Like many of you, we eat a lot of chicken especially during the week. Why? It’s inexpensive, tasty and considered a healthier alternative vs many other types of meat. But many people, especially the health conscious ones, tend to only focus on the chicken breast for their cooking and they ignore the dark meat. This is a big mistake in my opinion. Not only is a chicken breast more expensive to buy but it’s simply not as flavorful as the dark meat is.
For this recipe we bought a large packet of drumsticks for the super market. It was a large pack, about 16, which meant we had a fair amount of leftovers. If you are having a party and need to cook and don’t want to break the bank, this is a perfect recipe.
So how do we make regular ol chicken drums special? It’s all in the sauce. For this recipe we used the tequila lime recipe we had used for our stuffed portabellas and just made about 3 times as much of it. This is the great things about learning to make your own sauce recipes. They are super versatile and the end result can taste totally different depending on what you are cooking with.
Here are the ingredients for the sauce:
- 1 ½ a Cup of Tequila
- Juice of 6 Limes
- 3/4 of a stick of butter
- About three pinches of the EME Fish & Poultry Seasoning
- 15 Shakes from a Sale Shaker depending on your preference
- 3 tbsp. of flour to thicken (Here is the flower is used available on Amazon – low carb flour)
Preparation
The first step is to actually make the sauce
- You will need a medium size sauce pot for this step.
- Grab the butter and put in the pot at high heat until it fully melts.
- Once the butter melts, pour the tequila in and squeeze the lime.
- At this point I back off the heat to about medium and let the sauce reduce.
- Once it has reduced I put the flour in and whisk it with a spoon, this will thicken the sauce.
Marinating
Once the sauce is made you are going to need to let the chicken cool so you can use a portion of it as the marinade. I used two large freezer bags and put equal parts of the chicken inside of each bag. Using a ladle, I put enough of the tequila lime sauce to cover all of the chicken in the bags. In my case about 2/3s of sauce went in as marinade. Your marinade should look something like this:
Cooking
Once your chicken has been sitting in the marinade for at least 30 minutes (More is better here) you are ready to cook!
Here are the steps
- Make sure your Grill is clean and ready to go.
- Fire up the grill to about 400 degrees.
- Using tongs grab the marinated chicken and put it on the hot grill.
- Pour the marinated sauce into a bowl.
- Make sure that the sauce that wasn’t used as marinade is put into a separate bowl is this will be used later.
- Baste the chicken (I used a Silcon Basting brush like this one – http://amzn.to/1qewnw5) with the marinated sauce close the lid to your grill.
Note – If you have a gas grill you are going to need to keep a close one the chicken, the fat from the dark meat will drip onto the heat plates and can cause a flare up. If you see smoke coming out open the lid. If a flare up is happening, move the chicken off the flame and let the flare up burn off. You can also keep the lid open and turn the heat up. It will take a little longer to cook but you will be able to see what’s going on easier.
- Every Few minutes, rotate your drumsticks and baste them with the marinate sauce. This will begin to cook the tequila flavor right into the skin.
- By the time the chicken is done you should have basted all of the marinade sauce on the chicken.
- Once the chicken is done plate the chicken into a separate container and with a separate brush, baste the sauce that was not used as marinade onto the chicken to give it a great finishing touch. Make sure you either wash your brush or use another one.
That’s it! You are now ready to eat.
Let us know what you think.
