Grilled Spice-Rubbed Whole Chicken

I've been having fun adventures lately with cooking whole chickens from roasting, to soup, to grilling. Here's a great grilled recipe that I tried from the July 2009 issue of Cooking Light. Grilled Spice-Rubbed Whole Chicken basically consists of a savory and sweet spice rub on a butterflied chicken. Butterflying the meat helps it to cook faster (and makes it more manageable on the grill). Unfortunately, my Kroger only had chickens that had been cut in half already, so I figured it wouldn't be too big of a difference. Cutting in half is just one step beyond butterflying :-P

After prepping the chicken and mixing up the rub, you have to get your hands dirty. The rub goes all over the chicken under the skin. It was a little challenging to get it in all the nooks and crannies, but trust me, getting as much of the rub on as much of the chicken as possible is definitely worth it. It really infuses the whole chicken with the flavor, keeps it moist, and the skin gets perfectly crispy.

My chicken spooning its other half on the grill

The rub is really nice. The brown sugar caramelizes nicely, and it seems pretty versatile. It would probably be good with beef or pork too. I could think of a lot of variations of this that I'd like to try. To start, I actually added garlic when I made it and used hot Hungarian paprika instead of regular (also doubled or tripled the amounts because Adrian likes a ton of spices). I'd like to try chipotle chili powder next time and make it even hotter with cayenne. I think grating some orange peel into it would also be really yummy.

The finished chicken was delicious! Very moist, very sweet but also smoky, and so easy. Wow, I really need to try this again. It was awesome. Olive was really hoping we would drop some...

Such a little beggar