Heaven Is an Entire Lemon-Pepper Chicken Doused in Honey Butter
Once, I spent three days straight eating nothing but chicken wings.
Accompanied by four brave adult humans, I journeyed through the sweaty depths of an Atlanta July, armed with floss picks, wet naps, and handfuls of Prilosec. We ate out of styrofoam containers in gas station parking lots and visited strip clubs at 3 p.m. We fought over wilted celery. At one point somebody made a bracelet out of chicken bones. Things got weird. But we emerged triumphant, with a crumpled, sauce-stained spreadsheet listing the names of Atlanta’s top 12 chicken wing purveyors, ranked.
As a result of this experience, coupled with my decade in Atlanta (America’s chicken wing capital—fight me), I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur. And like any good Atlantan, Paper Boi included, I know without a scrap of doubt in my heart that the best chicken wing flavor on earth is lemon-pepper wet.
First, a lesson for the uninitiated. The difference between regular lemon-pepper chicken and the hallowed lemon-pepper wet is one thing: butter. Specifically, liquified butter that’s poured over your freshly fried chicken in a blanket of greasy glory, balancing the zing of the lemon and bite of the pepper with pure fat. Sometimes, there’s hot sauce in there too. But know this: A lemon-pepper wet wing is a little bite of heaven.
But you know what’s even better than a little bite of heaven? An entire chicken-sized hunk of heaven. And that is what my fellow Atlantan Bryan Furman of B’s Cracklin’ BBQ has introduced to you, good readers, with this grilled lemon-pepper chicken recipe. So obviously, I had to rep my adopted hometown and make it, even though I’d never grilled a whole chicken before. And because I am an all-or-nothing kind of person and a glutton for punishment (and just a glutton, generally), I decided to make it about two hours before 40+ people were to arrive at my tiny-kitchened Brooklyn apartment over Memorial Day weekend. Go big and stay home. That’s my motto.
How it went down
Step one to cooking an entire chicken is buying an entire chicken. In keeping with Furman’s M.O. of using only top quality proteins he helps raise himself, I opted for the most ethically-raised-seeming chicken in the Key Foods refrigerated meats aisle. I removed the chicken’s heart and other ick parts like a champ (made easy by the fact that they came neatly tucked inside a little plastic bag) and tossed them in the freezer, telling my cat and whoever else might have been listening that I would someday “make a stock with them or something!” while knowing that in reality they will remain lost behind three open bags of freezer-burned broccoli until I a) move out or b) die.
My friend Pat arrived as I was cleansing the chicken carcass (not with soap; shout-out to this man for learning that lesson for me). In exchange for a can of Coors Light, he agreed to be my sous chef, which mostly involved taking videos of me with the chicken and posting them to my Instagram story.
“Ayyyyyeeee!!!! ]]>🔥🔥🔥
