Here in America, turkey is the classic Thanksgiving meal and if you haven't
smoked yours yet, you are completely missing out. So, today I'm going to teach
you how to smoke a turkey.
When it comes to Thanksgiving, it's so often that we
put the oven to use to smoke the bird for our Thanksgiving meals. but I'm
telling you in the last couple of years we've learned that smoking a turkey
takes Thanksgiving to a whole another level. If you haven't done it yet, what I
want you to do is give this a try. Even maybe give it a practice try before
Thanksgiving before you invite everybody over, but this is a delicious way to get
a bird that everybody's going to love. One of the secrets to making sure that you have
one of the juiciest birds on the block is to start your turkey with a brine the
day before you plan on cooking it. Now, what is a brine? A brine is a salt
solution that you're going to soak your turkey in for about 24 hours to help it
actually absorb some extra liquid and absorb a little bit of salt and a few
other flavorful ingredients to help that bird retain more moisture during the
cook. There's a lot of science behind this we could go into that but right now,
just know if you're not brining your turkey you're missing out on such moist
meat and incredible leftovers. So, the first thing we're going to do is we're
going to put together a brine for this bird that we're gonna put it in for 24
hours before we even think about putting this on the smoker. Now, our brine starts
with a gallon of water. This is just tap water, we got it right
out of the sink and it's a gallon of tap water. About a cup of light brown sugar,
a cup of kosher salt ,then we have a half cup of honey. Now, you can use any honey
that you want. I've heard all kinds of things about different types of honey
imparting great flavor. You can use something that's local to you, but
honey's going to add some great sweetness. Along with that brown sugar we
also have about five cloves of garlic that are rough chopped. It's going to give
some incredible savory notes, and then we have one large onion that's just been
given a rough chop as well. All these savory ingredients are gonna add some
real depth of flavor to this bird. We also have four bay leaves. These bay
leaves are just dried bay leaves that you would get at the supermarket, and you can get
them in the spice aisle. Sometimes they're going to be found in the bulk spice aisle.
There's a tip for you. If you can, look at the bulk spices where you can actually load up
your own little bags of spices. You can find those a lot cheaper than other
places. We also have a tablespoon of black peppercorns, and they're full
peppercorns, they haven't been cracked, they're just
black and we're going to put them right in there, and then also we have a couple of
tablespoons, 3TB to be exact of Cajun seasoning. Now, you can use
whatever Cajun seasoning you would like. We're going to put ours in the recipe down
below. You could use Emeril's essence you could use your favorite. I've heard of a
bunch of different brands but you can make up one really easily down below.
now, all we're going to do is we're going to put all of this together on the stove
top, and we're going to incorporate all of this together and get these sugars
and these salts to dissolve in our liquid, and then we're going to go ahead
and add a whole gallon of ice water to cool it down and make sure that we have
a liquid that's cool that will keep our bird at a safe temperature
as its soaking overnight.
We have our brine mixture that's gone to a boil and then we've actually reduced
it back down. All we wanted to do was to make sure everything dissolved and it
really pulled together. And you can see on the inside here it's a really, really
dark liquid, and we want to get this chilled so we can get the bird inside.
Because we don't want the bird to get into that danger zone of above 40
degrees, or bacteria can start to grow. So, what we're going to do is we're going to
take our ice-cold gallon of water, a lot of ice and freezing cold water, and we're
going to add it to this mixture because we know we're going to need all this to
cover that turkey. So, we're gonna go ahead and add this to the mixture, cool
it off, and then we can get this in the fridge to cool down so we can get that
bird in it and get started on brining this turkey.
We've had our brine in the refrigerator overnight, and so now it's come down to
below 40 degrees, which is exactly where we want it to be before we put this
turkey in. Now, the turkey has been thawed, and all we have left to do is to take
the turkey, put it in the brine and then keep it cold in the refrigerator or
maybe even a cooler with some ice around it for up to 24 to 48 hours. Up to 48
hours you'll even have a juicier, more moist turkey than you will even at 24
hours. But all you have to do is take your turkey, lower it down inside and
then you're gonna take this, put in the fridge and wait for 24 to 48 hours
and you're good to go.
We've had the turkey brining for 48 hours now, and it has taken in all of the
additional liquid that it can as its soaking in that salt solution and it's
letting out some of that other moisture that is in there. But, we're going to
go ahead and get this out of the brine, and you can notice that
it's taken on some of the color that it's had from that brine. All we need to
do is make sure that the cavity isn't holding a bunch of water, and once that's
drained, I'm going to go ahead and put this on our cutting board. Then we're going
to go ahead and get some additional flavor on the inside. Now, getting some
flavor on the inside, you're saying, "didn't we already do that with the brine?"
Well, yeah we did, but we want to get some additional flavor on the inside, and that
additional flavor we're gonna put on the inside is going to be a little bit of an
injection. So, there we go. Bring it over to the cutting board, and there's our turkey.
So, now we want to go ahead and first things first, we want to go ahead and get
the outside patted dry. So, I'm just going to use some paper towel that
we have here, and I'm going to go ahead and pat the outside dry so we don't end up
with rubbery skin when we cook this bird.
Now, that the outside of the bird is dry, we're going to go ahead and transfer it
over to the roasting pan that we're going to cook this in today, because we
could put this directly on the grill, but I really want to save those drippings to
make gravy for the mashed potatoes and for the turkey. So, in that case, we're
going to smoke it, but we're going to smoke it in a roasting pan to make sure we save
those drippings. So, go ahead and transfer this over.
Get that all lined up.
Get this out of the way.
Alright, and the next step is when I like to add some aromatics to the bird. So, we have
this giant open cavity on the inside that is just screaming for something to go
inside of it while we're cooking it, and it adds some extra flavor it also adds
some extra mass so things cook a little bit more evenly. But, all we have here is
we have some onion, we have some apple and we have some celery, and what we're
going to do is we're going to take this and we're going to stick this inside the
cavity to make sure that we have some aromatics
on the inside to even out the cooking on this bird. So, the next step is to make
sure that we don't have any pieces on the bird that are
going to get overdone. And so a lot of times, it's going to be the wing tips and
and some places like that. So, if you have your bird and your wing tips are stuck
up like this, one of the easy ways to do it is just to tuck them behind. You can just
take this, lift it up and tuck this right behind the turkey and that will lay back
there and make sure that that's not going to get overdone. You can do that on
both sides. Just a simple way making sure your wing tips don't get scorched during
the process. In addition to the wing tips going underneath the bird, one of the
things that we also do is a lot of times we'll tie up the legs and we'll make it
so that the legs stay together well. On this bird in particular, what they've
done is they've actually made us a flap right here that we can just tuck these
legs underneath. Okay, and that will hold those legs for us. Sometimes they'll come
pre-trussed with some plastic that's actually already trussed around the legs,
and you can leave that in play, but the idea is we will just want this to be
able to stay tight and closed, that way it cooks nice and evenly. Now, the next step
that we have is we want to go ahead and make sure we've maximized the flavor
inside this turkey, and one of the ways we can make it even more flavorful is to
inject the meat of this bird to make sure that we've added as much flavor as
we can. So, my favorite flavors are melted butter and a little bit of hot sauce. Now,
I'm partial to Cholula myself. Love Cholula hot sauce. Then we're going to
have the carrier just be a little bit of chicken stock. So, chicken stock,
melted butter and a little bit of hot sauce. Mix that together, and I'm going to
stick it in my my trusty injector here, and then we're just going to inject the
breast, the thigh, maybe the leg in a few places, then we're gonna put a little rub on
the outside. So, the whole thing we want to do here is just get a little bit of
flavor inside the breast, and notice how that puffs up when we do this? See how
that puffs up from adding that? It just takes it and puffs that up which is
what we're looking for, and what that's going to do is add some extra liquid, give
us a little thermal buffer as well as some extra flavor.
It's going to be delicious. Now, I put three points in the breast, maybe a couple here
in the legs. Notice how that puffs up when we do that?
Now that we've injected the bird, you might have a little bit of residue left
on the outside, which is taking it from a dry bird to a little bit more wet or
moist bird. I just take a little paper towel, do the same thing. Just clean up
where we were, clean up those insertion points. Make sure that we're going to have
the ability for that skin to crisp up. Because, I don't know about you, but
one of the things I love about Thanksgiving, is having some turkey, eating that
skin when it's nice and crispy on the outside... it makes it so good. So, we
need to make sure that we have flavored the outside of the bird. In order to do
that, we like to use two stages of rub on the outside. The first is kind of a
combination of garlic powder, onion powder, some poultry seasoning and some
salt as our base layer. So, that's what we're going to do is we're gonna mix those
together, and we're just going to put it on the outside pretty liberally because
this is a 12 pound bird. It can take a good amount of seasoning. Now, in order to
get the seasoning to stick, one of the things we're gonna do is just use a
little cooking spray. This is an olive oil cooking spray that we picked up at
the supermarket, and all you need to do is just liberally spray the outside to
make sure that it's a moist surface. Just the right kind of moist surface, it's not
water, it's not just turkey juice, it's actually something that when it gets hot,
it will help crisp the skin. So, that's where we're gonna use this cooking spray to put it
on the outside. So, we said two stages of rub. The first one is the seasoning blend
of the salt, pepper, garlic, onion or the salt, garlic, onion and the poultry
seasoning, and the second stage is where we're gonna use just our sweet and spicy
barbecue rub. And this isn't a barbecue turkey. This is still a smoked turkey, but
we want a few those notes of barbecue flavor. Just a little bit of a
hint of that since we're cooking this out on the grill. And it's not going to
dramatically change the flavor of the drippings on the gravy. It'll give it a
little hint of flavor and people will say, "How'd you get that flavor into it?"
The secret is, it's that barbecue rub. Now, the turkey is seasoned up, it's ready to go out
on the grill. Now, we've got our grill set today at 300 degrees, because we want to
have a relatively high-temperature. Now, for those of you
who are thinking, "Smoking? Don't usually smoke around 225, 250, 275?" Yeah, we do,
but when you're cooking a bird you want to make sure that you get that
crispy skin on the outside. Remember, this is going to be a shorter cook time. We're
looking between three and three and a half hours most likely on a 12 pound
bird, and so at 300 degrees that's really going to give us probably the the best
give and take of temperature and time to get crispy skin on the outside of this
bird. So, today we're cooking on our Traeger. It's a Renegade Pro model, and
we're using a pellet grill to do this cook primarily because it's raining
outside, it's windy outside, and I don't want to be outside all the time cooking
this bird right now. So, we're going to let the pellet grill do the work for us,
and maintain the fire. So, we've set it to 300 degrees, all that's left to do now is
to get this out on the smoker.
It's been about 90 minutes and we're out here checking on the turkey, but what
we're gonna do is we're going to spray it down with a little bit of olive oil
to be able to provide some moisture for the outside of the skin so it doesn't
get too dark. But, we still want that skin to get crispy, so we're gonna go ahead
and rotate it all the way around, and we're gonna apply that olive oil to both
sides just to make sure that we have that lubrication to keep it nice and
moist, and to be able to help that skin really, really crisp up. We're also going
to take an external temperature probe and we're going to stick it down to the
thickest part of the breast meat to be able to watch the internal temperature
to make sure we know when this bird is going to be done.
All right, the dark meat's reading about 175°
the breast is reading about the same place we want it to be...
That's at about 165 as well, that juice is running clear. That says it's time to get this
bird off. We're going to go ahead take this off, tent it loosely and go ahead and let it
rest for a little bit and this thing is almost ready to eat.
Our turkey's come off the
smoker and it's rested here on the counter for about 35 to 40 minutes, and
the whole point of it resting is that the juices can reabsorb back into the
turkey so that when we slice it, it's juicy and moist, and that's really what
we have going here. So what I want you to do now is I want you to see
what our bird's looking like.
Now, I took that foil off, and the bird is still nice and hot
It's still warm. I can still feel heat coming off of it, even though it's been
sitting here for 35 or 40 minutes. So, you don't have to worry about tenting your
turkey or getting it done too early. If you're done a half-hour, even
an hour early, you can let it sit and you're gonna have some really, really
great eats. Now, what we're gonna do is go ahead and carve this up.
So, you can get a look at what we're looking at here with this turkey, and I'm gonna
start with the breast. I'm just going to carve a nice little slice here
on the outside.
Oh, look at that juice that's running through.
Oh man, that looks good.
It's moist, aww there's so much juice in there, and
that skin on the outside, oh man that's gonna be delicious.
All right, I gotta save this because this is gonna be the one that I know the fam wants to try too.
make a little slice for me
Look at that. Juice is running on it.
Look at the juice just falling off the end...
Oh, it's gonna be good.
Mmm.
That tastes like Thanksgiving here at our house.
Man, that's good.
If you ever smoked a turkey, you're missing out. There's so
much flavor on this bird.
All right, let's take a little look at the dark meat as well.
Little slice here on that leg.
Oh, that's gorgeous.
That's gonna be so good
A little bit for me.
Mmm.. Tender, juicy...
that's exactly what I want to see
in a smoked turkey.
Now, if you haven't tried this,
I really want to encourage you to try this at home.
You can make a turkey that is exceptional
for your Thanksgiving and I want to show you here, look at all the drippings
in this pan. If you could see all the drippings in this pan, amazing drippings
to be able to make gravy with. So, it's not like smoking a turkey leaves you out
on all the things that are important on Thanksgiving like gravy, mashed potatoes
delicious turkey... It takes you the opposite direction it actually takes you
to the point where you have incredible, incredible juicy drippings to be able to make
that gravy with, it is next level. You've got to try it.
So, if you like this recipe I
hope you subscribe to the channel. We want to put out videos like this once or
twice a week to help you win your weekend and become a better pitmaster we
want you to be a better outdoor cook and this whole idea is that we can help you
become better by showing you some of our recipes and sharing those with you.
So, this has been David from The Barbecue Lab, and I hope you join us next time,
right here on the channel.