Friday, November 16, 2007

Turkey on the barbecue - Indirect cooking

Well, maybe my last post was a bit presumptuous, maybe a bird a week was a bit much. I guess it's luck that I stumbled on, but man did I make a good bird the other day.

I picked up a 12-pound turkey from the local supermarket. This being my first time cooking a turkey I did not anticipate or calculate for a few days for "defrosting time". So after spending the better part of the morning defrosting the bird in large pots of water I was ready to start the grill.

I had picked up a few bags of lump charcoal and chipped enough hickory chips for at least 8 hours of sprinkling.

On a website (that I regret not being able to give credit to because I didn't bookmark the site) I read someone's post/site about mixing red wine and apple juice to the water, while soaking chips.

Once the charcoal was ready, I closed the lid and went back in to work on the bird.
Preparing the turkey

  • I poured boiling hot water on all sides of the bird, including the (empty) cavity. This allows for the moisture to stay in, while the skin tightens up.
  • While the bird was still hot, I rubbed on some olive oil, fresh ground pepper and garlic powder to the entire outside of the turkey.
By this point, the grill is about 250 (simmered down from about 300 degrees). Before I placed the turkey on the grill, I prepared the charcoal for indirect heat.

As mentioned earlier, I added water, red wine and apple juice to the drip pan. This added an incredible taste to the turkey and will be something that I will be experimenting with more in the future.

Once the grill lowered to about 225 degrees, I placed the Turkey on the rack, directly above the drip pan.

For about 6 hours, I maintained a temperature inside the grill of 220 degrees. Every half hour I'd add new charcoal, every hour I'd sprinkle some wood chips on top of the charcoal.
Once the internal temperature of the bird hit 170 degrees, I removed it from the grill. A beautiful pink smoke ring had formed just under the skin. The dark meat was perfect and the white meat was far from dry. Each piece of meat had a distinct taste of smoke.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you with some of the finest turkey I have had in my life. We fed 6 adults and 5 (small) children that night. My favorite part of the night was hearing my wife mention to someone that she didn't want to put gravy on her turkey because she didn't want to ruin the taste.

1 comment:

Juancho said...

Hey Joe!
I like your BBQ approach, and included a link on www.bluesmoke-bbq.com :
http://www.bluesmoke-bbq.com/023links/023en-links.php

Go for it!
Keep smokin'!
Juancho
www.bluesmoke-bbq.com
juancho@bluesmoke-bbq.com

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