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This Cranberry BBQ Sauce is perfect on Grilled Chicken. It’s easy to make and full of vibrant flavor. Jazz up your Grilled Chicken with a sweet and spicy Cranberry Chipotle Citrus Glaze. This chicken is sweet, spicy, tangy, and a perfect match for a bottle of great wine.

We’re always looking for new and exciting ways to jazz up chicken flavor, especially when it comes to finding something to pair with a specific style of wine. Adding fun and unique flavors to a BBQ sauce is a great way to achieve this.

Ingredients + Substitutions

The exact recipe portions are in the recipe card. You can use this cranberry BBQ sauce on almost any protein you like, but we especially love it on grilled chicken.

• Chicken – We prefer two chicken halves. But you can modify this for any cuts of chicken you have.
• Seasoning – We use our homemade chicken rub, but you can use your favorite store bought version as well.
• Olive Oil – Use extra virgin olive oil as the base to sauté the garlic.
• Garlic – Instead of using onions, we like to start with chopped garlic cloves as the base flavor.
• Cranberry Sauce – Use canned cranberry sauce for less chunkiness or you can make our homemade red wine cranberry sauce if you don’t mind more texture.
• Oranges – Fresh orange juice complements the cranberry and adds natural sweetness. We prefer navel oranges.
• Lemon – We use fresh lemon juice for acidity and also the lemon zest for flavor.
• Brown Sugar – You can use dark or light brown sugar for the added flavor versus cane sugar.
• Chipotle – Use both the sauce and the chipotle pepper.
• Salt – We prefer kosher salt when seasoning anything versus iodized table salt.

Half Chicken vs Whole Chicken

While we do whole chickens quite often, we find that when you split a chicken, you not only cook the chicken more evenly, but you’re getting more surface area on the chicken to get great grill marks and crispy skin. Half chickens are great for grilling at hot temperatures.

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Preparation

If needed, remove excess skin or any bone from the chicken. Be sure it’s patted dry before seasoning. Liberally apply the dry rub and consider letting it dry brine overnight uncovered in the refrigerator to let the flavor infuse into the chicken if you have the time.

Layout the ingredients for the sauce. You can make this up to three days in advance and store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator to spread out the work.

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Make the Cranberry BBQ Sauce

Either before you put the chicken on the grill, or while it’s cooking on the indirect side, prep your glaze. This is an easy Cranberry BBQ Glaze. A glaze is simply a BBQ sauce applied to meat while it’s cooking.

1. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, add olive oil and garlic. Stir to sauté and soften for about 2 minutes.
2. Add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Bring to a simmer and hold at a low simmer to let the flavors combine.
3. You can glaze your chicken while the sauce is still warm or make the sauce ahead and glaze when it has cooled.

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Grill Chicken

Set up your grill for two-zone cooking. We find with chicken that it’s easy to overcook it and get it charred (a polite way of saying burned) when you only cook chicken only over direct heat. So we set up our grill so we have a two-zone cooking space. We have the direct side, where our charcoal is the most intense heat, and then we have our indirect side, where we have no direct heat. Target 450 – 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

1. Place the seasoned chicken on the grill grates over direct heat. Grill both sides for up to 6 minutes per side to get the skin crispy. Keep the lid closed in between.
2. Move the chicken to the indirect side and close the lid. Continue cooking the chicken over the indirect side until it reaches an internal temperature of 155 degrees using a good instant-read thermometer. We recommend the Thermoworks Thermapen One or ThermoPop.
3. Apply the glaze with a brush to all sides of the chicken and continue to grill with lid closed until the internal temperature of the chicken reaches 160 degrees F.
4. Remove from the grill and place on a cutting board and apply glaze one more time. It will firm up as the chicken rests for 10 minutes and carry over cooking occurs. Then serve.

Wine Pairing

We love a fresh Gamay Noir, especially from Beaujolais, with bright cranberry notes. Or you can pair it with a Pinot Noir with similar characteristics.

The sauce has a great combination of sweet and tart rich fruit from those jellied cranberries but is balanced out from the citrus and smoky, spicy chipotle. When paired together, the sweet fruit of the wine tamed the spice and melded with the flavors of the cranberries. At the same time, the chicken enhanced the spice and structure of the wine.

Side Ideas

Our favorite side for this is our Oven-Roasted Crispy Potatoes. And for a salad, we love to have our Grilled Caesar Salad. This is easy to make since the grill is going. For a veggie option try our easy Grilled Broccolini or for something more fancy go for Grilled Asparagus with our BBQ hollandaise sauce.

Frequently Asked Questions

More Grilled Chicken Recipes

• Jerk Chicken
• Perfect Grilled Chicken (every time)
• Grilled Wine Can Chicken
• Balsamic Rosemary Glazed Chicken
• Grilled Chicken with Cherry Chipotle Glaze

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