Home Cookin' - Pollo Boracho

Hubby and I made Pollo Boracho (i.e. drunken chicken) for the first time on Sunday.  It is ridiculously simple, but usually requires a special beer can holder for the grill, unless you want a pain in the butt trying to keep the chicken upright and you want to spill boiling beer on yourself when the chicken is done.  As luck would have it, they had some of these holders in the supermarket when hubby went on a grocery run recently.  Understanding the correlation between buying me kitchen gadgets and eating tasty food, he picked one up!

I just rinsed the chicken, salted it inside and out (kosher salt ONLY, what am I? A barbarian?), stuffed a peeled onion and some garlic cloves in the cavity and stuffed it onto a partially emptied can of beer on the holder.  You need to empty between a quarter and half of the liquid from the can, so there is room for it to boil.  I gave my husband the excess beer to drink.  He was heartbroken, as you can imagine, but he took one for team chicken!

The beer heats and steams and flavors the inside of the chicken.  It also slowly roasts the onions and garlic to sweet and tender perfection.  I can tell you the chicken was awesome after slow roasting for about 90 minutes.  I would love to show you the finished product but my husband someone carved them before I had the chance.  We also grilled some corn and baked some potatoes on the grill in foil packets with salt and butter.

I am looking forward to playing with this recipe and using other things besides beer as my cooking liquid.  I really want to try cranberry juice next!  Has anyone out there in cyberspace done this with anything besides beer?  Tequila?  Cola?

UPDATE: Our friends who were over for dinner the night of the Pollo Boracho caught our finished birds on camera!