Outdoors with Luke: Luke copes with the Texas heat, tries barbecue sauce from Wolfe City

Luke grills some chicken halves over a wood fire using an old school barbecue sauce.

I’m about to tell you about some fun I had this week making barbecue chicken the old school way but first, let’s talk about surviving this hot weather!

Garrison Keillor used to open his long running radio show Prairie Home Companion with, “It’s been a quiet week here at Lake Wobegon.”

Well, it’s been a quiet and HOT week around the homestead of this outdoor scribe. It’s so hot that I continue to take a cue from the wild hogs I love to hunt; I move early and late and seek shade during the hot part of the day. Luckily during the heat of the day all that is required is to adjust the thermostat on our air-conditioning to a cool temperature and BINGO, it’s fall already.

But my activities have not been totally limited to the indoors. No, just this morning early I decided to raise the height of my corn feeder situated in the woods about a half mile from home. I have the feeder chained to a lower limb on a big pecan tree and during the summer the weight of the corn in the feeder causes it to drop too close to the ground.

The feeder needed to be raised a few feet out of reach of raccoons and wild hogs standing on their hind legs attempting to reach the golden kernels they love so much. My morning task got off to a bad start when I hurriedly grabbed my six-foot step ladder and immediately felt the stings caused by three yellowjackets that didn’t take kindly to me moving their home. Things got better when in the woods.

Raiding the feeder was somewhat a challenge for one person. I had a quarter-inch bolt with washers and nuts pushed through a couple of the chain’s links. Balancing the feeder atop the ladder, I managed to remove the bolt, take up the slack in the chain and reattach it a couple of feet higher than it was. Hopefully that limb has sagged all it’s going to sag.

I pulled the SD card from the trail camera set on the feeder and back at home noticed a fat young boar hitting the feeder just about dark every evening. This week, I plan to have my Seneca Dragon Claw big bore air rifle topped with the AGM Global Vision scope and attempt to collect some fresh pork.

It’s been too long since I’ve spent time in pursuit of wild porkers and yes, I will have a big cooler with 40 pounds of Buc-ee’s ice in the back of my truck. I have plans for a big pork barbecue soon.

Speaking of barbecue, let me tell you about some outdoor cooking fun I enjoyed on one of the cooler mornings when the temperature was a frigid 84 degrees. I spent my younger years on a poultry farm up in north Red River County. My dad raised 14,000 chickens from babies to around 2.5 pounds every nine weeks. We obviously always had plenty of chicken to eat and to this day, I love barbecue chicken.

My dad often hosted several neighbors and family for a barbecue chicken dinner with all the trimmings. He dug a pit in the ground, about two feet deep, covered it with an expanded metal grill and piled the chickens on. But the day before the cookout, he marinated the birds in the refrigerator in a relatively thin homemade barbecue sauce. While cooking the chicken halves he used what he called a swab stick, which was a piece of cheesecloth tied to a small green stick, to keep his homemade sauce mopped on the chicken.

Well, my plan was to closely duplicate my Dad’s method of making barbecue chicken. But rather than dig the pit in the ground I used my Mountain Man Grill by Cook Shack. This grill easily adjusts in elevation to suit the heat of the oak and hickory wood fire below.

A bottle of Inky Joe’s barbecue sauce was the catalyst that prompted this old school cookout. Greg Staley and his wife Renee’ from Wolfe City had shipped me a bottle of their old school barbecue sauce and asked me to give it a try. This sauce tasted very much like my Daddy’s concoction that I remembered 60 years ago. This was before today’s thick paste sauces become popular.

It was so good I had to refrain from actually taking a small sip. The name Inky Joe’s came from Greg’s father’s nickname. Seems Billy Joe, because of his small stature, played the part of a fairy in a school play years ago and the name Inky Joe stuck. After much trial and error testing several years ago, Greg finally got the approval of his Dad. He had perfectly duplicated the flavor of this old sauce that really got its origin decades ago by a share cropper in Lamar County that loved to make barbecue and had originally created the formula.

With my cooking grill set in place, I built a fire of oak and hickory. We have plenty of both species trees on our place and wood is never in short supply. I like using oak for heat and long burning coals but it’s the hickory that gives meat/chicken the smoky flavor. When the coals were glowing red and the flame had subsided, I placed the chicken halves on the grill and basted them every 20 minutes or so with Inky Joe’s, using a swab stick of course I made from a green hickory limb and a piece of cloth. The chicken soon took on that black, charred look on the outside. Just the way I remember barbecue chicken looked when cooked on that old pit in the ground.

After about 45 minutes, I raised the grill and allowed the chicken halves to slow cook for another 30 minutes or so. The finished product, served with some homemade potato salad, corn on the cob (also grilled) and ice tea took me way back to my early days. The chicken was perfect, a bit black and crunchy on the outside but tender to the bone and flavored the old school way with a thin, vinegar-based barbecue sauce. I can’t wait to slow smoke a pork shoulder in my Smokin Tex electric smoker.

Think I’ll inject it with Inky Joe’s and let the low heat and smoke do its magic. To learn more about this sauce which is currently available by direct order, send an email to [email protected].

Listen to Luke’s outdoor show on KKVI 98.3 FM Greenville at 7 a.m.

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