Two Recipes for POLLO ASADO: Traditional Mexican Grilled Chicken & Texas Style Sweet Heat BBQ Sauce

Today we're making Pollos Tejanos or Pollo Asado, depending on where you're from. Depende de que rancho vienes, is what I always say. And the ranch that I'm from, we do like a little bit of barbecue sauce sometimes on our Pollo Asado, and today's one of those days. And this right here is that sweet heat barbecue sauce we just made, Apple Habanero. Little kick, a little sweet, just right. You see, Pollo Asado means direct grilled chicken, bursting with flavor and juiciness. And that's the first way we're gonna cook today's Pollo Asado. And the second way, I'm giving this one my little Texas twist. And that's gonna be with a little sweet heat, Apple Habanero barbecue sauce. Homemade recipe just for you. Now this is traditionally a very easy recipe, so I'm super excited to share it with all of y'all. You see, there are three parts to this recipe. First is prepping the bird, including splitting in half, trimming and seasoning. Also explain why I like to split my chickens myself too. Next is cooking the sauce step by step with all the ingredients. This is sweet heat, Texas style barbecue, baby. And finally, well, grilling the chicken, of course. This is Pollo Asado after all, and it's one of the easiest and most rewarding cooks to learn and master for some good, good goodies. All right, let's get fired up and make some Pollo Tejano. I mean, Pollo Asado, I mean, barbecue chicken. Ah, hell, let's just get fired up. Vamona! So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take my knife, cut this neck off right here for now. Now I like to use those to make chicken broth. We boil chickens to make our own homemade chicken broth. That can go in there too. Chickens have a keel bone, what they call that, a keel bone right here in the middle. You can feel it's kind of like a little bone going right down between the two breasts. I always like to have the keel bone on my right side, your left half of the chicken. So I'll feel where it's at, and I'll just kind of run my knife and score it a little bit like that. Once it's scored, I can see all the way down to the bone. I'm gonna get my knife right here, give it a quick little wrap like that. And you can see here, we've got the backbone and the ribs and everything else. I'm gonna take the backbone out just like that. You can do both sides. And again, this makes great chicken broth. And I like to remove as much excess fat as I can. So I'll come up here under the skin here, and you can see here it's got a lot of fat right here. And so I'm just gonna kind of use my knife to scrape some of that away. You don't have to get 100% of it off. It's all good. And this will fold over like this. Now, another thing you can do if you're in a small grill, maybe you don't have a lot of space on top, you can trim this keel bone just like this with the scissors. And so now you have a nice flat bone so the chicken's gonna lay down really nice. The other thing that I like to do is cut the tail off. I know some of y'all like to eat that. I've had you guys comment that in the comments before. That's okay. You can enjoy it. I will cut it off. I do like to peel my skin back like this. Do it carefully. That exposes the whole breast right there. And very carefully, because sometimes the skin tears very easy. So you want to take your two thumbs and just kind of push back like that. And that exposes the whole thigh and most of the leg quarter right there. There's some fat right here. You can trim that off if you want. You don't have to, but that's just something we used to do in competition. So I just do it all the time. And so there it is. Okay, so the reasons I like to buy a whole chicken and split it in half myself. Number one, it's cheaper. You get to save a little bit of dollars. So it's less expensive to do it that way. Number two, I don't want the meat market or the store to cut my chicken in half because sometimes they cut a whole third off of the other half. Well, they don't really always cut it exactly right in the center. Number three, it allows me to season the chicken underneath a little bit easier when you have two halves. All right, now, before we get to seasoning, let me go ahead and dump my charcoal over here in the grill, and we'll be right back with that. Get this fire set. We've got a little extra charcoal in here. We should be just right with everything. All right, I've got my fire situated more or less the way I want it. Let's get the grate on here. Set the top up here. We're gonna open both of these halfway, more or less. And that's gonna allow our fire to kind of settle down and settle into a temperature. It might be 300, it might be 350, 375. We'll see where it lands here in just a moment. Then after we season our chicken, we're just gonna lay it right directly over the fire. A lot of cooks use olive oil or any other kind of oil. That's fine, too. No problem there. But I like to use a little parquet. Adds a little extra flavor. You wanna spread that around a little bit. We've got a little coat of wow here. Gonna do that on both halves. Nice, even coat. I like to pull the skin back, make sure I get the leg quarter underneath there, too. And then for a little extra Texas kick, I've got my Boom. It's got that 16-mesh black pepper in there, a little bit of chili powder and paprika. Adds a little color and a little boom to your flavor. Now, I'm gonna let that set for about five minutes or so. Then I'm gonna come back and flip it over. All right, it's been five minutes. Okay, guys, now I'm telling y'all, try this trick at home. This is a game changer right here. I want a lot of first-place chickens at cook-offs, and this is basically the way I prep my chickens. You wanna spread that around. When you're going directly from the seasoning to the grill, like we're doing today, it's a game changer. It will add a ton of flavor. We're gonna lay a little bit of wow on our birds, and you don't need a whole lot, but you do need some. Get a little boom boom going here. Okay, so now we've got our skin going back over here. Well, the oil helps a little bit with the color. It's not gonna get super crispy, and we're not really going for that. We're going for a juicy, delicious chicken more than anything. Nice, even coat like that, and we're gonna do a nice, even coat of boom. Little bit more, little bit more. Make sure you don't miss any spots. You wanna get it all on there, and our chickens are ready for the grill. All right, first thing I like to do, I like to start with an onion to clean my grill. You guys have been on my channel for a while. You know this is my normal routine. Now, today I'm running Central Market Lump Charcoal. It is the Oak Lump Charcoal. We're up here in Austin. I like that flavor, but I also threw some mesquite in there, some mesquite chunks, because I like the mesquite flavor. I'm gonna dump my onion right in there. All right, now I like to get a spatula, so this way I can lay my chickens on real nice and neat that way. I like to get the breast facing out away from the center of the fire, because the breasts tend to overcook a little bit. You want the leg quarter, the thigh, and the drumstick to be over the hottest part of the grill. Got my chickens on, but wait, there's more. Every time I've got a fire going, I always wanna throw a piece of sausage in there for a quick scooby snack, because it's gonna cook really quick while the chicken does its magic a little lower and slower. Our chicken looks beautiful. It's coming up nice and slow. That usually means it's gonna be juicy, juicy, juicy. We're generally looking for about 160 degrees on the breast or 170 on the thigh. That kind of seems to be just about the right balance on a pollo asado, which is what we're cooking today. Now, we might be making a direct grill, Texas-style pollo asado. That don't mean that you can't have a really delicious sweet heat barbecue sauce to go with your chicken. Okay, so I've got a tablespoon of ghee in here, already melted down. I'm gonna start warming that up. I'm gonna add two garlic cloves in here. I've got a quarter cup of diced onions. You guys, if you've seen me make other barbecue sauces, y'all know I like to start all my sauces with a little garlic and a little onion. I'm also gonna use two habaneros for this barbecue sauce. So these are right here in my little stock pot. Be careful, don't put your whole face in front of it like that, because you will smell it. It'll burn your eyes. Just be careful, friends. The habanero's getting nice and soft. The onions are sauteing really pretty. When they start to change color like that, they're getting sweet. I love sweet onions like that. All right, first cup of ketchup coming down. This calls for three cups. And like I've covered before in the past, ketchup is always a really great base for barbecue sauce. There are some other great sauces that don't use ketchup, but the ones I made so far all have ketchup. Let's go ahead and stir this up a little bit. All right, next up, we've got three tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. There's a lot of them out there. Leigh & Perrins is the best, in my opinion. That's the one I like to use, but use whatever you like. Next up, we've got half a cup of apple cider vinegar. All right, guys, next up, competition trick. In competition, the judges like really sweet stuff and flavorful. So we're gonna use about two and a half tablespoons of apple jelly. We're gonna add one tablespoon of guajillo powder. The other flavor that I really, really like is the ancho chili powder. So I'm gonna use a tablespoon of ancho chili powder in this sauce. All right, so we're gonna stir all this in. And you can see that it's kind of nice and thick right there, right now. We're gonna add some more liquid here in just a moment. So this is gonna take two whole teaspoons of fine black pepper. And remember, this is a Texas-style barbecue sauce. Texas sometimes means cumin, comino. So we're gonna add a little bit of cumin in there, about a half a teaspoon. We've got two teaspoons of kosher salt. I like to make this sauce with just plain water, but this is a sweet heat sauce, so we're gonna use apple juice. Let's pour all 10 ounces in here. Okay, now the next step is really important. You wanna make sure everything's nice and warm. We wanna turn off your heat for just a minute while you use your immersion blender. If you don't have an immersion blender, you can use your regular blender. Just blend it on high until everything's nice and smooth. Now, if you like it nice and thick like this, the way it is right now, you can just leave it like that. We're gonna add a couple more ingredients. We're gonna add some sugar and some honey, but I like it to be a little bit more runny myself. So we're gonna put another cup of water in here. Okay, so now we need a whole cup of brown sugar. When you see recipes, they say to pack down the sugar, brown sugar, pack down. That's what that means. You wanna pack it down, make sure it's a real cup, half a cup, 3 1⁄4 cup. Okay, so we've got a whole cup of brown sugar in here. I love brown sugar in my barbecue sauce. Now we're gonna add two tablespoons of honey. Okay, so we're gonna cook this for 20 minutes on a medium simmer, but before we go, we need to do a little taste test to see where we're at. Oh man, that's good. Friends, we've been simmering our barbecue sauce for 20 minutes, but before I did that, I went ahead and added two more tablespoons of apple jelly. Remember, this is an apple habanero, not just habanero. Let's give it a taste test now that it's done done and see what we have here. It's good, it's really good. Okay, so we have our barbecue sauce completely made. It's super delicious, well balanced, amazing. Gonna be great on that chicken. I like to use Mason jars, so we're gonna pour this into a Mason jar because you can pour it even while it's still pretty hot. This is just a way better way to store barbecue sauce than plastic, in my opinion. I really, really like using jars for my salsas, for barbecue sauces, for marinades, or anything that's liquid. And even if I'm not canning, which I don't, you can always freeze stuff. I've never frozen a barbecue sauce, but you can use these jars for that. All right, we've got our sauce poured. It's well balanced, it's delicious. Let's go ahead and get some onto our pollo asado. Vamonos! All right, amigos, it's been exactly one hour. Remember, I told you an hour ago, it would probably be about an hour. We haven't touched the lid in the last 20 minutes. Let's see what our chicken looks like. Ooh, yeah, looking nice. We got some real pretty color. I'm gonna get my spatula. I'm gonna flip one of these halves and put barbecue sauce on the bottom side. I'm gonna leave the other one there and put a little bit of butter. So now this butter is gonna just, it's a little bit of oil, and it's just gonna give it a real pretty color. And some of that's gonna drip down there, that's okay. All right, now let me flip this chicken. You can see it's not burnt on the bottom. It's not real charred or anything like that. It's probably just right. Let's check our temperature on these chickens. We're looking at 173 here on this leg quarter. So this one is 172, we're just perfect. And I like to check my breast from the front, right up here on top, where it's probably the coldest in the middle. We're at 158, so that chicken is basically perfect right now. All right, now today we're making pollos tejanos or pollo asado, depending on where you're from. Depende de que rancho vienes, is what I always say. And the rancho that I'm from, we do like a little bit of barbecue sauce sometimes on our pollo asado. And today's one of those days that we want a little bit of barbecue sauce. And this right here is that sweet heat barbecue sauce we just made, apple habanero. A little kick, a little sweet, just right. Let's get some in here. I'm gonna squirt a little bit in between there where the breast is a little broke. And we're gonna let that set for about three minutes before we flip it over. Okay, it's been three to four minutes. Let's pop the lid off one more time. We're gonna do another butter baste on this chicken right here. Now, if we had a little more heat, it would have got nice and charred and a little bit more color on it. But trust me, at that temperature we were running, we started up close or around 400, came all the way down to three and then 280-ish and where we're riding right now, that's actually perfect. So let me get this butter out of the way. And we are going to flip this other chicken back the other way here. And again, this is our sweet heat apple habanero that we just made. Let's get this on the bird. And this is the way I like to lay the sauce on my chicken. If I want it to look really pretty and thick, let it drip on the fire. It's all right. What we want is that beautiful chicken right there. Let me know in the comments below. But the main question I want you to tell me is, do you like barbecue sauce on your pollo asado or chicken in general, when you grill it onto the barbecue pit? It's been five minutes. Let's get the chicken off the grill. Let's see what our finished product looks like. All right, here we go. Man, look at that. So pretty looking. Look at that. Gorgeous chickens. All righty, baby. Look at that beautiful chicken right there. All right, friends. I'm gonna put this on the cutting board for a couple of minutes. We're gonna let it rest about 10 minutes. Let that chicken cool off just a little bit so we can take that taste test, see how our chicken turned out. All right, guys. Sorry, I forgot to show you guys what the sausage looked like, but I'm gonna tell y'all it was delicious. It was fantastic. We ate all three of them, actually. So we've got Texas twist and traditional pollo asado. Okay, let's grab our first pollo. We've got a little slather of sauce on there. That don't bother me a bit. All right, I like to cut the wing off first. Now we're gonna slice our bread. Look at that pretty speckled pepper all over this bread. Doesn't that look gorgeous? It just looks beautiful. I don't know if the camera's picking that up, but it's super moist. You can see that. Mm, ooh, better. Been a while since I've had a good pollo asado. All right, now I'm gonna show y'all another little trick. When y'all have a chicken that juicy, you can get your slices, dip them in that natural juice. Look at that. Oh, baby. That is 100% delicious flavor. Oh, man. All right, let's get chicken number two, what we're calling the Texas twist today. Let's slice into this breast right here. Barbecue sauce and all. This is something amazing that I used to notice on cookoffs. Even though this doesn't have the keel bone, I think if the camera can catch it, maybe, this is just as juicy. Look at that. When you cook the chicken at 300, 350-ish, no more, give it a 45 minute to an hour on a grill like the Smoky that you got a little extra room. It's not too hot. It's not gonna burn the bottom. You're gonna have a very moist and juicy chicken. That's good. Ooh, I love that treat heat. Guys, y'all gotta try that barbecue sauce at home. It's fantastic. All right, friends, I hope you guys really enjoyed this video. This was really a great little technique to cook really great pollo asado. It's okay to cook grilled chicken right over the coals. We'll call that pollo asado. It's okay to put some barbecue sauce on there, especially if it's the sweet heat barbecue sauce, homemade like we just did. It's fantastic. I promise if you guys try it, you will thank me later in the comments. Today, we used the Wow and the Boom on these two. The chicken has really great flavor, great color. You can get those at Arnie's Asado.com along with the OG and the new rice seasoning and the brand new chowder bean spice. You're gonna love them all. And don't forget, you can also get Arnie Tex, my cookbook, New York Times bestseller with over 104 recipes of Mexican-American cooking and Texas-style barbecue. We'll see you guys on the next video or in the book. Thanks for watching. We'll catch y'all later on the next video. Boom! Hey, watch it. That's some good chicken right there. That was great with the sauce. Mm-hmm! What's he like? Okay, he's done. Dear, let's go ahead and get the lid off, clean up our... It's okay, I had cleaned the pork really clean earlier today.