Beer Can Chicken on the Grill?

Cooking Discussions Cooking, Cookbooks, Ingredients
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The world of culinary arts needs to be tested with scientific rigor.

Kenji, America’s Test Kitchen, Serious Eats, Ethan Chlebowski, and many others on YouTube post the results of their experiments doing various things, like boiling eggs or cooking steaks. They do a decent job of optimizing variables under controlled circumstances.

Where they fail is their sample size. They don’t repeat their experiments with sufficient technical replicates nor biological replicates before drawing firm conclusions. The reason, I suspect, is some combination of time and expense of labor and reagents.

The reason they get away with drawing conclusions without sufficient data (insufficient sample size, technical and biological replicates) is there is no process of peer review prior to publication on YouTube or in written/print media.

This is the equivalent of publishing in non-peer reviewed literature, which is essentially not science.

The people doing these experiments are very intelligent and some have scientific backgrounds, and they definitely mean well. However, just because they’re sure they’ve answered certain questions to their own satisfaction, and may have published thick cookbooks with their results, they’ve left the door open for having done so much work only to make incorrect or at least imprecise conclusions.

Chief among the areas of room for improvement is the issue you’ve brought up: the evaluation of the cooking results is generally not done by masked graders.

Ideally, the cooking results should be evaluated by trained masked graders the preparation of the food probably can’t be masked from the cook, but at least the experimental results should be assessed by graders who are masked to the preparation being studied, and who are also trained to assess subtle taste differences. Furthermore, experiments should be repeated several times (technical replicates) and using several different batches of raw materials, such as chickens, cows, eggplants, yams, from different farms (biological replicates).

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No. What’s happening is you think emglow isn’t tasting what he’s tasting–without yourself having tasted. In other words, you think from afar that emglow is making it up.

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You understand why people use double blinded taste tests for food related research ? (It has noting to do what I think I would taste - just read some basic research)

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A beer can chicken some rando in one of my cooking groups made on his BGE.

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Looks pretty scrumptious to me, but I wasn’t invited to his dinner, so I can only go by looks :wink:

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A long the same lines

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I feel so seen.

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I’ve had a number of disagreements with him over the years. I don’t know his current stance, but maybe 15 years ago he insisted that a thick chop or roast or bird got as much salt in a 30 minute to 1 hours soak as it did in a 12 hour soak, testing proving salt penetration over time be damned.


ETA -

@honkman - I thought I could tell the difference between iodized and non-iodized table salt until my kids challenged me on it (caveat, this was after I lost some of my sense of smell due to covid; but I always thought before that I could detect a somewhat “dusty” flavor to the iodized). And my kids insisted that they like Irish Breakfast tea over English Breakfast, until I blind tested them.

Interestingly to me, though, in view of your article, is that none of them have claimed a taste preference between the mass market eggs I buy less often now, compared to the pastured chicken eggs I get from the couple down the street most of the time.

They do perform better as hard-boiled (whether boiled or steamed) with no shells cracking during the process. I’ll buy them anyway because the couple are nice folks and I can afford the upcharge, and some Uni report I read said on average eggs from pastured chickens had around 2x of certain fat soluble vitamins and the “good” fatty acids.

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As far as eggs are concerned, I’ve done the blind test a couple of times, and the eggs I get at the farmers market or from various friends who have laying hens that live wonderful lives have won out each time with regard to flavor. Appearance (like extra rich-orange yolks, or colorful shells) got nothing to do with it. Plus I support local small farms, or — better yet, get them for free :smiling_face: win/win

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Sorry to go OT, but how long do “unwashed” pastured hens eggs last on your counter vs store bought eggs? I refrigerate my store bought eggs and they last a month or even 6 weeks, but I try to eat my room temp unwashed eggs within a week but I have not seen any of them float in the water test so far. Sadly, I have recently heard that the “if it floats it is bad” test is not all that accurate.
I go through a lot of eggs and my egg compartment is full of commercial eggs most of the time so I supplement the store bought eggs with eggs bought from a guy outside a German church near my house.
I think the pastured hens lay eggs with brighter yolks (as Natascha noted) so they look better. But I cannot tell a difference in taste.

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Free would be nice indeed! But how can you be certain (unless you dye them green like Kenji did in his tests) that the beautiful orange yolks aren’t skewing your perception?

But I’ve not done blind testing of our eggs, either, with the kids. I’ve just asked if they taste better to them. I probably could, though. ATM, I do happen to have both sorts in house. And plenty of green dye… :slight_smile:

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i’ve had no problems at 6 weeks, though i try to use them within 4 to 5 weeks.

i’m not a big egg eater generally, so i only get them every couple of months or so.

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when i read the article i wondered if the green dye was totally without taste/flavor.

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I don’t know for sure. The other place I used to get them just had them on the porch, unwashed and at room temp. I’d normally use them in much less than a week. When 3 of the 4 kids are here, we can easily use a dozen a day, or considerably more if the daughters are baking cakes etc. I quit buying theirs because it was out of the way for me.

The farm I’m buying from now does have a washer, and stores them on the porch in a small refrigerator. I’ve only let them sit out at RT a couple of times (letting them come to RT with a fan blowing on them to avoid condensation per my youngest daughter’s instruction), but again, we go through them very fast. Even with just me and my son, it’s a dozen per 2 days.

As for yolk color, I’ve a friend a state over who has dozens of layers who scratch in his back yard, supplemented with feed from Tractor Supply. He get’s the kind with the marigold petals ground up into it and in the winter, despite being mostly on feed (not much to find on the ground), the yolks have the same color due to the marigold in the feed.


ETA

Yeah I wondered that, too. But I figure it must be fairly subtle as I’ve not noticed it making my March beer foul or any green confections taste bad.

But certainly if we had not had Dr. Seuss, green eggs would probably be viewed as being in poor taste.

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And you will never get huge double yoke eggs from the grocery store.

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Talking about huge (but not double yolk) eggs, my brother got some huge goose eggs last month and they kind of creeped me out. They were probably 2 to 3 times the volume of a jumbo chicken egg.
I hate to admit it, but I did not eat any of them, so I can not tell you all what they tasted like.

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You misunderstood. The eggs I get from my buddy don’t have specifically bright orange yolks, but many people see those in an egg & will immediately assume that they are going to taste better or be more nutritious.

These are brown and white eggs that taste better, without any visual clue that they should.

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I did not care for duck eggs scrambled, but we had turkey eggs in Berlin that were delightful.

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Ah, gotcha. I wonder to what extent there may be other environmental factors involved - thinking about how they say wines pick up some flavors from where the grapes are grown.

I haven’t tried my friend’s eggs in the next state over. I texted him after I mentioned him, above (I had some other catching up to do anyway), and he said everyone says his taste better than store-bought. But he also gives a lot of his away… which has a certain flavor-enhancing effect, too. And they do have the visual cues (orange yolks).

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I’ve got a similar widget for propping the chicken upright, but mine wasn’t designed to hold a beer can. It came with an “air fryer” (a kettle with a ring-burner underneath; the walls just get super hot and radiate heat toward the meat). Larger turkeys stand upright in the basket on their own, but smaller turkeys and chickens need the support to stand up.

I’ve done chickens in the air fryer and in the grill and do like that it’s not shielded by a sheet pan but still isn’t going to stick to the grates, as @Thimes mentioned.

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I googled eggs and terroir and found this statement. The article was mostly about their beef.
“People say our eggs are the best they’ve ever eaten, even though eggs they buy from other farms have the same practices as us.
So I started wondering…could it be terroir?
Yes, it is!”

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