- Easy-to-do
- Simple ingredients
By Forrest Fisher
My grandson and I tried something new in the smoker getting ready for a Sunday family dinner celebration. Chicken drumsticks! A few weeks back, we found some huge chicken drumsticks at a local market in Arcadia, Florida. When we bought them, we vacuum-packed 13 of them for later use – that day was last weekend. It took about 3 hours to bring them up from freezer temp to room temp, then we seasoned them up in two groups. This was a first-time family taste experiment with chicken drumsticks, HUGE drumsticks. For reference on size, these 13 drumsticks weighed nearly 4.5 pounds!
The first group of 6 was prepared with a spice mix blended together in a small bowl:
- 2 Tbs garlic powder
- 2 Tbs black pepper
- 2 Tbs dried Cuban oregano (homegrown)
- 2 Tbs chili powder
- Then rub coat each drumstick with olive oil
- Then sprinkle coat with the spice mix.
The second group of 7 used a blended spice mix quite different from the first group:
- 1 Tbs garlic powder
- 2 Tbs smoky dry rub
- 2 Tbs paprika
- 2 Tbs ground sage
- 2 Tbs onion powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 2 Tbs chili powder
- Then coat each drumstick with yellow mustard
- Then sprinkle coat with this spice mix.
It didn’t take long to fire up the smoker with mesquite wood chips, 275F. It took 2 hours to reach 170F internal on the whopper chicken legs.
In between, after 90 minutes, we flipped them over and brush-coated all of them with ½ cup of liquid chili sauce mix from Aldi’s that was thinned with ¼ cup of Bragg’s apple cider vinegar.
Then we smoked the coated drumsticks at the same temperature for another 30 minutes to harden and crisp up the skin.
In the future, we plan to try the same recipe in the oven and then again in the instant pot with the same formula.
We’ll be looking for taste vs time to do, but honestly, it will be tough to beat the real smoker cooking taste.
These smoker drumsticks were absolutely delicious! Just plain delicious! Worth the time (total = 3 hrs).
