Grilled chicken drumsticks finished with a sweet and smoky jalapeno pepper barbecue sauce.

Smoky Jalapeño Barbecued Chicken Drumsticks

By  Sue Lau |  Palatable Pastime

It’s time for Crazy Ingredient Challenge and this month the theme is on combining apple juice and bell peppers. My first thought was to do a riff off a jalapeno jelly  glazed chicken I did years ago, since I could get something together with bell pepper, jalapeno and apple juice.

I just happened to have a bottle of Red Duck smoky ketchup  left from Burger Month  so threw a  bunch of  that in, making it a barbecue sauce since it had nice smoky flavor.

Funny, the first #CIC I did was barbecued chicken legs—> that one was mustard glazed with a Carolina type sauce.

I  enjoy making bbq sauce from scratch as I am rather good at it. I also enjoy chicken legs as well. You can’t beat the price and they usually stay nice  and moist.  It was the way I was raised. My mother enjoyed grilling bbq chicken as well. In the winter months she would make bbq chicken in the broiler  pan, and it was always well  received  by me.

I’ve  come to do  my  own outdoor grilling,  even in most winter months. This time around, it’s been raining quite a bit so it’s been hard to get this one  done. Cold may not bother me but rain can be rough. I grill and smoke with wood so it  is hard to get the fire started. I have a small grill that I can use  in light drizzle, but the rain was coming from the east for some reason and hosed my chances there. I might have put it in the smoker, since the pellets will  fire rain or not and I have a remote thermometer so I can stay dry, but I really don’t like the skin on smoked chicken. It’s alright if I am   going to rip all the outer skin off,  but  being smoked tends to be unpleasantly  leathery and not a bit crisp. So I do like  to do a sear then grill indirect on chicken like this.

The sauce is  scratch  and I  use a food  processor to whiz the peppers up in a hurry. You can use a blender if you have to. On the red jalapenos- mine was not that hot, although one  I had put on  an upcoming kebab recipe was fiery. In this case,  just use one of two, and supplement the heat if you need to with ground jalapeno pepper or some jalapeno hot sauce rather than risk  making it too spicy to  eat.  Because once the peppers are ground up, there  is no turning back.

If you can,  try the Red Duck ketchup.  It is good- but if you can’t get that, since it is smoky, you  will probably need to expose your sauce to smoke which would mean cooking it on the grill to get the smoke in there. Either way it can be done with smoky ketchup or regular.

Make sure to click the blue frog link  below  the recipe print to see the entire collection (not sure how many will be in this linkup).

Tomorrow I will be kicking off #BBQWeek with the Festive Foodies.  I have those kebabs I mentioned- in Tangerine Hatch Chile Honey Chicken Kebabs and some tips for using the sauce on other things,  such as fish and pork. There will also be a giveaway so make sure you sign up.

~s

Crazy Ingredient Challenge