Smoked Thanksgiving Turkey
This is a bit of a departure from our usual writing; but I love grilling and smoking; I’ve smoked our Thanksgiving turkey for the last 15 years, and I think this year’s is the best I’ve cooked. I think I’ve found what works well and have settled on a method. If you like charcoal grilling or smoking but haven’t done a turkey yet, it’s really quite doable.
The Prep
Dry Brine
I think dry brining is the way to go. It’s more convenient and less messy than wet-brining, and in my experience the results are better. I’ve tried injecting as well, but I think I’m going to stick with the dry brine by itself moving forward.
Dry brining means simply seasoning the turkey with kosher salt overnight before cooking the turkey the next day. I’ve dry brined steaks as well, and it works really well with nice steaks.
Here’s the idea behind dry brining: the salt will draw moisture from the turkey, but then that moisture gets reabsorbed with the salt into the meat. This has the same effect as brining, and I’ve found it to be effective to impart flavor into the meat because of the salt. Here’s what you need to do:
The night before cooking, open and prep your defrosted turkey.
For prep, prepare as you would an unstuffed turkey for oven roasting. Remove innards; I cut that little “tail” from the turkey. Use a good kitchen knife to trim the flap of skin that hangs over the neck/head area. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but a cleaned up bird will help the final result. If there’s an automatic “popper” in the turkey, remove it. You can use an instant read thermometer to test the temperature of the turkey.
Pat the turkey dry and generously salt the turkey all over and in the cavity. Get the whole turkey. Use a course kosher salt. I used a few tablespoons for a 14 pound turkey. Gently pat the salt on the turkey to make sure it sticks to the surface.
Elevate the turkey on a rack on a pan or tray and place uncovered in the fridge until it’s time to prep/cook the next day.
It’s important that the turkey is not sitting in the bottom of a pan or tray. If you do that the turkey will be sitting in a pool of liquid the next day, and you won’t achieve the purpose of dry brining.
The next day, you will not see any salt on the surface of the turkey and there should be no, or very little liquid in the bottom of the tray. It’s cool to see.
The skin will also dry a bit in the fridge, which is good - that promotes crispier skin when you cook it.
Mayo for the skin (!)
This was new this year, but it worked great. Before applying the rub, coat the turkey with mayo. (You could also mix some of the rub in with the mayo for this step).
This is for crispy skin. You will not taste the mayo, trust me. But I think it helped with skin crispiness and also color.
You may see recipes that tell you to coat the outside of the turkey with butter. That can work, but I’ve never really liked doing that. The butter clumps up on the cold turkey. Mayo can be distributed nicely and you have a nice binder for the turkey rub.
Mix and Apply seasoning
Here’s my seasoning recipe. You don’t need to add salt content to the rub if you dry brine. Add a little if you want (there’s also some salt in the Umami seasoning I use)
1 part coarse ground black pepper
For our 14 pound turkey, that was about a table spoon
1-2 parts poultry seasoning
About 1/2 - 1 part “Umami” seasoning
This is optional, but I put some of this stuff in just about any rub I mix up. Trader Joe’s has the best one:
About 1 part garlic powder
Combine. I mixed my rub up the night before and put it in a skaker.
Apply the rub. Hit all areas of the turkey, including the cavity. Season generously - a nice layer will not overpower a large turkey. Pat to make sure the seasoning adheres.
The Cook
Roughly chop onion, carrots, celery and ditribute in bottom of aluminum pan. The turkey will sit on this “bed” of veggies.
Put some broth (chicken or turkey are great) in the bottom of the pan.
Don’t fill past the level of the veggies otherwise your turkey will be sitting in liquid1
Heat your cooker to around 300 degrees. 300 is a target. Depending on the cooker, a slightly lower temperature works great. And 325 or even 350 would work too. My smoker was sitting at 290 for most of the cook.
I would say that cooking Thanksgiving turkey is not a “low and slow” cook. No need to cook at 225 or 250, though it’ll get the job done.
Steven Raichlan calls smoking at a higher temperature “smoke-roasting” and that’s a good description.
I use a charcoal bullet smoker. (Weber Smokey Mountain) But this recipe will work fine with pellet smokers or offset smokers.2
With my charcoal smoker, I used one chunk of pecan, one chunk of oak, and one chunk of cherry. Don’t oversmoke.
Put the turkey in the pan, breast side up, on the bed of veggies and put on your smoker. Let it ride. Remember, if you’re looking, you ain’t cooking.
You could think about using the liquid in the bottom to baste, but I didn’t find I needed it. My turkey was on for about 4 hours. I might have been able to pull it sooner, but I want to make sure the breast is finished. A little extra time won’t hurt it, but of course, but don’t go overboard and dry out the turkey.
Let the turkey rest covered for about 30 minutes before carving.
Results
The turkey came out great this year. I’ve gone back and forth about what methods to use, but I feel like I’ve landed on what works best for me. Here are some pics:
I don’t have anything philosophically profound to say about cooking this turkey. But you should try it. The smell of turkey combined with wood smoke is a gift, and sitting with the smoker and enjoying the smell and the cook, and the browning turkey is something I look forward to each year.
Summary
I make fun of food bloggers and their interminably long posts on dishes like grilled cheese. But apparently it’s easy to be loquacious about a cook that you enjoy. So here’s a briefer summary of what I do (This is the TLDR as the kids says):
Dry brine the turkey: season all over with kosker salt, and place uncovered in refrigerator overnight
Place chopped carrots, onions and celery in bottom of aluminum pan with some chicken or other broth.
Heat cooker to around 300 degrees with chosen wood smoke (mix of pecan, oak, cherry recommended)
Coat turkey with mayo.
Season turkey generously with seasoning mix:
Black pepper, poultry seasoning, umami seasoning, garlic powder
Place seasoned turkey in pan on bed of veggies and smoke until the thickest part of the breast is about 165 degrees.
There’s a tradeoff here. The drippings from the smoked turkey into the broth make the foundation of a breathtakingly good smoky gravy. So Marianne want as much as feasible, but I don’t want to overfill the pan. We chose a fairly radical solution this year. On Monday I did a no-fuss smoke of the smallest, cheapest turkey we could find. I used plenty of broth for the drippings, and we froze that to use as the gravy base on Thursday.
It will also work with charcoal kettle grills. I used my Weber Kettle for years to cook the turkey. I won’t go into adjustments for the grill. I’ll refrain from getting in the weeds on temperature and fire management - though I’d be happy to address it in the comments.