BBQ Chicken Leg Quarters

For a cheap and delicious meal, chicken leg quarters are the way to go. I picked up 6 of them for ~$5. Compare that to the price of a whole chicken and this really is a money saving meal.

Before I put the chicken in the smoker, I brined them for three hours. I chose to brine the chicken for three hours because I was brining three quarters. How long to brine (if at all) is really a matter of personal taste, but the chicken is more moist if it's brined.

Brine recipe:

1 cup of kosher salt
1 gallon of water
1 cup of dark brown sugar
1/4 cup of Worcester sauce

Make sure the salt and brown sugar are dissolved completely, then add your chicken quarters skin side up and put the chicken in your refrigerator. Do not use a metal container to brine the chicken. Feel free to modify the ingredients, but I do recommend 1 cup of kosher salt (not table salt) to 1 gallon of water. Anything beyond that is up to you.

After the chicken was removed from the brine, I rinsed them under cold water, trimmed off the excess skin and fat and sprinkled some of my favorite rub on both sides.  Because I was going to begin cooking the chicken within the hour, I left them out to come up to room temperature:

I fired up the smoker to 275 degrees and using pecan wood, cooked these quarters for ~2 hours (go easy on the smoke). Be sure to go by the chicken's temperature and not time. Chicken is done when it reaches a temperature of 165 degrees. These quarters were at ~180 when I pulled them off and they were moist; the brining helped with that.

I let the chicken rest for ~5 minutes while I finished up the rest of the meal. I'll definitely make this again:

tIC