JUICY Smoked Pulled Chicken on a Pellet Grill

Smoked pulled chicken is the secret weapon your BBQ lineup needs. Juicy, flavorful, and packed with smoky goodness, this recipe is perfect for sandwiches, tacos, or meal prep. I’ll show you how to smoke it low and slow on a pellet grill, with tips to keep it moist and shred like a dream.

Grab your rub, fire up that pellet grill, and let’s turn chicken into something worth pulling.

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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:13 Prepping Chicken
02:57 Setting up Pellet Grill
03:33 BBQ Sauce Recipe
06:08 Finishing Smoked Chicken
06:50 Tips for Juicy Pulled Chicken
08:32 Pulled Chicken Sandwich

#pulledchicken #smokedchicken #pelletgrill

Smoke pulled chicken done right is one of the tastiest meats in barbecue. I’m going to show you how to pull it off at a pellet grill and my top tips for making sure that it’s as juicy and flavorful as possible when you’re ready to serve. Pulled chicken doesn’t have to suck. Let’s prep the chicken. So, you want to use some kitchen shears or poultry shears and then cut along the backbone here. Now, I like to smoke my chicken in halves, not just spatchcock, because I find that it allows you to deeply season um all the sides. Really, uh gives you more grill space, too, if you’re going to do a bunch of chickens at the same time. Gives you a little bit more control. Plus, the chicken cooks faster. Before I forget, I’m also going to cut off the wing tips. All right, there we go. Okay. And then once you’ve got the chicken laid out like this, um you want to trim a little bit of that excess fat. Sometimes there’s a little bit excess on the top and the bottom. Uh clean out the insides too. I just grab a paper towel, kind of pat the inside dry of anything excess. And then what you want to do here is similar to just spatchcocking a chicken. Once you’ve got the backbone out, flip it so you’ve got the breast side up. And then you just want to give it a good push. Sometimes it’s a loud snap. In my case, it wasn’t very loud, but that’s okay. And then I am going to go ahead and just use my shears to cut right down the middle. There we go. That’s it. If you’re wondering why I’m wearing gloves, it’s more of a reminder to not like scratch my face and grab a bunch of stuff with chicken hands. Now, what I’m going to do before we season them is I’m actually going to loosen up the skin on the breast meat here because I do want to season underneath here as well as on the skin. All right. So, you can use any barbecue rub that you like. Today, I think I’m going to go scorching sun. I haven’t made chicken with that in a bit. So, it’s nice and spicy. Um, but any rub that you want works. I like to season the breast and then we’ll season the rest. Boy, that was a dumb joke. So, once you’ve got the breast meat seasoned, go ahead, pull the skin back over. That’s going to be important to insulate the chicken. Boy, is this hard to do with one hand. All right, screw it. I’ll just wash my hands again. It’s more important to do it right. All right, clean hand again. Let’s keep going. So, I will Let’s flip this over to the ugly side. That way, we end up with the presentation side on top. Okay, so we’ve got the meat seasoned. There’s more meat in here, obviously, on the bottom, too. So, make sure that you season pretty generously. Go ahead, flip it over. And then we’re going to leave it on this side as we put it in the smoker. Okay, so I’ve got the chicken sitting here. I’ve got the smoker preheated now. So, let’s go ahead and get it on. All right. I’ve got my plet grill here. Now, I’m set to 275. You can cook 275 to 300. really. You don’t need to go much higher cuz you want to make sure you have enough time for all of that smoke flavor to build up on here. Too low and the chicken gets a little dry. I feel like that 275 to 300 range is real good. Go ahead and stick these little things in here. I’ll take those off early just for some stock later. And then we’re going to let these cook for a while. Maybe an hour, 90 minutes. And uh yeah, we’ll be back. While the chicken’s smoking, let’s whip up a barbecue sauce. I’ll put the recipe up here for you, too, so you can follow along. All right, so we’re going to start with a tablespoon of butter. Then to that, we’re going to add about two chipotles worth in adobo sauce, which would be about maybe 3 tablespoons minced. Mine happens to be like in a jar already minced, which is nice. Then I’ve got 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. And this is really the main reason why we’re going to be cooking it down ahead of time is we got to get that raw flavor of the tomato paste out of there. Now, while that’s going, I’m going to go ahead and grate three garlic cloves, too. Now, if you don’t want to grate them, you just want to chop them up or mince them, that’s fine, too. Grating kind of brings out a little bit more of the flavor in this sauce. That’s why I do it. I love garlic. All right, so we’ll stir the garlic, tomatoes, and chipotle together. Let that just cook for maybe another minute. All right. Next, I’m going to add one cup of bone broth. Now, this is a beef bone broth, but you can use chicken as well. And bone broth is important because it has that extra collagen in there that’s going to thicken up the sauce and make it extra savory. Okay, next we’ve got 3/4 of a cup of ketchup. Feel like most barbecue recipes use like two cups of ketchup, so this is a little bit less. All right, I’ve got 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar. I just use the same little spout here. All right, we’re going to add a tablespoon of worstersher sauce. Okay, I’m going to add 3 tablebsp of brown sugar. You can use maple syrup if you want to or honey. We’ve got a/ teaspoon of onion powder. 1 teaspoon of black pepper. And then I like to add about a tablespoon of chili powder. So, I’m going to use Sedona Sand. It’s already got some salt in it, too. Um, if you’re going to use your own chili powder, just make sure that you check it for salt at the very end. Since mine has it, I’m already aware that it’s going to have that extra salt. So, you may need to season it more. This has been simmering for about eight minutes. All right, I’m going to turn off the heat, let it cool a little bit before I throw it in the blender so it doesn’t make a big mess. All right, we got the blender set up. This is cool enough. I’m a little impatient, but that’s okay. I’ll carefully pour it in here without splashing it on myself. All right, let’s go ahead and give it a whirl. All right, let’s try it. Oh, that smells good. That’s really good. Nice and tangy. Super super savory. I’ll pour it in here. So, we’re done with the sauce. I guess we just wait on that chicken. All right, let’s check. Ooh, it’s been a little over an hour. You can see that the skin is nice and firm. Now, I’m going to go ahead and check the temp on the breast. All right, we’re about 150 here. Thigh meat’s almost 160, but I really want to get this to about 180 or so cuz it’ll really break down all the fats and everything and just shred perfectly. So, I’ll kind of keep my eyes on this. I’ll come back in maybe about 30 minutes. Once the thigh meat reaches about 180°, we can go ahead and pull that off, put it in a foil pan, and then wrap it up with some plastic wrap. That allows the chicken to steam while it’s resting, and it’s going to make the meat a lot easier to pull off. All right, now for the fun part. I don’t know how you feel, but I definitely keep the wings aside. I want those. The chicken’s manageable. Sometimes it’s like really, really hot. So, again, the gloves. Make sure when you’re shredding this chicken, first thing you want to do is pull off all of the skin. Now, don’t get rid of this. Set it to the side. Test bite. M. But this is why we wanted to season under the skin because this time the chicken actually gets the seasoning. Make sure you look out for these wishbones. These can sneak in. Now, the size of chickens can vary, but I find that I usually have about 2 and 1/4 to sometimes even 2 and 1/2 lbs of meat after I’ve picked it off the bone. Okay, now that we have all this flavorful meat, we’re going to do something with that chicken skin. Told you not to get rid of it. There’s a lot of great fat, seasoning, and flavor on here. So, grab it like a dirty rag and rub it all into the chicken. Use both sides to transfer as much of the fat and seasoning back into the meat. Now, you could throw this back on the grill and crisp it up, but I find this is a lot easier and a lot more practical. Next, we’re going to add some of that delicious savory barbecue sauce in here. There’s about 2 and 1/4 lbs of chicken, so I like to add at least a/2 cup of barbecue sauce. Mix it up and then taste from there. All right, let’s taste test. I’m gonna add a touch more seasoning because it needs just a tiny bit more salt. All right, the last step is to add some warm broth. You want to put it right on top into the pan. And what this does is it’ll keep it nice and moist, especially if you’re going to be serving some guests in a little while. It’s also great when you’re reheating the chicken if you have leftovers because it keeps it really moist. All right, let’s build a little sandwich. Toasted up a bun here. We’ll put some of that smoked chicken on there. Let’s top it with a little more of that sauce. I’m going to finish it with some homemade pickles. Let me know in the comments if you want the pickle recipe. All right, there we go. That’s my kind of chicken sandwich. No BS here, just pickle sauce and smoked chicken. M. The best part is is that the chicken is so moist and flavorful, and that’s what it’s really about. Yeah, you could put some sllo or some lettuce or whatever on here, but I mean, when you have good pickles, good barbecue sauce, and just a pile of meat, my opinion, that’s what makes barbecue so freaking good. This recipe is always on repeat at our house. I hope you guys try this one out. If you do, let me know in the comments, and we’ll see you guys next time. Cheers. [Music]