How I Brine and Smoke a Turkey!

hey what's up barbecue lever just that time of the year again to give thanks and today we're going to show you guys how to batch brine and smoke a beautiful gorgeous turkey on our hasty bake legacy charcoal grill now cooking turkey can be very very easy but it can also be tricky for those folks who don't have as much experience as some of us do one of the worst experiences you can have is an overcooked dried out turkey it happens a lot and there's a few reasons why that happens one of them is that people stick to that pop-up thermometer which is totally useless and worthless that's ruined many a turkey the other one could be too much heat not having a really good thermapen or a good thermometer to check the temperature and also not monitoring the temperature as the turkey cooks part of our process today is going to be adding moisture in our grill batch cooking the turkey brining it and then using a good quality thermometer to monitor the temperature while it cooks we're running here at about 375 degrees right now so let's talk turkey how a barbecue lovers let's talk turkey starting with a spatchcock there's two ways to do it you can use a really good sharp 30 knife or you can use shears me personally I prefer the shears and in order to spatchcock your bird all you have to do is flip it over with the backbone up take your shears or your knife and just kind of follow along both sides of the backbone once you get it done you want to score that breastbone crack it a little bit flip it over and then press down on it to make sure it is cracked all the way and it lays nice and flat this will help cut your cooking time in half the other things that spatchcocking allows is for the bird to cook nice and even all the way across you're not going to have a dry breast we're in a juicy thigh or vice versa it's going to come to Tim pretty much exactly at the same time all the way across so you'll have a nice juicy bird from the drumsticks to the breast all right now brining is the process of immersing your turkey into water that has other ingredients like salt sugar in our case poultry seasoning and a little bit of Newark out of the seasoning which adds more flavor to the brine now that with the brine with a saw through osmosis carries moisture into the cells of the turkey that allows the turkey to stay juicy and moist once they reach a temperature once it's cooked even after you arrested it's going to be very very moist it's very hard to cook a dry turkey when you brine now our brine consists of several ingredients I like to use Morton salt first and it takes two cups of Morton's salt I use the coarser large green salt I'm also going to match the salt with two cups of sugar personally I like to use light brown sugar it adds a very mild little different taste to the sugar but you can use regular white sugar white pure cane sugar a lot of this sugar it should be fine next thing I like to add is two teaspoons of poultry season now the poultry seasoning already conned with several herbs already blended together what great chefs have found to be the best herbs that complement poultry I like to use poultry seasoning in my turkey it adds all that flavor that we're all so used to tasting at the Thanksgiving table now the last thing I use in my brine is two tablespoons of noir kailua poyo and that adds a lot of great flavor it also comes with some herbs as well that also enhance the flavor of the turkey and just make it extra succulent extra juicy has a little bit of salt in there as well so we're adding a little more salt to our brine by adding the color of the north now the last thing that I use and I want to point out to you folks is I use Ozark a-- distilled water distilled water has no chemicals no additives no chlorine all the stuff that comes in the tap water pure distilled water will not change the flavor of your brine it will not have a chemical reaction with a salt or any of the other ingredients that are in your brine so you'll just have nice pure water now once I have all my ingredients together I'll mix them together in a cup pour them into a container and that will add up to two gallons of water total it's gonna make a total of two gallons all together all right now the last thing is there's a couple different ways you can brine your turkey now for today's example what I did I used the extra large Ziploc bags this one we went old-school we put it in an ice chest put the turkey in the bag and then poured the brine in the bag zipped it up really nice and tight double triple check that the seal is tight then we added a bunch of ice and a little bit of water that was already in the bottom of the ice chest now that's the old-school way I do that sometimes because I normally cook three four or five truckers at a time have a couple of really big ice chests that works great for me but for one turkey we use two gallons of water one big bag in the ice chest now there's also these really cool brining the ruckettes Brian buckets of all sizes shapes and colors you can find them online in the description below you'll find a link or you can order one of those if you're gonna cook turkey more often nothing wrong with having a brain bucket around to make the job a little bit easier I personally like the bags and the ice chest method because when I'm done I pull the turkey out throw the bag away dump the brine out down the drain and I don't have anything to wash the cleanup dump the whites and water out of the ice chest we're done pretty simple pretty easy works great now I will tell you guys that for the amount of salted sugar make sure that I have in the two gallon brines you want to brine your turkey for anywhere from 14 to 20 hours I would not probably go to much more than 20 hours because of the amount of salt in there you don't want it to be too salty all you want to do is for that salt to penetrate and through osmosis to get into the turkey bring the moisture in there and enhance the flavor and hence the moisture all right now when I get it out of the brine I'm gonna rinse it really really well with some water in the sink I want to make sure I get all that extra stuff from the brine off of it both on the top and the bottom so rinse a really good pat dry it with some paper towels set it on your tray and then I'm going to go ahead and season the top the skin part with a little bit of kosher salt and I'm going to lay that on there just nice and even not a whole bunch it's a little bit of salt that will help continue to dry out the skin and enhance the crispness of the skin and add some real pretty color as well today we're going to be running bird booster it's one of my favorite poultry rubs that's one of my competition rubs that I used on my chickens and we're also going to be running juicy Pig which is also another one of my favorite rub for both pork and chicken so two great flavors that are gonna really make my turkey pop and taste wonderful today all right now what I do after the salt sit there for a while I'm gonna come in and rub it really good with some extra-virgin olive oil the oil does a couple of things it helps the rub stay stuck really well to the burp to the turkey and it also enhances the color the oil brings a little shine and a little bit of beautiful crispy color to the turkey so one of the first thing I do is lay the oil on there cover it lightly with some bird booster which has some herbs that are really poultry friendly that's one of the reasons I like it and then I rub that bird booster in a couple of times really nice and then I'm gonna come back a little bit later about five minutes and I'm gonna lay some juicy Pig on there another juicy Pig has a little more garlic and a little bit of sugar in there which really I think enhances and kicks that Turkey up another notch in flavor I'm gonna rub that in really really good to let it fit awhile I like to have my rub on there a good twenty to thirty minutes before I actually put it on the grill that gives it time to really flavor and hopefully help crisp up that skin and make it look pretty alright friends we finished seasoning up the turkey now let's move on to the cooking process first thing I did clean out my hasty big charcoal grill threw in some hasty big lump charcoal which is basically hickory and oak and then I'm going to add a little bit of pecan in there I added some pecan there's a story behind that when I was a young man and fairly newly married my sister-in-law and her husband lived in Independence Missouri we flew up there to visit him one year around Thanksgiving and he was smoking some Turkey's he was using for conch-shells I had never in my life eaten a smoked turkey that turkey just totally knocked my socks off blew me away how incredibly good it tasted smoked with pecan shells so ever since then that's always been my absolute favorite woods for turkey just it stuck at me and my brain in my head and I just love pecan with Turkey now of course you can use cherry you can use tea tree you can use that Apple it's any kind of fruit would you like or whatever you prefer but that's my personal preference I like pecan now I'm using the hasty big lump charcoal I really like it a lot it's hickory and oak but the thing about lump charcoal in general is that it doesn't ash up it leaves almost zero ashes on the bottom of the grill so it's very very minimal ashes it doesn't get on your food it doesn't have any fillers or additives or chemicals it's just pure real wood that's been burned down to a certain point and then shut off and so it becomes lump charcoal but it's actually really real wood so besides that it's very very little ash it also adds an excellent flavour to your barbecue most of the times when you see videos or you read about turkey recipes in a written recipe book they talk about starting at 450 degrees or 475 or 425 that's all great in an oven an oven is a very moist environment because there's no airflow going through there now in a barbecue pit environment in a grill environment there's a lot of airflow that airflow is going to want to try to draw your bird out so you want to start hot to kind of crisp up the skin and give it that real pretty color let the temperature come down slow I like for my fire to settle in somewhere around 350 degrees to 375 that's kind of where I like to cook my turkey that little bit lower he'd kind of keep the skin from splitting and blowing up it also keeps the bird a little bit more moist and a little bit juicier over a little bit longer cook barbecue cooking and smoking is not a cookie cutter operation like an oven so you kind of got a I ball your operation your process and your progress as you're cooking if you noticing one sides getting a little more color than the other or you can see the skin really hard trying to buff a little bit you know just kind of time it I've got my timer set for about 15-20 minutes and then I'll go look at it and if it looks like it's burning or getting a little too hot on one side I'm gonna rotate that bird completely around 180 degrees and that way you get nice even color and nice even cooking all the way around I came in a little while ago and I put a rack under my turkey because you know it just makes it easier to rotate pick the whole turkey up like that with my glove and also when it's time to pull it off it fits perfectly done sometimes the thighs may want to just fall up and the wings may just want to fall off if you're trying to juggle it out of there when you've got it on the rack pick the rack up from the bottom lay it on your resting tray makes it much much easier to get it out of the pit and let it rest for a little while Oh tree in general and in Turkey as well is basically done done at 160 degrees internal temperature right about the middle of the breast it's kind of the generally accepted rule of thumb now you'll see a lot of us pulling the turkey out at about 155 to 56 57 degrees because when you pull it off the grill the heat continues to carry through into the meat it's what you call carryover cooking when you pull that turkey out to rest it's going to continue to cook a little bit longer we're gonna put our meat probes into the meat right about now it's been in the pit for about an hour and 15 minutes so we're fixing to insert our chef's alarm thermometers and figure out where we're at but you'll see when we pull it off the temperature is going to continue to rise so it's going to finish out right at about 160 to 62 degrees after its resting on the tray all right friends we have our shuffle arms inserted into the breast and the thigh the biggest part of the thigh I've got my trusty thermapen to double-check as we get closer on temperature when my chef alarms ring that we're very close I'm gonna double check on the other side of the turkey make sure we have nice even temperature you can see how we're running you can see that moisture boiling down there that's that distilled water it's catching all the Turkey drippings as well that's an awesome little piece of odd you that you can use to make some turkey gravy it's going to be really great today because we've had the turkey on for approximately an hour and 20 minutes or so has beautiful color it's nice and even it looks gorgeous just looking really really pretty today we're sitting at about 129 and the breasts right now in about 137 and the thigh and remember we started it rotated the other way first that's one of the reasons it's thighs hotter remember I was saying that the rotating process you got to use a little bit of your common sense and I could see that the drumsticks were burning a little bit quick so I turned it all the way around and put it under a rag to make it easier to rotate and by the time it's done you'll see that the breast is going to catch up with the thigh temperature-wise that's one of the beauties of having a spatchcock turkey nice even cooking I did wrap the the drumsticks with a little bit of foil to protect them so they don't blow up and burn up or anything like that I could see that the wings we're catching a little bit too much heat you can see they were starting to fall apart they're starting to boil a little too much so we're gonna cover them up and keep them thinking keep them looking pretty while they get done all right French we've got a nice hot fire still going there you can see the water sizzling and boiling that'll probably make us some nice little gravy there I'm gonna try to slow the heat down just a little bit for the second half of the cook so I'm going to lower that grate one of the beauties of the hasty bake it's very adjustable very user-friendly so we're gonna lower that down I'll probably put in one more little piece of pecan in there to add that last little blast of smoke and we're gonna slow the air down a little bit also I'm gonna slow it down just a little bit so try to finish at around 300 degrees finishing Tim we've been running right around 350 375 I'm gonna try to finish it off around 300 or so more or less so that turkey finishes nice and juicy and like I said cooking the turkey is really pretty easy you've just apply a little bit of time little patience and a little bit of technique you'll have a wonderful turkey don't be afraid to experiment and don't be afraid to run a test before the actual turkey day so you can be sure to put out a really great fantastic turkey for your holiday meal all right friends that's our chef alarm we're here 157 we're gonna turn these off and we're gonna pull out this beautiful turkey we're gonna go rest it inside on the kitchen counter and let it rest for about 35 or 40 minutes remember to keep the smoke light and make it work you

Channel: ArnieTex

Views: 143,486

Keywords: turkey, thanksgiving, holiday, bbq, smoke, smoked, bird, potluck, dinner, feast, perfect, how to, hasty bake

Id: c182fEa14Hc

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 17 2018