The BBQ Fan Club

As we approach the Thanksgiving season, our thoughts turn to our favorite bird to cook up and eat, the done Tom Turkey!

You may find this surprising, but I HATED turkey before I got my Backwoods Smoker. I could not stand the dried out, overcooked baked turkeys that my family did every year. By eating the dark meat, it was somewhat passable.

A couple of years ago I started to deep fry our turkeys, and fell in love with that method, if you really want a nice tasty dish, fry one up and see how you like it. However, heart healthy this method is NOT. So, with a little help from my doctor, I had to start looking for a new way to cook the bird.

Thank you Lord for moving me and my family to Kansas City! I now have the solution to a juicy, tasty Thanksgiving bird that not only tastes great, but the prep time required allows me to watch football uninterupted for the whole day! Here is how I prepare my birds.

1. BUY. Get a FRESH turkey if you can, NO BIGGER than 14 pounds for smoking. Because of Salmonella poisoning, bigger birds remain in the 40 -100 degree range while cooking too long, thus raising your risk exponentially of having someone get sick. Smaller birds are more tender in my opinion anyhow.

2. CLEAN. If you turkey is frozen, thaw it out safely in the ‘frig, then wash it and wipe it down, wash ALL the skin and and flaps off with warm salt water. Salt water helps to kill the bacteria. (My Grandmother taught me that).

3. PREPARE. You may have heard of people “brining” their turkeys. This is the process of soaking the meat in a salt - liquid mixture, there can be many things in a brine. I personally don’t use this method, there is nothing wrong with it, but I like to inject my birds rather than brining. I use a bunch of different injections, my families favorite is a Cajun Butter injection that I get from Sam’s club of all places! Every thanksgiving Sam’s sells an injection kit that has the injections, plus a really nice seasoning for the outside of the bird. My family like Jane’s Crazy Mixed Up Salt Mix for the outside of the bird, but that is to people’s taste.

Learning how to inject a bird takes a little practice. First you need a good injection needle. I recommend ordering one or going to an upscale cookware store to get a sturdy one. If you simply can’t do that, go ahead and get a cheapie from Sam’s or walmart.

The art of injecting is simple, your goal is to spread your injection flavoring throughout the meat of the bird evenly. When I first started injecting, I would fill the injector all the way up, jam it into the bird, the hammer the plunger down. What I found by doing that is that I had “puddles” of the injection fluid in one spot of the bird, rather than all through it. To evenly spread your injection, insert the needle of your injector into the desired part of the bird, then SLOWLY start to pull the needle out, as you do THAT, slowly start to depress the plunger on your injector so that a little bit of the fluid gets deposited into the bird at a time. Do this is in as many locations that you can get to, spacing the needle insertions by an inch or so. I inject while the bird is inside a metal pan, because you WILL have spillage and leakage. Be ready for that! After you have injected the bird, let it sit in the ‘frig again for another hour or so. This let’s it set in the marinade that you have put directly in the bird. This sets a real nice taste into it.

4. SMOKE, COOK, FINISH! While the bird is setting in the injection, I usually set up my cooker to get ready for the bird. I lay my fire pan and only use natural lump charcoal. DO NOT USE KINGSFORD FOR ANY KIND OF COOKING ANYMORE!! There are people who swear by it, and I used to, but I found out that it is no longer made in America, AND they are putting additives into their charcoal. Since I don’t like eating additives that I cannot pronounce, and I like to support American business, I usually use Royal Oak or some other natural lump coal. This will give you a MUCH cleaner and hotter fire anyway, try it out I gurantee you will see the difference. I lay down my cold lump in my pan, then lay down some hickory and pecan wood when I smoke a turkey. I like the mixture there of flavor. You can use any kind of wood you like to taste. I don’t recommend using any citrus woods since there is a lot of acid in them, but you can experiment if you like. I get a chimney full of coal lit, and let that burn for about 15 minutes before I put it into the fire pan.

I then hook up my BBQ Guru Pro-Comm and get it set up for the cook. I like to cook my birds at about 220-230 degrees, to a finish temp of about 170 in the breast. I am not going to give you a time for how long it takes to get there, smoking is not about time, but rather your finish temperature. (Chicken thighs and ribs aside in that comment, those ARE time based). If I was forced to give a total time to cook the bird, I would say 12-15 hours, but this fluctates since every piece of meat is different. So I set my Pro-Com to 220, get the fan going on it, and then pour the hot coals into the corner of the my fire pan, and close everything up.

Then, I go and get my bird from the frig, I find that cold foods smoke real nice, a lot of people let things come to room temp, that scares me a bit with the bacteria and stuff, so I always put the bird in cold. I take the bird, coat the outside with Jane’s Crazy Salt Mix, then put the bird on the top rack of my Backwoods. Close everything up, make sure everything is running, then take my Pro-Comm remote and go sit down and watch some tv and forget about cooking.

After about 8 hours I put more lump in, no more wood since the meat can’t accept any more smoke anyways, then forget the whole thing again until the Pro-Comm beeps at me that I have reached the internal temp of 170.

5. REMOVING AND SERVING. After the Guru let’s me know the bird is done, I go ahead out and disconnect the fan unit, then turn off the Guru itself, plug up the induction sleeve with the kill plug, then go ahead and open the door and ejoy the view! The golden skin and the fresh smell of smoked turkey fills your nostrils and makes you instantly hungry!

I usually grab my stainless steel fish turner, get underneath the bird without and lift it gently out of the cooker and into a pan. THIS NEXT PART IS KEY SO I AM CAPPING IT. WHENEVER YOU COOK ANY MEAT, YOU MUST LET IT REST BEFORE YOU CUT INTO IT! During the cooking process, the juices and the fluids in the meat get “pressed” into the outer part of the meat, when you see someone cut into a piece of meat and see all the juices flowing out of it, that is not always a good thing! Meat needs time to redistribute the juice throughout the cut after cooking. What I do with my bird is take it and place it uncovered into my oven, I make sure the oven is off and then let it rest for one hour. The oven will keep the heat in the bird, but let it cool down enough to let it rest and redistribute all the juice. You can also use a marine cooler to do this.

After an hour, I take the bird, get my trusty sharpened knife, and slice into the breast for the first sample. The result in our case is a buttery, slightly spicy piece of meat that has an excellent smoky flavor!

Feel free to experiment, you may find that you like brining, I personally don’t like the flavor of a brine. A lot of people also throughout the cook rub butter on their bird skin to give an extra glow. I personally like to keep my cooker door closed for the whole cook, I keep a consistent heat that way.

Tomorrow I will throw out an awesome dessert recipe for smoked apple pie!