We are hosting Thanksgiving for the first time this year. I’ve roasted turkeys in the past with great success, but this year my in-laws gave us a smoker and told us, “You can smoke the turkey for Thanksgiving this year!” Despite being volun-told in this way, I’m looking forward to it.
This recipe looks pretty straightforward, but I’m a little nervous about screwing it up. I’m going to brine and smoke a small (9 lb.) turkey this weekend as a test run. I’ve always heard brined turkeys are great. Has anyone ever tried brining and smoking? Got any tips for me?
Personally, I’d cook two turkeys, one smoked and one the usual way, if you’re really worried about messing up the meal. Then give away turkey meat leftovers to your departing guests.
While I haven’t smoked a turkey (though I may have snorted a couple in college) I have brined turkey many times, it makes for an awesome, juicy bird. Highly recommended.
I’ve never smoked one, but the brining is a very straightforward process. Mix your stuff up, pour it into a vessel with some ice (a tall narrow cooler is great for this, or I guess with a very small turkey you could maybe use a stockpot or canner) and plop in your meat. The more concentrated you make the brine, the less time you leave the meat in. If you thin the brine out, leave the meat in longer.
If you have a probe thermometer with a temp alert on it, that’s great for making sure you keep birdy out of the danger zone if you’re doing a long-term brine. Set it to go off when the temp hits 40, and then you know to put in more ice. If you can manage to fit your brine container in the fridge, you don’t have to worry about this step, but most folks don’t have that kind of extra space when hosting Thanksgiving dinner.
That’s why we’re doing the test run this weekend, for proof of concept. If I blow it the first time, I definitely will roast an additional turkey or at least a turkey breast on Thanksgiving just in case. I’m just hoping to do it well the first time, so it’s enjoyable Sunday.
Before you brine, check the tag on the turkey. Many grocery store bought turkeys are now already brined or injected with a brine solution. This saves some work but takes control out of your hands.
I did do the Good Eats brine and then cooked the turkey on my grill. Put some wet wood chips on the charcoal, and I got a nice smoke ring on the meat. The Turkey was darn tasty, but if you have picky eaters the moistness and pink color can make people think “underdone!”
Tcha. I have great respect for Alton, but in this matter, his offering is merely adequate. I will leave the brining to others, who have explained it well. I will speak to you of the ways of Smoke and Baste.
The Baste:
There is no fixed recipe, but it includes a large proportion of powdered garlic, Tony Chachere’s creole seasoning, and black pepper (freshly cracked, if possible) in roughly 5 ounces of olive oil. You may blend these ingredients to your taste, but the final baste should take on a reddish color when you finish stirring it together and have a loose slurry of spices at the bottom of the bowl. If the turkey is brined, you may wish to use red pepper and a small amount of salt in place of Chachere’s, but brining is not strictly necessary. The baste will keep the turkey from drying out as it cooks, and the oil will cause the spices to cling to the surface.
The Smoke:
Put about twenty chunks of mesquite in a pan of water to soak while you make other preparations. Prepare your charcoal as Alton advises. When the smoker reaches the proper temperature, toss the first three or four chunks of wet mesquite on the fire and wait until they begin smoking. Place your skinned and thoroughly basted turkey on the grill, then close the lid. Roughly every 30 minutes, turn the turkey, baste (making sure to get plenty of the spice slurry on your brush), and toss a few more chunks of wet mesquite on the fire. The turkey will develop a rich, reddish-brown color, but it won’t burn or dry if you keep it basted. You can use a meat thermometer to determine when the bird reaches 160 degrees, at which point you should remove it from the heat and cover it with foil to rest before carving. (Actual smoking time should be roughly 3.5 hours.)
There are special brining bags (like large zip-locs) - I saw them at Whole Foods last year and used one. Worked nicely. In previous years I used doubled-up plastic turkey roasting bags to hold the liquid. Put the bag-o-brine-and-bird in a roasting pan (to catch drips) in the fridge to keep it all nice and cold. Also, we make up our brine the night before we get the bird, and sit it in the fridge, to make sure it’s ice cold before we use it. The fridge is crowded, but we manage well enough.
There are a number of brine recipes here on the board; I use one I got from the Washington Post food section about 6 years back. I’m told the combination of brining + smoking is seriously yummo - not for me, as I don’t own a dedicated smoker and a turkey won’t fit on our gas grill, but I’ll be eager to hear how your trial run works out.
The brining bag sounds like a very good idea. I have room in the fridge to keep the bird in there while it’s soaking – the same space it’ll be sitting in while it’s thawing.
I still need to get a probe thermometer. I’m making a SuperTarget run on the way home tonight, so maybe they’ll have those and the brining bags.
Well, the experiment was successful – sort of. We do not know how to get the damn smoker to get hot enough and stay hot enough. We smoked that turkey for seven hours before it peaked at a temp of 150F. 165F was the goal, so we brought it inside and put it in the oven to finish it off. Once it came to temperature, we sampled it. The skin was a gorgeous brown, and the meat was juicy and flavorful. Yay! But it should not take seven and a half hours to cook a nine-pound bird.
We also ended up brining the turkey for about 36 hours. I put it in the brine Friday night, intending to start the smoking Saturday morning, but life intervened and we didn’t end up starting the smoking until Sunday. The meat didn’t turn out too salty or anything – it’s awesome.
What am I doing wrong with the smoker? We followed all the instructions. I have the worst time with charcoal fires. We started with the recommended 5-6 pounds of coal in the pan, and let it get going for about 20 minutes before adding the soaked wood chips. I left the vents open because it said that would help increase the temperature. After two hours, we stirred up the coals and added more, plus more water in the water pan. We added more coal when the temperature started dropping again, and at one point we pulled all the ashes out and added maybe another pound of so of fresh charcoal to the glowing coals. That beefed it up for awhile, but we just can’t get it to stay hot.
It’s an upright charcoal smoker – just a metal box with a pan for coals, a water pan, and a rack or two for the food. Not one of the fancy “egg” smokers.
The smoker temperature was around 200 most of the time. I know smoking is supposed to be low and slow, but this was Low and Time Has Stopped. We could not get the turkey over 152F in the smoker (we had the probe thermometer in it the whole time), and when it backed down to 150, we put it in the oven to finish it off.
Yeah, for turkey I like to get the temps up to 250, even 275 or possibly touching 300, otherwise you get really leathery skin. BBQ is usually done at temps around 225.
I do turkey every Thanksgiving in a Weber Smokey Mountain. As you’ve discovered, the most important thing to learn about barbecue is fire control. Once you have that down, you can smoke anything.
Here’s a good website that teaches you the ins and outs on a Weber Smokey Mountain. Perhaps you can apply some of those lessons to your smoker.
One of the most important things for an upright smoker (and some of the cheaper models don’t have this) is a vent in the lid for the smoke to escape. If you don’t have a vent, the smoke is trapped in the cooking area, and some of the nastier byproducts of burning charcoal (creosote) get dumped on yoyur food giving it a bitter, “dirty” taste. When you’re smoking, you don’t want billowing clouds of white smoke. You want gentle tufts of very light blue smoke to flavor your meat.
For turkey, I would personally go for a gentler wood like white oak and/or apple over mesquite. I sometimes put in little bit of hickory into the mix, too, but I find mesquite overpowering in everything but beef.
edit: There’s nothing wrong with finishing in your oven if you can’t get the temps up in the smoker. Most of the smoke flavoring is created in the first three or four hours of cooking. After that, there’s not much to be added, so feel free to finish in the oven if it makes things easier for you.
The skin did get tough, but I don’t usually eat the skin anyway. It looked very pretty! I know others like it though, so I would prefer that it be less rubbery.
We used hickory wood chips, which were nice. Our smoker does have four vents, which were open the whole time.
There’s no lid. There are two doors on the front. The top one goes to the space where the food racks are, and the bottom one gives access to the water and coal pans. There are two vents in each side of the smoker – one high and one low on each side.
Well, I’ve been known to use a box fan to pump things up when a smoker isn’t heating properly. Prop the coal door open slightly, set the fan on low, and aim it at an angle into the gap. Just a little bit of extra airflow to the coals will usually heat things up nicely.