Roast chicken on Cobb - what went wrong?

[Tangle]

We got a Cobb last year and tried a whole roast chicken - and it worked exactly as the book says - 9 heat beads, one chicken, one hour later and its all done.

Tried it again last night. Checked after 1 hour - not cooked. Brought it in after 2 hours and thought it was done so DH started hacking (we were beyond nice carving by this point) - but then saw red juice under the legs he'd taken off, and the breasts turned out not to be done either. So we gave up, cut off most of the meat, stuck in foil and put it in the oven.

But we're a bit disappointed, and don't really understand why the wretched thing wouldn't cook. The only two things we were able to come up with were:

1. the beads were bought last year. I've heard cobblestones can loose a certain something if not used within a reasonable period - does the same hold trued for heat beads?
2. DH thinks the chicken was sitting quite high and might have been touching the lid.

Any one had a similar experience and solved it, or got any ideas?

Can't comment on the beads sorry as only use the stones here.

Was your chook at room temp before you stuck it in?

Never experienced this before. How very disappointing for you

Ah - that could be option 3. It was straight out of a cold fridge.... Do you think that would make >1hr on the cooking time, though?

mm

did you do the whole 20 mins per pound plus 20 mins over?

tbh I would ignore the 'cooks in an hour advice' and use usual cooking times for weight of things and then add some. If you are worried about having a dry bird you can add a bit of water in the moat although I can't be arsed with that and just keep it in foil until the last 15 mins when I whip it out to brown up a bit.

I have to say I tend to lean towards the overcooking of meat in the cobb as there's nowt worse than diarrohea in a sleeping bag [speaks the voice of experience]

Did you check on it too often? Opening the lid reduces the temperature hugely.

It wasn't a particularly big chicken - absolute weight will remain a mystery as its now part eaten and part binned (and the bin got emptied this morning). Gut feel is its smaller than the one we did that worked really well, but it was probably also quite a bit colder.

I don't think the lid was opened very often. Maybe once to put the thing in, then once to add the veg. That was probably about it till we checked it after an hour and discovered it was a bit on the rare side...

Getting it straight out of the fridge is sounding most likely at the moment. Might have to persuade DH we have to try again and try to get it right.

Thanks for the thoughts, though :)