The smoked chicken at Mimsy’s Craft Barbecue, in Crockett, about two hours north of Houston, needed an overhaul. For two years after the 2020 opening of their restaurant, owners Kathy and Wade Elkins heard complaints from a few customers that their marinated and smoked half chicken seemed undercooked or that the skin wasn’t crispy enough. The couple had a hunch that a deep fryer might solve both issues. Proof that their theory was correct lies in the juice that collects on your plate once you break through the new-and-improved chicken’s crackling skin.
“It really revitalizes the product,” Wade says of the bird’s hot-oil bath. The preparation begins long before that step. Forty-eight hours before the poultry goes into the smoker, the cooks submerge it in a brine of salt, sugar, water, and Lipton black tea. Wade isn’t sure if the tea adds much flavor to the meat, but “as you’re smoking the chicken, it offers a really nice color,” he says. The bold taste comes from the “cowboy jerk” dry rub that’s applied just before smoking; the blend includes the allspice, cinnamon, cumin, and nutmeg you’d normally find in a jerk marinade, plus black and cayenne peppers.
The brined half chicken is smoked until it reaches an internal temperature of 160 degrees. It’s held in a warmer and, when an order comes in, dropped into the fryer for about two minutes. Then it’s brushed with a sauce of pureed cilantro, garlic, jalapeños, oil, toasted red chile flakes, and vinegar. “We didn’t want to blow it out with the Scotch bonnets or habaneros,” Wade says of the hot peppers typically used in jerk sauce. They need this chicken to be a crowd-pleaser: a business can’t always survive on smoked meat by the pound.
Mimsy’s is one example of how a craft-barbecue joint can work in a small town. “We have to play to the audience, and this is where we’re committed,” Kathy says of their East Texas hamlet of 6,300. “You can only feed everybody in Crockett so many times a week,” she says, so the Elkinses refresh the menu every few months—recently giving the jerked-and-fried treatment to smoked spare ribs—and they regularly offer nonbarbecue fare such as burgers, steaks, and impressive appetizers such as fried green tomatoes and a wedge salad.
As a result of rising beef prices, Mimsy’s has had to charge more for its smoked brisket in recent months, but “it’s still our number one seller every single day,” Wade says. So even when new menus roll out, the barbecue isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the other customer favorite—the jerk chicken.
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “A Deep Fryer to the Rescue.” Subscribe today.
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