This is one of those posts about failure

So. I went camping. In the woods. Being me, I brought something to try, in the culinary sense. I decided to try and make beer can chicken on a Coleman stove. Beer can chicken is a recipe that I have been making for years, very successfully, in my oven. I saw the method I used on food network and figured, "well, its not like there is anything else to do in the woods..."

The concept is pretty simple. Take a whole chicken, cover it in rub, insert a half full can of beer where the sun don't shine, and (in the oven, at least) in an hour and 30 minutes you have a wonderfully moist, flavorful chicken. In the woods, its never that easy.

To try this, I rubbed the chicken in my yummy beer can chicken rub (recipe below) and tried to violate it with the beer can. Hubby bought the beer. It was a can of Fosters (Australian for abnormally large can!) It had to have been a 30oz can. It was large, and the chicken, well, wasn't. Luckily, we had some empty cans of diet coke, so we washed one, and partially filled it with beer. At this point, you need to try and balance the chicken on the two drumsticks and the beer can, kind of like a tripod in your cooking vessel. If nothing else, it makes a hell of a dramatic presentation piece. In the oven you just stick it in, and leave it alone. The beer boils, and comes out the neck hole of the chicken (kind of like a percolator) and bastes the chicken for you. Well, I didn't have an oven, I had a tiny camp stove, and a cast iron frying pan. I tented the chicken in tinfoil, and put in the meat thermometer.

2 hours later...
The breast meat cooked, the thermometer read 166F but the drumsticks were still a little rare, about 138F, that's good with steak, but not so much with poultry. There was an air leak at the bottom of the tin foil, and that caused the bottom not to cook efficiently. At this point, I was done. I put the mostly cooked bird in my cooler (it got cooked at home) and made myself a hot dog. Oh well, there's always next week, when I have to camp AGAIN.

Beer Can Chicken Rub

1 T brown sugar
1 T paprika
2 t pepper
1 t salt
1 t chili powder (more or less, according to taste)
1/2 t garlic powder
1/2 t onion powder

Mix well, and rub all over chicken. If you have time, wrap it in saran wrap and throw it in the fridge for a few hours. This lets it "marinate." Then, insert the half full beer can into the chicken, and put it in the oven, on a baking vessel with sides, as the beer tends to leak. Bake at 350 for an hour and a half.


This is Ella, and the best fluff face ever. See, someone ate well in the Maine wilderness.

Photo credit to Laurel M, who documented this whole experiment, and was even nice enough not to make fun of me when it didn't work.