Dr Pepper Smoked Chicken

Raise your hand if you own a smoker or have ever smoked meat before? **Raises hand** We bought a smoker several years ago to start smoking our Thanksgiving Day turkey and each year and love trying out new recipes. Admittedly, we’re still pretty inexperienced smokers, but our poultry always comes out amazing…the beef we still need to work on. So we thought we’d try out a way to smoke a chicken we’d heard of before, but instead of using a beer can you use a Dr Pepper can! Here’s how we made Dr Pepper Smoked Chicken this weekend for dinner!

You’ll also need some seasoning of your choice, as well as stuff to brine the bird (sea salt, sugar, and water).

The brining recipe we used was a gallon of water, 3/4 cup of sea salt, and 2/3 cup of sugar. Mix it in warm water, allow water to cool, then place chicken (giblets free) in the water to soak. Ideally, let it soak overnight, but if you’re short on time at least a few hours will work well. Let it brine in your fridge where it’s cool.

Once your chicken is brined and you’re ready to start smoking, get your wood chips ready and soak them in water for about 30 minutes to help create smoke. You can purchase wood chips at places like Lowe’s or Home Depot or even sporting goods stores…there are a wide variety of flavors to choose from. We had some apple chips from the apple farm we went to last year, so we used those.

Then my husband started preparing the smoker for the meat…that takes a bit of time to get everything set up and the smoker up to the temperature it needs to be to cook.

Once the smoker was ready, we dried off our chicken and rubbed it down with some chicken rub on the outside. We also opened a Dr Pepper can and emptied it about half way and then placed the chicken on top of the can (like it’s sitting on the can).

You’ll literally place the chicken on the can sitting up on the smoker and put the lid on tight. You’ll want to keep the temperature of the smoker at least around 200 degrees for several hours.

We opened up the smoker every hour or so to pour more Dr Pepper on it as a glaze, then replaced the lid again so we didn’t lose our heat too quickly.

Once the temp inside the bird reaches at least 165 degrees the chicken is ready to go!

We brought it in and let it sit about 15 minutes to capture all the juices, then cut it up for dinner!

Overall, the whole thing was AMAZING! Our 4 year old was chomping at the bit to get more chicken…it’s wonderfully tender and moist and has a great smoked, sweet flavor because of the Dr Pepper. We can’t wait to make this again!!

If you’re in the market for a smoker–here’s the SMOKER that we own and LOVE! *affiliate link