I always brine. Turkey just isn’t as good without it. I smoke when I can (my smoker wont take birds over ~18 lbs—I don’t buy anything over 15 lbs). I have never tried to compensate for the cooking time differences between white/dark meat—with the brine and smoke the white meat stays quite moist.
My brine:
1 gal water
1 t allspice
1 t white pepper
2 c dark brown sugar
1 c salt*
Immerse bird (As my smoker will take two birds, I usually double the recipe) and let sit for 36-48 hours. Some have called me out for leaving this to sit too long but the flavor is great (if you are in a warm area, add ice as needed to keep the whole thing cold).
I smoke (Brinkman electric) using hickory and apple. You can finish in the oven as needed (and could add pre-cooked stuffing if desired). I won’t use the drippings for gravy—too salty.
*The shape of salt (kosher, flake, granular, or rock) is irrelevant—the idea of a brine is to dissolve it. The ingredients of the salt, on the other hand can change the flavor—I use non-iodized.
I use kosher salt simply because I can see it on cooked food. I usually don’t need to add salt anyway. I’m certainly not one of those people who douse their food with salt before I even taste it.
Here I thought I might be the only one to offer advice on brining and smoking a turkey. But I should have known better this being the Straight Dope and all. I’d follow all of Rick’s advice. My only addition is that you should not try and brine a bird that has been injected with any type of solution. Those are basically prebrined and you don’t get much in the way of additional flavor by trying to brine it.
I smoked a bird last weekend for an early family Thanksgiving. As usual it cooked fast on the gril, about 8 minutes a pound. But then I live along a rather windy ridge. I lit the coals in a cold down pour. I had to put foil over the top of the charcoal chimney to keep the coals from getting soaked. So I don’t want to here any of this it’s to cold, to wet, to snowy to grill nonsense. Unless you’re in a monsoon it’s grilling weather.
I’ve never smoked a turkey - or anything else, for that matter.
I do not own a specialty smoker, just a standard gas grill.
Is it possible to smoke a turkey using one of those? If so, what sort of things would one do? I gather some sort of metal box, laid pretty much right on some of the gas jets, with soaked chips in it to make the smoke.
Note: I will not be trying this for the big day - will stick with my tried-and-true brine recipe, and roasted in the oven, as I don’t want to experiment on the guests. Not with something that big, anyway! But, for future reference…
It should be noted that I’m a nervous griller and have never done anything more adventurous than hamburgers or chicken breasts on the grill. I think it’s time to expand that.
Yes, depending on the grill. Does yours have separate controls for the two sides of the grill? Put your meat on one side with no flame, and one of these “smoker boxes” (I bought mine at Home Depot) filled with damp chips over a low flame on the other side. This creates indirect heat and plenty of smoke. I made pulled pork on my gas grill several times this way.
Mmmmmm, salty… actually I’ve done roasts in salt in the oven and the results are lovely. Seals in the juices and adds just the right amount of salt to the meat. The first time I did a salt crust, it was 2 chickens, and the instructions called for mixing in egg whites to help the salt hold together.
When it came time to get the chicken out of the crust, however, weapons were required :eek: (results were WORTH it though).
Yes - it does have 3 separate gas jets though only 2 grates - guess I’d put the meat to one side, and have the jet on the opposite side turned on, and the middle and meat side jets turned off.
Does it take hours and hours to do this? or roughly the same time as it would take to roast in the oven?
Does the meat go in a pan of some sort or just on the grate? just a standard roasting pan or aluminum disposable or something?
Oh, and to contribute more specifically to this thread, here’s the brining recipe I use:
8 cups unsweetened apple cider or juice
2/3 cup kosher salt
2/3 cup sugar
6 quarter-size slices unpeeled fresh ginger root
2 bay leaves
6 whole cloves
1 teaspoon black peppercorns, crushed
2 teaspoons whole allspice berries, crushed
6 cups ice-cold water
In a 3- to 4-quart saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the cider
or juice, salt, sugar, ginger, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns and allspice
and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring until the salt and sugar have
dissolved. Boil for 3 minutes then remove from the heat. Add 4 cups of the
cold water and stir. Cool to room temperature (I put it in the fridge until it’s cold). Add the last 2 cups when you put the turkey in the brine, also stuff the turkey with 2 oranges, quartered, while brining.
The results: You wind up with a very dark brown turkey, once it’s done roasting. And the drippings are also very dark - the gravy winds up looking like beef gravy - it’s honestly the color of dark chocolate. I think because of the sugar caramelizing during baking. Deelish though. And the carcass makes wonderful soup.
Yes, real BBQ is very time intensive. “Low & Slow” are your watchwords to produce fall-apart meats in a smoker. I make pulled pork from a 7lb. pork butt, smoking it at 225° for 14 hours. I have also gotten good results from smoking it for 3-4 hours, then finishing the remaining 10 hours in the oven.
This sounds awesome, but how sweet is it? And can you use the drippings for gravy or is it just too salty? I use Alton’s recipe but this is sounding very tempting.
There’s perhaps the faintest hint of sweetness in the meat, but not discernably so. It just makes it taste so rich. Most of the sugar (just as with most of the salt) remains in liquid and gets poured off.
The drippings are certainly not too salty for gravy. Now, I don’t do the sort of gravy where you add extra broth or whatever - I just add some water to the pan to deglaze it, and then pour that off into a saucepan, where I add water/flour to thicken it. Using broth might make it too salty, if there’s salt in that.
I don’t recall what Alton’s recipe calls for by way of salt but I imagine it’s comparable, overall.
I have, several times, made baked chicken where I’ve used a rub that contains a lot of salt. Far less than goes into this brine recipe. And the drippings from the baked chicken are far too salty; I tried and the results were truly not edible (the meat tasted good though).
Alton actually uses a sweetened brine for pork (salted orange juice plus flavorings) so the concept isn’t too foreign.
Mama Zappa, smoking for several hours (if your grill goes low enough) will also give a mahogany finish—smoking and a brine just drives it deeper.
A smoker box may be problematic. I have used them before and they didn’t get hot enough to produce smoke (especially if you cook at a low enough temp)—until I took them off the grate and moved it closer to the flame. Of course then you have to leave the grate off to add more chips and your turkey might not fit on the grill surface. The other (and cheaper) method is to make a few pouches. Just wrap damp chips in some heavy foil, poke a few holes in the top and toss them in one at a time. Replace when it stops smoking.
Warning: With any kind of ‘low and slow’ cooking you run the risk of leaving a large hunk of meat out where nasty stuff can happen. Use a thermometer to check the temp of the interior of your grill/smoker—it should be around 200-240ºF (the brine actually helps you here as bacteria don’t do as well in a saline environment). Also check the temp of the bird prior to serving (it is a very good idea to check in multiple places as cold spots in your cooker (even in ovens) can leave a portion undercooked).
Self reporting a mistake from my earlier post:
From All About Salt
Still, I don’t go to the expense of Kosher and just use the non-iodized granular stuff. To be honest, with the amount of other flavorings I add, I doubt you could taste the difference.
Nobody got this, huh?
But the real reason I came back here is that I don’t think I really want to be known as a “turkey briner”.
I suggest “Fowl Steeper”.