Chiminea Chicken

Yesterday morning the weather was lovely, so I decided I was going to make the tea outside. When I left work, it turned horrible. I got a chiminea a few weeks ago but I have only managed to light it a few times because of the weather. I hadn't originally intended to cook with it but it turns out they are very good for this. I cooked some lovely skewers of steak and prawn with chilli sauce not long after I got it but the blog wasn't around then. I'll revisit them sometime and share the joy on here. Anyway, on to the chicken...

I used...

4 x chicken breasts (2 each)

8 x rashers of bacon

A bit of cream cheese

Garlic (a clove for each)

Rosemary

Salt

Black pepper

For each parcel, I put two rashers side by side and seasoned them with salt, pepper and rosemary. I then put one chicken breast on top of the bacon (raggy side up), covered it in cream cheese and crushed the garlic on top. Like so:

Stick another chicken breast on top and wrap the bacon around the two bits of chicken. Season the rest of the bacon the same as the last lot and wrap that around in the opposite direction, nice and tight. Now wrap them in tinfoil to hold it all together.

The fires been on for a canny while now (about an hour) and the wood has burnt down to glowing coals ready for cooking. The chiminea is what you'd get if your barbecue got your oven pregnant somehow. It grills from the bottom, but the cast iron surrounding kicks out heat from all sides like an oven. I put the parcels in at a bit of a height from the coals so to take more advantage of the convected heat (oven) than the grill.

This oven doesn't have a door so typically won't get as hot as your oven indoors (or maybe it does on a hot day without wind) so therefore needs quite a while to cook, especially chicken as you shouldn't take any chances with poultry (food poisoning). I gave it 50 minutes, moving them about regularly.

At this point I was going to remove the foil and grill them for a bit to get the bacon crispy but the fire had pretty much died and wasn't hot enough. It would have been daft to put more wood on, wait ages and start cooking again, so we just ate it like this:

I'm glad I did! Chicken's one of my least favourite meats as its often dry but not this. It was very very juicy, cooked perfectly and all of the cream cheese had stayed put. If I'd grilled this, I might have dried it up and lost the cheese to the inferno. It didn't need any sauce as the rosemary and garlic had permeated the whole thing and gave loads of flavour to the juices. I served it with some baby new potatoes, butter, salt and pepper.