Pulled Smoked Chicken

Pulled Smoked Chicken melts in your mouth whether you serve it stand alone, with sauce, over a bun or piled high with nachos. This tender, juicy meat is packed full of just enough BBQ flavor.

🍽️ Why This Recipe Works

Super Fast – If you are using the stand mixer technique, this is finished in under a minute. If you use the two fork method, it may take you five minutes.

Stretches Food – No matter what, pulling and shredding chicken for additional recipes is just smart use of food. For a whole chicken once you shred it all, you can get 3-6 additional meals out of it, depending on what you do with it.

Freezer Friendly – This is great to shred it and divide up for the freezer to simply pull out and use when you want a quick, easy and delicious homemade dinner. Pull out for last minute quesadillas or Saturday night movie night, make a heaping pile of sheet pan nachos. Cold and chilly weekends grab a bag out for a big batch of Crockpot Taco Soup or Slow Cooker White Chicken Chili.

🐔 Ingredients

Smoked Chicken | Use the smoked chicken that you finished or plan on smoking two of them at the same time. That allows you to eat one now, and shred the other for the week’s meals.

📝 Instructions

This is super simple to do and you have two different ways to do it.

Fork Method

Step One: Remove the skin from the chicken and remove the chicken from the bone.

Step Two: Place two forks back to back to each other in the chicken and pull them away from each other. Put the forks back together again in the same configuration and repeat until the chicken is fully shredded.

Stand Mixer Method

Step One: Remove the skin from the chicken and remove the chicken from the bone.

Step Two: Make sure the chicken is broken up into 3-5 pieces and start the mixer with the PADDLE on to the slowest setting. Do this for about 30 seconds as the larger pieces start to break down. Turn it faster when you can and the remaining pieces will pull apart. This should take around one minute for the chicken to completely shred.

15 Recipe Ideas

There are endless options of what to do with pulled chicken besides having it on a sandwich with BBQ sauce and slaw.

How to Reheat

Depending on how you are going to use the chicken will depend on if you need to reheat it.

If you are using the chicken as a component to another recipe, then simply follow the instructions and add the chicken as required to heat.

I like eating the chicken with a fun salad, so I simply heat up the chicken with a little bit of water in the microwave for 1-2 minutes.

How to Freeze

Consider dividing up the meat into one cup servings into freezer safe bags. This will allow you to pull out a bag to make a salad or a batch of taquitos without having to defrost three pounds of meat.

Step One: Scoop one cup servings into each freezer safe Ziploc bag and press out all the air and seal. Do this until all of the meat is bagged up.

Step Two: Take all of these smaller bags and put them into a large gallon sized freezer safe Ziploc bag. Press out the air and zip it closed.

❗ Expert Tips

Double bagging when freezing will secure the meat to stay so fresh that it will taste like the day you smoked it. Doing it this way will allow the meat to stay in the freezer for up to six months.

Don’t freeze all of the meat in one big lump in the freezer, even if you feel really lazy. It is too hard to get it apart and it makes you commit to using all of the chicken at once.

Recipe FAQ

Related Recipes

Tried this recipe? Please leave a star ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating in the recipe card below and/or a review in the comments section further down the page. You can also stay in touch with me through social media by following me on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook!