How to Make Grilled Spice-Rubbed Chicken Drumsticks

Dan shows Julia how to make perfect Grilled Spice-Rubbed Chicken Drumsticks.

Get the recipe for Grilled Spice-Rubbed Drumsticks: https://cooks.io/2U7Vft2
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Most recipes for grilled chicken focus only on the chicken breast and completely ignore the other parts in particular the lowly drumstick yet the drumstick has a lot going for it it’s less expensive it’s made of juicy dark meat and it comes with its own handle but you can’t just grill a drumstick as

You would a chicken breast or you’ll end up with this flabby gross skin the meat’s usually pretty tough and oh worst fart gets a little bloody right there next to the bone oh it’s kind of gross so today dana’s going to show us how to grill a

Drumstick the right way i’m so excited we’re doing this this is like my original chicken cut like the drumstick as a kid you just always want to eat that it’s always in cartoons and it looks really great but then you go to barbecues now and you always avoid it

Right because it’s going to be like that so we’re going to finally give drumsticks their due and it’s really easy we’re going to start with five pounds which is really easy to buy the supermarket there’s no prep involved the first step is we’re actually going to brine them okay even though it’s dark

Meat even though it’s dark meat we usually reserve that for white meat we want this to be the ultimate drumstick recipe and so what we’re actually going to do is cook them to a slightly higher temperature than we normally would really break down that top collagen so

We won’t have chewy meat we’ll have nice juicy tender meat we’re going gonna start with two quarts of cold water and a half a cup of table salt because of that higher temperature we have a tendency to lose some of that moisture so we’re gonna try and trap

More of it with the brine you’re looking to see if all the salt is dissolved yes and that’s actually a pretty important step it is a very important step so if it’s not dissolved it’s not gonna do much work as a brine i remember the first time i brined i

Totally didn’t let it dissolve and when i put it in a zipper lock back and then when i was done it was like sludge and it wasn’t brined at all it wasn’t brand at all it was just sitting in water for a while yep and so when it turns

Basically clear when you can see through it again you know that you’ve dissolved it all in there so we’re just going to transfer these over we’re going to brine these for 30 to 60 minutes that’s pretty fast it is and it’s the time it takes us

To get the rest of prep done and get the grill going so it’s not a big deal so this is going to be in the refrigerator for that time i’m going to do it once we finish with our rub all right put this aside here so we want this to be super approachable

And something you add to your repertoire right so the flavor profile we’re going for is classic barbecue we’re going to achieve that by doing a rub so we’re going to start with three tablespoons of brown sugar we need sweetness and the sugar is going to help brown a little

Bit on the grill as well next up we have a tablespoon of paprika gotta have paprika in your barbecue it’s like a rule i think it’s a law isn’t it so then we’ve also got a tablespoon of chili powder two teaspoons of garlic powder ooh hello

That’s a lot the thing is this is the place to use garlic powder right like this is the flavor profile that you expect it in it works here it’s not the garlic you always want to use but it’s perfect for a rub i also have three quarters of a teaspoon of table salt

Three quarters of teaspoon of ground black pepper and a quarter teaspoon of cayenne you’re right those are all pantry friendly ingredients and it’s classic right i mean you can almost taste what this is going to be like before i even put it on the chicken we’re just going to mix it up here

I like that you’re using the whisk to put a dry rub because you’re actually just breaking up the sugar so then it mixes nicely with the spices so julia i brined these for the full hour because i really want them to be extra juicy just for you oh thank you

You’re welcome so anyway i took them out and i’m just gonna pat them dry here we want a little bit of moisture on the surface so our rub sticks to them but we don’t want them to be too wet so we’ve got our our rub here i’m going

To transfer it to a large plate it’s going to make it a lot easier to dredge all of them in there just kind of spread it out like this for the dredging process it’s not that difficult but there isn’t but there’s a couple little tricks so a

Lot of times the skin can get peeled back like this and you get a lot of flavor on the meat which is nice but it tends to overcook on the grill so you want to make sure that skin is all the way down there and then what i’m going

To do is just kind of roll it around try and get it on as much of the drumstick as i can sometimes it’s hard to get the handle while you’re doing this but we’ll have a little bit left over that we can go through and just cover those as much

Flavor as possible in there and then i just pat off any excess which is gonna fall off later on the grill anyway i’d rather have it here and then get to use it hmm that looks good already right you know we thought about glazes for these but when you’re eating something out of

Hand sticky glazes are coming kind of a mess the rub really is nice for that okay so i’m just gonna finish the rest of these up and we’re gonna head out to the grill sounds good we’ve got our gas grill preheating for about 15 minutes over high heat on all of the burners

You can see the heat coming off that guy it’s very hot we’re not going to cook the drumsticks directly over this intense heat we saw a lot of recipes that did something similar where it’s over medium-high heat the whole time it’s an easy formula to remember just

Throw them on but it doesn’t produce very good drumsticks one of the big reasons is we render a lot of fat from the skin and if it’s right over the heat it just flares up also tends to overcook them so we’re gonna use a two heat method here and the first thing we’re

Gonna do is kill these two burners so we’ve got our primary burner on and these are off we’re gonna do nice indirect cooking first before i do that i’m gonna scrape and clean the grill okay i have a paper towel with just a little bit of vegetable oil here

And i run it right over the grates you want to do a really thorough job because skin has a tendency to stick a bit more than other things so by putting the oil on the hot grill grates you’re actually making more of a non-stick surface

All right time to put the chicken on so this is our primary burner nice and hot we’re gonna go right next to it here now you can see i orient them kind of opposite so they nestle in really nicely you can fit a lot of chicken on one grill

You can really smell those spices as soon as they hit the grill so i’m going to cover this now and we’re going to go for about 25 minutes before we flip them cooking them really nice and gently all right okay so that’s been 25 minutes ooh these guys over here haven’t been

Cooking quite as fast as these ones because they’re not as close to the heat source so we’re just going to flip flop and the way i like to do that is first move them out of the way over here and then slide these over ah very organized looks like something you

Figured out after you did it wrong once or twice yeah so we’re going to close this and continue to cook until the chicken registers 185 to 190 degrees and that’s well over the same temperature we need for chicken of 160 to 165 but during that time at the higher temperature it

Makes a really big difference breaks down a lot of that collagen into really supple gelatin so they’re nice and juicy and tender it takes another 25 to 30 minutes all right so the total cooking time is a little less than an hour that’s right it’s been another 25 minutes we’re going

To take a look here starting to look good they really do look good still not super pretty because we’ve got one more step to do but i want to check the temp here so we’re gonna go into the thickest part we’re looking for 185 degrees to 190 degrees and that’s

Perfect right there on the nose nice and hot so now i’m gonna transfer them to the hot side of the grill this burn we’ve had on the whole time to get really nice crisping and char so it’s only going to take about five minutes here to get them nice and crisp

All over and i’ll keep rotating as we go be nice and beautiful on all sides okay those look amazing all right let’s get them off you don’t want to mess around while they’re on the hot side do you they brown really quickly oh definitely yeah we’ve rendered all that fat so it crisps

Up really quickly you would want to pay close attention at this point yeah not a time to walk away no it looks so good oh those look delicious so now we’re going to cover them with foil bring them inside let them rest a couple minutes and then it’s time to eat sounds good

Can i do the big reveal please all right we’ve got some oh hello gorgeous chicken mmm so you just have to convince people at your barbecue that these aren’t the drumsticks they’re used to right once they get into them right they’re gone i’m just gonna serve you up all right

There’s nothing left to say at this point it’s really it’s an eating game at this point i like that we don’t actually have any utensils here because drumsticks they’re straight up they’ve got handles right that’s so good that’s actually tender oh i like this one shrub it’s it’s not

Spicy it’s just a little hint a little floral it’s like you’re not gnawing it off the bone like you normally are with with the drumsticks it’s tender it’s really juicy from that brine and the skin you can eat it it’s not flabby it’s nice and rendered

Cooking up to 185 190 it sounds really high but it makes it so tender it’s cooked all the way to the bone none of that bloody bone stuff and then the brine really keeps it juicy too yeah it’s very juicy these are fantastic thank you dan you’re welcome

To make the ultimate grilled drumsticks grind them for 30 minutes then coat with a simple spice rub build a two level fire start the chicken on the cool side then move it to the hot side of the grill to finish and there you have it from america’s test kitchen to your

Kitchen the ultimate recipe for grilled spiced rub chicken drumsticks these are darn tootin good i’ve never heard you say that before thanks for watching america’s test kitchen what’d you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you’re excited to make or you can just

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