Grilled Chicken Thighs

Everyone loves smoky flavor chicken thighs, and once your family and rubs so dinner is never boring. Keep reading for the best-grilled chicken thigh recipe and you’ll want to make this real meal. Other get a taste of these juicy and delicious chicken thighs, they’ll think you’re some kind of magical smoker!

Smoked chicken thighs are very easy, delicious, and full of smoky flavor. Either boneless or bone-in — are a good choice for the grill.

Choose your favorite different vegetable on the grill alongside thighs and you have a quick and easy summertime meal. This recipe uses flavorful marinades and seasoning.

How do you pick out good Chicken Thighs??

Most people like to use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs but according to your taste, you can totally choose a boneless, skinless variety. Good thing that the crispy skin really adds value to your real meal. Arguably tastiest part of the chicken thighs is a mushy little parcel of tender, juicy meat from the top of the leg. Generally, the thighs are cheaper than the breast.

We have the best eating experience. Every bite is delicious and they cook uniformly on the grill because packed full of that dark meat chicken flavor.

Ready the Chicken Thighs…

Thighs need to be trimmed very well. They have skinny wonky edges; everywhere needs trimming down well giving a really good great eating experience.

Take any excess pieces of fat or skin that are hanging around until you can roll chicken thighs into a nice little uniform rectangular shape like a little pillow.

Time to prep Thighs for the Seasoning.

This is a very important step. If you throw your seasoning onto the thighs, it will adhere really well. You will get good smoke and lots of flavors.

For this recipe, I used Mojo Criollo by Goya. It’s one of the favorite marinades on the market for chicken and it can be found at just about any grocery store.

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But if you want to really bite the through chicken skin that is not leathery, a really important step is a coating on the chicken thighs. It will help to prevent the drying that occurs in the lower temperature smoker that actually dehydrates the skin and turns it leathery. For this, you can use your favorite spray oil. Make sure pretty liberal on the outside of each of your chicken thighs.

This is going to help any of those loose pieces of rub adhere to the chicken without having to press it down or rub it on and just one more little layer of protection for our chicken skin in the smoker. Now, these Thighs are ready to go into our cooker .

Tips:

To help us out with keeping this chicken juicy, flavorful, and Smokey also the texture that we’re looking for is to run your smoker at a higher temperature than you normally would. I like to rock these Thighs at about 275 degrees Fahrenheit.

Setup your Smoker……

Prep your smoker for 350-F, as per the manufacturer’s instructions. Clean and oil the grates.

A favorite wood for smoking but I think chicken works nicely with fruit woods like an apple or a cherry, especially where we’re going to be using a fruity barbecue sauce and that’s a nice flavor combination. It’ll give you a light wood smoke, beautiful color, and at two seventy-five, that heat is going to render the fat out of our skin quickly enough that we should develop a great bite through texture.

Gently transfer. We season them so beautifully. You don’t want to mess any of that up right onto your grill grates. Now, we’ve got those skin side up so again, that fat can render around the chicken as it’s smoking all that delicious flavor goodness.

We’re going to close the lid and let these go for about 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes depending on how big your chicken thighs are. These are chunky, chunky chicken thighs. So, they’re probably going to take closer to that hour and 15-minute mark until they’re ready for our next step which is saucing but for this step, we’re looking for an internal temperature in our chicken thighs of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. I just checked the temp on our chicken thighs.

They’re rocking and rolling right at 165 where we want them. That means they’re fully cooked in terms of food safety but for chicken thighs, my target temperature is a little bit higher about one seventy-five.

Tips:

That’s because that’s when that tighter connected tissue starts to break down and you’ll have a much more enjoyable, almost bite-off-the-bone experience.

Before you eat them but first, we need to hit them with sauce.

 I’m going to be using my whiskey peach sauce, it’s sweet, it’s savory, it’s tangy, and It is a total crowd-pleaser. The whole family loves it but you can use your favorite barbecue sauce at home or even have a recipe for this whiskey peach sauce if you’d rather make it than buy it but if you buy it, that’s cool too. Now, no matter what sauce you use to baste your chicken thighs, it is going to result in softer skin.

This is not a crispy skin thigh recipe. If you are wanting crispy skin, skip the sauce, and crank the temperature up on your grill to three seventy-five, 40 degrees. That’ll give you that crispier exterior that you’re looking for.

Tips :

You just have to watch them closely so they don’t burn. The sugar on the outside of those chicken thighs in the rub can caramelize quickly. So keep an eye on them. It should only take a couple of minutes.

For me, we’re going for that yummy, bite-through, saucy, soft skin. Another note about the sauce, no matter what sauce you’re using, try to pick one that doesn’t have any liquid smoke in it. You just spend an hour adding natural wood smoke flavor to your meat.

Tips: Don’t cover it up with the sauce that is added to liquid smoke.

It’ll overtake the natural smokiness that you just put in there. Our chicken thighs are off of the smoker and its looks like the cartoon popping ice.

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Look at how beautiful these are……..

Literally, two seconds of trimming out of the package, spray rub, spray, smoke, and sauce. It’s like a lot of essences but really it was super simple. They’re like show-stopper chicken thighs with the least amount of effort ever.

 It’s not uncommon to see a ring of pink around the outside. Now, that’s just the smoke ring. That means that the smoke has impacted the proteins. It doesn’t mean they’re undercooked. We used our accurate thermometer. We know that they’re cooked properly but they are a little pink. They are most definitely juicy.

The flavor is sweet and succulent. Chicken thighs are so rich too and that skin just bites through and melts away love every single thing about these. Okay,

Here to give it a try because what is a good recipe if you don’t make it to feed the people you love I certainly could use a Backyard Barbecue Hero moment……….

Ingredients

• 6lbs Chicken thighs bone in, skin on.
• 3 cups marinade If you don’t want to use a store bought marinate, you can make your own using a base of one part oil, one part acid (e.g. vinegar, citrus juice, or wine), and then one part seasoning
• 1table spoon Salt
• BBQ sauce – Bottle of favorite BBQ source for the recipe
• 2 table spoon chicken rub

Instructions

Prep the chicken

• Start by trimming any excess skin or fat off your chicken thighs.
• Place the thighs in a container, or large Ziploc bag, and pour the marinade on top. Make sure thigh is well-coated in the marinade and fully submerged.
• Cover/seal the container and store in the fridge for up to 24 hours.

Ready your Smoker

• Pre-heat your smoker to 300°F.
• Clean and oil grill grates.

Smoke the Chicken Thighs

• Transfer the seasoned chicken to a wire rack or jerky tray.
• Put the chicken on the smoker and let it smoke for about 45 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches around 165°F.
• Rotating the position of each thigh halfway through so that all pieces are being cooked evenly.

Serve

• Coat the chicken in your favorite barbecue sauce.
• Working in batches, sear the chicken, skin side down until lightly charred and skin is crisp, flip and cook 2 to 3 minutes longer.
• Remove from the grill and place on a platter tented with foil to rest for 5 minutes before serving.
• Serve hot with additional BBQ sauce if desired.

Nutrition