Last weekend saw me cook my biggest cook to date. Tandoori Chicken and Wings.
At an event with over 400 people, I cooked 39kg of chicken.
This all started after an event last year where I cooked 100 chicken wings.
The feedback was so much and the requests for me to cook more wings (why I have been cooking most weekends) saw a plan hatched to cook just double what was last year.
It kinda took off about 2 months ago with the thought of doing Brisket.
I had said that to cook enough brisket would cost too much but we could provide more to eat, why not have a kebab and wings and up the wings even further to 300.
I was trying to work out the timings and thought I had nailed it (of course not but not by much to be fair). We could arrive at 5:30am, get the BBQ lit and the kebab built and on by 7am, that would come off around 10am and I could start the wings in batches of 100.
Remember the Fools Gold from the Pork Butt cook a few posts ago, in a strange way it was kinda lucky again as although I bought another pot, we needed all of both pots to make up all the bags ready for the massive 370 wings that I got from 15 trays, 31KG of wings.
We also had 8kg of chicken thighs to marinade overnight.
So with the thighs, 600ml of oil and 800g of Angus & Oink Tikka Gold Tandoori Rub, I got to mixing together.
Why 800g? Well, this is a 10% rub to meat ratio. It’s always been in the back of my head and never really actually done it until this cook. I felt it needed it.
With the thighs prepared, the bags ready and the van loaded, the following morning we took everything to site, arrived at 5:30, unloaded, got the gazebo up, the table out, the bbq lit and somewhat slowish getting up to temp, and started to thread the meat onto the skewer.
Things at this point actually went very well, to the point the kebab was ready to go into the BBQ by 6:15, so on it went, 400f and well balanced, it rotated on the rotisserie nicely.
At 6:25, Mrs SParky mentioned something about maybe a bit to much smoke…..
FLARE UP!
I had only placed 1 set of drip trays and the oil from the chicken was dripping down and catching.
Thankfully we got that under control fairly quickly and the rest of the cook was smooth, but longer than I expected.
In the mean time, we got the chicken into the bags and into a cool box to keep fresh.
I took the Tandoori chicken off at around 10:45am so it had a good 1.5 more than I thought. This meant the first batch of wings was not on until 11am, over an hour behind where I wanted to be.
I needed to be ready for 1pm, I thought I would have the last batch going in at that point but no, even the wings had it in for me.
ANOTHER FLARE UP. I might has spilt some oil when removing the drip trays and that caught.
Under control, BBQ temp down a bit, the first batch took an hour but the second batch took nearly 1.5 hours.
Batch 3, I managed to crank the temp up to 500f and got that and the final batch done in less than 1.5 h0urs
People were queuing from 1pm and we did start putting food out
We had the tandoori chicken with some wraps and cucumber yoghurt dip, we had the wings that we had cooked and just keep adding more as they came off.
In some way, having the wings come off and not sitting in a box for a while was a good thing, everyone wanted the fresh ones and they were going down a storm.
And after batch 4, the cool down of the BBQ started (was still warm when we loaded it into the van but ran out of time for cooling, lucky we didn’t have far to go) and as the event died down we had 4 wings left, Mrs SParky took them round to people still there and they were gone quickly.
Home at 5:30pm, van unloaded, most things away, lots of trays to clean and exhausted (took a far greater toll on me than I thought it would) but my goodness it was damn worth it.
What will I do for next years event, I’m not sure, I either need to up the flavour game even further or maybe I’ll not do it, depends on the state of the BBQ….it might be getting closer to end of life than I would like, we’ll see.
How does this fair for a SParky BBQ Competition Team? Oh grief, I’m not ready for it, too much money involved and knowing the competition, I don’t think I can get anywhere near the level.
For now, back to the regular weekend cooking.
