Come try our famous barbecue chicken!

Carnival rides nightly

Craft booths & chicken dinners

The Chicken Dinner at the Crane Broiler Festival has always been the premier item that brings people back year after year to visit Crane during this weekend event.

First we take 50 frozen chicken halves and load them onto a metal rack in one room of our cook shack. Each rack is loaded with the skin side of the chicken half facing up and placed as close together as possible on the rack so that each chicken half will cook evenly. Each full rack is then sprinked with a special spice mix and sprayed with a separate oil and vinegar sauce mix before being loaded onto the barbeque pit.

This large barbeque pit; by itself, is an attraction for many of the people that come to the Crane Broiler Festival. The "pit" is a 50 foot long by 6 foot wide concrete block cooking area that takes approximately 50 bags of charcoal to initially "fire" each morning that the chicken is cooked. During the two days (Friday and Saturday only) this pit area is "fired" at approximately 8:00am each morning and cooking will continue until around 4:00pm each day. Over the 2 day cooking period we will go through 3 to 3.5 tons of charcoal and over 50 gallons of various sauce mixes in the pit area. When the pit is full it will hold approximately 25 of these metal cooking racks. That is approximately 1150 halves of chicken on the cooking pit at one time when the pit is fully loaded. A metal rail system on the top of each side of the cooking pit allows each rack to be easily flipped by the pit workers to allow even cooking of each rack. Pit workers continually move these racks up closer to the "finish line" as fully cooked racks are removed and flipping other cooking racks to insure each chicken half cooks as evenly as possible. During the course of a rack's journey down the length of the pit it will be sprayed at least 5 times again with the same special oil and vinegar mix to help keep each chicken half as moist and juicy as possible so that each chicken dinner produced will be as flavorful as we can make it, for you the purchaser of that chicken dinner. From the starting end of the pit to a fully cooked, succulently moist, chicken half at the finished end it will take approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes for one rack to complete its cooking journey at the Crane Broiler Festival. No chicken half will leave the cooking pit until its internal temperature exceeds 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Now that is hot if you consider that the charcoal in the pit itself is probably burning at over 225 degrees Fahrenheit at the finish end. You definitely do not want to hold your hand over the exposed coals in this area of the pit for very long or drop anything into the pit that you really want to keep.

Date: August 23-26, 2023

Cost: Free

Location: Main Street, Crane, MO 65633

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