce until it was fork tender.  I used chicken thighs, skin-on.  No one likes pale, flabby skin, so before these thighs went into the sauce, I browned them well on both sides in a skillet.  Not only did this avoid the flabby skin problem, but browning the chicken also adds another dimension to the taste, as well as renders out some of the chicken fat that would otherwise end up as a greasy layer on top of the barbeque sauce after baking.

Ingredients:

• 6-8 chicken thighs, bone-in, skin-on
• Kosher salt and pepper (or bbq seasoning)
• extra-virgin olive oil, or fat of choice for browning chicken
• Bone Suckin’ Sauce, or bbq sauce of choice

Preheat oven to 350F.  Season the chicken on both sides with salt and pepper.  In a large skillet, working in batches, brown the chicken thighs well on both sides (about 4 minutes/side). Do not crowd the skillet.  Transfer the browned chicken to a baking dish that will hold the chicken in a single layer.

Cover the chicken with barbeque sauce.  Cover the baking dish with foil, and bake for 30 to 40 minutes.  Pour off any excess grease.  Increase the oven temperature to 400F and cook for an additional 10-15 minutes, uncovered, to thicken up the sauce and “recrisp” the chicken.  Serve it hot!

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Boy howdy that’s good bbq! And so is the soundtrack. First, the official house music for SCHC’s Santa Fe headquarters is John Prine- something about his wry worldview and a fire is how we spend most evenings. His new one, The Singing Mailman Delivers will be a favorite, I’m sure. Drawn from recordings made before his first album, this is classic Prine. Illegal smile, indeed!

Guy Clark is a legend among songwriters- “LA Freeway”, “The Randall Knife” and more are well-loved. His new live album, Songs & Stories is a glimpse behind the songwriting process with Clark and a great band.