While pork and, to a lesser extent, beef are ideal for slow smoke cooking, I prefer chicken and most other poultry roasted in kettle or hooded barbecues.

Not only does the higher temperature minimise the risk of food poisoning, it helps produce crispy skin and moist, succulent flesh. Well, that's the likely result if you get the heat and cooking times spot on.

If, like me, you would prefer to imbibe a tiny glass or two of passable red wine with the guests rather than nervously watch a dead bird cook there is a solution. It's called BBQ Blue's principle of inversion cooking of poultry.

Here's how it works - pay attention now - what you do is simply invert the dead bird (yes Virginia, turn it upside down).

I have always been amazed at how many people prepare special marinades and bastes for chooks only to end up with tasteless and dry meat but beautifully flavoured chicken backbones and bases of roasting pans.

By turning the bird breast downwards after the initial 20 minutes or so of cooking the juices will soak into the breast meat. The result is succulent moist flesh subtlely flavoured with the ingredients placed in the cavity.

A word about stuffing poultry - don't! By the time you've used enough heat to kill any bacteria that might have bred in the middle of the stuffing, you usually have one overcooked bird.

If you want your stuffing fix - cook it in a separate pan or wrapped in foil. In my opinion, the only things that should be placed in the cavity of the bird are flavouring ingredients. These can include lemons or onions soaked in various mixtures often featuring wine or beer. Their purpose is to heat up sufficiently through the cooking process to release moisture and flavour when it is needed.

Another plus is that the ingredients steaming away inside the bird lessen the risk of it drying out and you can concentrate on what people are saying instead of staring at a clock.

The Process

Squeeze the lemon juice into a glass or stainless steel bowl. Throw in the squeezed lemon quarters, onion chunks , garlic, bay leaves, chilli, wine and olive oil. Soak for at least a couple of hours (or better still overnight) to give the lemons and onions a chance to soak up the other flavours.

Pack them into the cavity and secure the opening with a sharp satay stick (soak it in water for an hour or two to avoid burning).

Roast at around 200 degrees C for the first 20 minutes. Than turn the bird breast side down for the remainder of the cooking period. The turning of the chook is a good time to add some more pre-soaked hardwood chips.

The actual cooking time will vary depending on the size of the chicken but an hour or so is usually the minimum. Nervous cooks can check with a meat thermometer or prick the thigh to see if the juice runs clear - not pinky read (and do remember to prick, don't slash like a serial killer because the juices will escape and the meat will become dry).

Ingredients

If you're rich, go buy a free range chicken fed on an exclusively organic diet that comes with a guarantee that it was free to self express - at least until it was knocked off. It's usually money well spent. For the extra 50% hike in cost, you probably get about a 100% improvement in flavour.

The size of chicken, of course, depends on the number you are feeding. Remember though that it takes the same amount of fuel to cook two chickens as one.

The cavity should be stuffed with:

• A lemon and an onion - both cut into four equal sized pieces
• Some fresh cloves of garlic cut in half. If you like garlic use lots. If you don't still use a few as the flavour becomes very mild during cooking.
• A few bay leaves. I prefer fresh but dried are okay.
• A glug or two of sherry or white wine.
• A glug of olive oil.
• A hint of chilli. I prefer Asian sweet chilli sauce but you can use powder or even the real thing if you're a hopeless purist. Just make sure you don't overpower the other flavours.
• A few whole black peppercorns.

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