I Cooked BBQ Chicken 6 Different Ways and Found the Only Method I'll Ever Use Again (It's So Juicy) (2024)

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Overall rating: 7/10
Get the recipe: Tyler Florence’s The Ultimate Barbecued Chicken

This recipe starts by brining chicken leg quarters in a simplified wet brine for a couple of hours. While the meat soaks, you make a thick, sweet barbecue sauce with sautéed onion and garlic, ketchup, brown sugar, molasses, vinegar, and spices. You’ll then remove the chicken from the brine, pat it dry, and grill it just until there are some good grill marks. Then the chicken goes in the oven, where you’ll cook it for a bit, baste it with sauce, and continue cooking until done.

It delivers sticky-sweet leg quarters that are perfectly cooked and juicy, with a bit of char flavor from the brief time on the grill. The sauce is quite thick and splatters on the stovetop as it simmers, so it’s a bit messy to make. The flavor of the sauce was a bit too sweet, giving a baked beans vibe. I’ll likely make the recipe again, as I loved the grill-oven approach (char flavor from the grill combined with the steady and easy-to-control heat from the oven); I’ll just eliminate the brown sugar and go with molasses only in the sauce.

Overall rating: 7/10
Get the recipe: Trisha Yearwood’s Oven BBQ Chicken

This recipe begins with an easy homemade barbecue sauce made with sautéed onion and garlic, ketchup, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, butter, and spices. As the sauce simmers, you’ll arrange seasoned bone-in chicken thighs and drumsticks, skin-side down, on a sheet pan. You’ll then pour the hot sauce over the chicken, cover the pan, and bake until almost done. You’ll then uncover the pan and bake for a little longer, then turn the chicken skin-side up to finish cooking.

The chicken comes out of the oven with an incredibly moist, tender texture and lightly charred skin. There’s a lot of sauce on the pan, which is a little loose from the chicken juices that intermingle. Personally, I would have loved for the sauce to be a smidge thicker. The flavor is balanced between sweet and tangy. Overall, this chicken reminded me of the always-popular BBQ chicken I see at family reunions and potluck gatherings. It’s mildly flavored and juicy, with a familiar, comforting appeal.

Overall rating: 7.5/10
Get the recipe: The Pioneer Woman’s Oven BBQ Chicken

The first ingredient in this recipe is “your favorite BBQ sauce,” and I used a local-to-me favorite from Dreamland Bar-B-Que. You simmer it with peach preserves and grated fresh garlic, and that’s your sauce. For this recipe, you’re working with 12 bone-in thighs, which you’re instructed to arrange on two sheet pans — so I arranged one oven rack in the top third of the oven and the other in the lower third. You bake the chicken, skin-side down, until it’s almost done, then flip it over and start basting with sauce every few minutes until the chicken is done and the skin starts to brown.

Spreading the chicken out over 2 pans is a smart move: It allows more of the chicken juices to evaporate as the meat cooks, so that the skin ends up almost crisp even after being repeatedly basted with sauce. The flavor is totally dependent on your choice of store-bought sauce. Because I knew I’d be adding peach preserves, I went with a brand that I knew was less sweet to begin with. (If you’d also like to go less sweet but don’t know what brand to choose, look for one with the least amount of added sugar on the nutrition facts panel.) The meat itself is wonderfully moist, and the recipe is dead-simple (although it does require you to be on hand for basting duties).

Overall rating: 8/10
Get the recipe: Millie Peartree’s Baked Chicken with Hibiscus BBQ Sauce

As noted above, the homemade sauce for this recipe is comprised of mostly classic ingredients — except for the star component, dried hibiscus flowers. I’ve made many batches of margaritas with this ingredient (which I typically get from a local Latin foods market), so I was familiar with its tangy flavor and stunning magenta color. True to form, it lent both elements to this sauce. The sauce also included a full 1 1/2 teaspoons each of red pepper flakes and cayenne pepper, plus a pierced whole habanero chile. I was worried about the heat level, but put my trust in the recipe; I’m glad I did.

The sauce did not taste as spicy as I thought it might, but it definitely had a medium-hot kick. The flavor was tangy and not too sweet, with that lovely bit of fruity heat from the habanero along with the more “hot” heat from the dried pepper elements to complement the hibiscus notes. The sauce gets brushed onto seasoned chicken leg quarters that bake almost completely without sauce (it goes on just for the last 5 minutes or so). As a result, the sauce sort of sits on top and doesn’t feel quite as one with the chicken. But wow, that flavor! I loved the sauce so much that not only did I dip bites of chicken into it, but I also drizzled a hefty amount onto steamed rice so I could enjoy even more.

Overall rating: 8.5/10
Get the recipe: Marcus Samuelsson’s BBQ Chicken with Coleslaw & Rice

I only made the chicken component from this recipe; I skipped the coleslaw and rice. This recipe begins by coating boneless, skinless chicken thighs with an intense spice paste that prominently features the Ethiopian spice blend berbere. While the chicken sits in that marinade for an hour, you make the sauce with sautéed onions, ginger, and garlic; honey and brown sugar; chopped tomatoes; ketchup; more berbere; brewed coffee; water; and herbs. You then grill the thighs, basting both sides with the sauce.

First off, this recipe is flat-out delicious. However, the recipe requires some on-the-fly judgment calls. It lists 2 cups of olive oil for sautéing onions, ginger, and garlic for the sauce. That sounded like a lot, so I started with 1 cup — and that was still too much to allow for the caramelization that was supposed to happen. So I ditched the ingredients and started over with a 1/2 cup of oil (using the amount called for in Ina Garten’s recipe below as a guide), which seemed right. Next, the ingredient list included a mere 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce, which seemed odd, and I wondered if tomato paste was the intended ingredient. Sure enough, tomato paste (not sauce) was called for in the instructions, and luckily I had some on hand and used it instead of tomato sauce. Also, you add 4 cups of liquid (3 cups of water and a cup of brewed coffee) and then cook the sauce down for an hour so that it’s reduced by half. I understand the flavor development that happens when you cook a sauce down, but why not start with a bit less liquid and cook for a little less time? All in all, it had the feeling of a large-scale recipe that didn’t quite translate when scaled down for the home cook.

But the flavor, oh my, was outstanding. Berbere brought a big, bold, intense flavor to the chicken and the sauce — a mixture of spicy heat and heady, earthy spice that was rounded out by the sweetness of the ketchup and brown sugar. Even though it was the sole recipe to call for boneless, skinless chicken, the thighs remained juicy inside, with a crisp, seared crust on the outside. The chicken picked up crusty bits where the spice paste and sauce charred on the grill, and the flavor was divine. I would 100% make this recipe again, as long as I make some adjustments.

Overall rating: 10/10
Get the recipe: Ina Garten’s Barbecued Chicken

This recipe calls for quartering two whole chickens and removing their backbones, which is pretty easy to do (you can Google how to do so if you’ve never done it before). You marinate the chicken quarters in a homemade barbecue sauce that sets itself apart in several ways. First, it was the only one that didn’t use ketchup. It did, however, use an entire cup each of tomato paste, cider vinegar, honey, Dijon mustard, and hoisin sauce; and it also called for a 1/2 cup each of Worcestershire and soy sauce, plus an ample amount of chili powder, cumin, and pepper flakes. After the chicken marinates for a few hours or up to overnight (I went with the latter), you grill it for about 45 minutes, turning only once or twice and basting occasionally with the marinade.

This recipe gave me everything I could ever want from BBQ chicken. The sauce was beautifully balanced — rich, thick, tangy, complex, a bit spicy, and not too sweet. And it felt fully integrated with the chicken (the marinating time helped the flavors infuse into the meat and skin). The meat stayed juicy and cooked to perfect tenderness on the grill, and the sauce gained lovely bits of char from the fire. The skin was mostly crisp, which was a tasty surprise.

One thing to note: The ingredients for the sauce do add up and might seem pricey, but the delicious results are absolutely worth it. It does make a lot of sauce, and you can likely get by with a half-batch if you want to scale back. When I served this recipe to my family, everyone ate in silence, eating all the skin and meat, and licking every luscious bit of sauce from their fingers — so much so, that every bone was picked clean. Even cold leftovers tasted phenomenally good the next day, straight from the fridge.