Rotisserie Chicken?

buy one from harris teeter and pretend you cooked it

Roasting over an open flame is an extremely tricky proposition. It's hard to control the heat coming off it, and without an enclosure you'll have a lot of hot spots and cold spots, making cooking extraordinarily uneven.

To mitigate this effect, you need to mind two things: the heat source and the meat's density.

To get the best heat source, don't cook over an open flame. Cook over the coals of a well-developed fire. To get this, you need to build fire as soon as you make camp and use plenty of hardwood logs. As the logs burn down and turn into coals, rake the coals over to your cooking area, and maintain the fire a little further away, adding new wood to keep a good supply of coals. Move coals over as needed to maintain an even, hot bed.

Now, for the chicken... you will want to either break up the whole bird into quarters, or at least "spatchcock" it. To do this, you make a deep cut to the bone on both sides of the spine and use poultry shears or a heavy chef's knife to cut through the rib cage and remove the spine. Then you turn the bird back over, and push on the sternum to break the ribs and flatten the bird out some. Then you can either use a forked rotisserie spit or a rotisserie basket (link to an example below) to keep the bird secured and flat. This will help the chicken be a fairly uniform thickness, allowing it to cook evenly. Rotate the chicken often, about every five minutes. Monitor the skin color and test the internal temperatures of the breasts and thighs with a quality digital meat thermometer. If the skin begins to brown prematurely while the inside of the chicken is uncooked, wrap it in foil and return to the heat. Your target temp is 160*F. Once you hit that, remove the chicken from the heat, cover it in foil, and allow it to rest for 5 minutes before serving. This will allow the hotter exterior of the chicken and cooler interior to equalize some, bringing it to a safe 165*F internal temperature without overcooking it and making it dry. I cannot stress enough the importance of using a good meat thermometer, and having the patience to tell yourself and your family/guests that the chicken will be done when it is done, and wait until it hits the right temp before pulling it off.

It's almost impossible, at least if you're talking about a whole chicken and cooking it from raw. You need at least an hour over a very slow fire, otherwise you will burn the outside much before the inside is anywhere near done. And to maintain a steady slow fire for that long will require at the very least a lot of patience and effort and pretty good fire skills, and even then it'll be tricky.

But if you want to give it a bash, my advice would be:

1) To choose as small a bird as possible, and if you need to feed more people then add more birds rather than bigger bird.

2) To spatchcock the chicken so you can cook it on both sides (inside and out).

3) Cut slits into the thighs, to allow heat to penetrate better. You may want to do the same with the breasts, although this will cause them to dry out a bit.

4) Assuming you have the chicken on a spit, make a 'ring' of fire around the chicken, rather than putting a fire directly underneath it, that way you will avoid flare-ups when the melting fat falls to the fire, and also you can cook even when you still have small flames, don't need to wait for embers, which will also make it easier to maintain the fire for a longer time.

5) Once you're finished cooking, wrap the chicken in a alu foil or otherwise keep it warm, to allow the heat to penetrate through more evenly.

Use skinless chicken breasts on the spit or on the grill. Roughing it is the fun of camping. If you want a roast chicken dinner pick a cold day in November and toss the bird in the oven.

Don't do it over the fire, do it over coals, long and slow. Just like an oven, it will take over an hour.

you should be ashamed of yourself for wanting to murder an innocent animal

do the right thing and go vegan