Drumsticks

This is the first food I ever made that got requests for seconds, and at one point a marriage proposal. It's not really BBQ as it is done in the oven with no smoke. It's really braised drumsticks, but it's braised in BBQ sauce. It's been a superbowl sunday favorite with my friends for many years now, so here's the recipe. Please don't be underwhelmed!

What you will need:

Deep baking dish or roasting pan
Aluminum foil
About 3 bottles of your favorite cheap bbq sauce
garlic powder
Approximately 5 lbs of drumsticks

cooking:

Heat over to 275

Put chicken in a single layer into your roasting pan or baking dish. Squeeze as many as you can in. Cover liberally with garlic powder. Then pour sauce over chicken. Get some on every piece. I add sauce until it comes up between 1/3 and 1/2 way up the height of the drumsticks. Cover pan with foil. Put in oven. About 2 1/2 hours later remove the foil and let bake for another hour.

If you have to move them to another vessel to transport to your buddy's house to watch a football game, I would suggest a large spoon for removing them from the pan. Scoop them up from underneath. Using your tongs or fingers will likely result in the bone sliding out and leaving delicious hunks of saucy meat in the roasting pan.

That's it. For as popular as this recipe is amongst my friends, I'm kind of sad to say that it isn't more involved.

A note about recipes on this site

From time to time I will be posting recipes for various sauces, rubs, meats, sides, etc. All recipes are, at best, approximations. Especially the rubs. I'm terrible at measuring these things. For example, for the bbq sauce recipe, I put 3 cups of ketchup because it came in a 24 oz bottle and I guessed a cup and a half of cider vinegar because I used about that much to clean the rest of the ketchup out of the bottle. But a recipe reading, dump a bottle of ketchup into a sauce pan, fill the bottle half way with vinegar to rinse the bottle out and then dump that in the sauce pan. Add some onion powder, garlic powder, sugar and black pepper and simmer for a while just isn't a very useful recipe.

For recipes on this site, and in my opinion for ANY recipe, follow it at first. If you like it, great, keep using it. If you think it is missing a little something, add it. If it's got too much of something, reduce it. Cooking in general and BBQ in particular should be delicious experimentation. In my experience few methods of cooking are as forgiving and easily allow the cook to add his own flourish as BBQ. Don't be afraid to tinker. At the end of the day you have to eat your food. You should enjoy it!

Good for everything BBQ Sauce

This is a basic Kansas City style sauce with some extra vinegar thrown in. It's easy to make and tasty on just about everything.

3 cups of ketchup
1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
3 tbsp brown sugar
4 tbsp onion powder
4 tbsp garlic powder
grind of black pepper to taste

Mix everything in a sauce pan and simmer 1-2 hours. I especially like this on pulled pork sandwiches, but I can't think of too many things I wouldn't put it on.