How to Smoke a Turkey for Thanksgiving

hey guys welcome to matt scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to show you an easy way to smoke the perfect thanksgiving turkey with the holidays coming up i wanted to do a special deal for the leather aprons they get made by the amish they're handmade and i wear mine all the time i love it it's got pockets specifically designed for barbecue but the point is you can get 50 off if you include the coupon right here so i wanted to be able to give people a discount on this if you're buying one for yourself or for a friend or somebody in your family somebody who barbecues it's the perfect accompaniment to somebody who's outside grilling and barbecuing it just works really well looks really nice with all the craziness that's going on in 2020 if you get one of these you'll at least have something you can look at and say no 2020 wasn't all bad to get ready for this video i went to the grocery store and bought a turkey and this turkey was no joke 3.84 cents for the whole turkey i thought it out i removed the giblets and the neck and got everything out of the turkey there was a little plastic thing that's kind of holding the legs together pulled that out and now we're ready to actually start doing some real work to get this turkey prepped and ready to go on the smoker by the way if you've cooked turkeys before you've probably been in the situation to where it's not actually fully thawed when it's time to get the thing in the oven or in the smoker or in whatever method you're trying to use to cook that turkey one way to make it thaw faster than just leave it in the fridge for a couple days is to put it in an ice bath thermoworks put out a video where they show exactly how to do this they have probes you can actually leave in the water and they have a ton of stuff but basically you want to make sure that that water stays 40 degrees or below and that way your turkey can thaw more quickly than just by the air that's in the refrigerator when it comes to cooking turkey simplicity is key and i want to give you the outline of exactly what we're going to do with this turkey to get it ready to go on the smoker and then how we're going to cook it so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to trim up the stuff that's on the outside of the turkey just so we have a clean surface and then we have good places to put the rub on the inside of the turkey as well now for the rub i'm using only salt and pepper the reason i'm using only salt and pepper is because i don't want to hide the flavor of the smoke that gets on the exterior surface of this meat i want it to get on there and i want it to penetrate as much as possible and in my experience when you use rubs that have a bunch of stuff on them they prevent smoke from penetrating or maybe they just cover up the smoke flavor either way i want to taste smoke if i'm smoking a turkey so i'm going to use only salt and pepper now you could use things like sage and rosemary and thyme but those herbs in my experience tend to burn on the exterior surface because you're trying to crisp the skin but it burns those herbs and they no longer provide the flavor that you really wanted so that's why i'm using only salt and pepper in addition because the turkey breast is so lean i'm going to inject it with butter but not only butter i'm going to inject things that appeal to what i like in terms of flavor so i'm going to use ancho chili powder because it gives kind of a sweetness and earthiness and then chipotle chili powder because it gives some heat which i love heat and chilies so chipotle for the heat and a little bit of smokiness at that point we're going to be ready to put this thing on the smoker so we're going to put it on the smoker and much like the chicken that i do i'm going to start it off at 225 degrees the goal here is smoke flavor and so we're going to give it several hours to try to absorb lots of smoke flavor and great color and then we're going to bump the temperature up to 325 degrees because we need to render the fat that's underneath the skin we want to crisp that skin up and at that point this turkey should be right around the final temperature that we're looking for to get this ready i'm going to do a few things here number one this little temperature indicator this plastic piece right here i'm not going to trust that i'm going to trust my thermal pen instead i'm going to pull that guy out there's extra skin up here around the neck and i'm going to take that off because i want to season that pocket and make sure that i have good seasoning everywhere and then also this little piece at the end apparently it's called the parson's nose i'm going to take that guy off and it's just not going to survive a cook for several hours on the smoker [Music] so [Applause] [Music] all right we've got the turkey on there with the breast facing toward the fire because it's going to take longer to cook and i want it to come up to the same temperature as the rest of the turkey so that's why i have it oriented that way also at 225 degrees i'm not going to check on this thing for two hours because it's all about the smoke flavor and i don't need to spray because if i spray then i'm going to make that skin soggy and it's not going to crisp up the way i want my goal in injecting all the butter and stuff like that is to make sure it's moist i don't need to spray to do that also if you're cooking on a smaller smoker or a pellet smoker your turkey's going to cook a lot faster than it's going to cook on my big offset i'm not exactly sure why that is i just know that's the way it is so if you're cooking on a small smoker or you're cooking on a pellet grill maybe cook at 200 degrees for this period of time and then wait about two hours just to build up smoke flavor all over that meat so i'll see you guys in two hours it's been two hours now and it's time to check on this guy we're looking for color because color is going to be our best guess as to how much smoke flavor we've added to this bird so we're looking for something like deep dark golden that's what we really want then we're going to bump up the temperature to 325 degrees and get that skin nice and crispy so let's take a look at it [Music] so so it looks like we have really good color on there which is telling me good smoke and we just need to bring everything up to temperature just like i suspected the breasts are way behind everything else so i'm going to leave it facing toward the fire that is the breast and i'm going to jump the temperature to 325 and i'm gonna do that not by moving it closer to the fire but by adding more wood because if i burn more wood my thinking is i'll probably get more flavor moving through that cook chamber so i can maybe flavor the meat even more while i'm trying to crisp that skin [Music] it's been about another two hours and i think this turkey is ready to come off but the only way you're really going to be sure is by checking the temperature so i always plug the thermapen i love these things the money you spend on this you will save and meet you do not ruin so let's check it out [Music] there we go that's done [Music] first thing we have to do with this turkey is let it rest that's very underestimated in cooking if you're barbecuing especially because you have those long cook times it's crucial to let your meat rest doesn't matter if it's a brisket or if it's a steak that you just grilled letting your meat rest is going to help the quality of your meat tremendously and a lot of people don't even realize how big of a deal it is so the first thing we're going to do we're not going to cut it we're not going to start carving on it we're not going to do anything except let it rest for at least 30 minutes because the thing took four hours to cook we can give it an extra 30 minutes to rest now that we've let this rest for 30 minutes i see juices oozing out of this turkey which tells me it's probably going to be moist which is exactly what we're looking for if you can make a turkey that's moist a lot of other sins can be forgiven because it's so rare to find moist turkey it's usually dry and it kind of crumbles in your mouth and nobody's really excited about the thanksgiving turkey everybody's excited about thanksgiving sides because they're usually not dry as a bone so when we cut this we're going to cut it in a very specific way to make it as tender as possible a lot of times you'll see people with a carving fork and a knife and they start slicing the breast off like this that's not the best way to do it because you're cutting with the grain what can happen is the turkey gets stringy when you're trying to chew it so instead what we're going to do is we're going to get in right here and remove the whole breast and then slice it so that we're cutting against the grain and it's not stringy and it's not the sensation of being too dry that way you can maximize the quality of what you get with this turkey now for the other parts of the turkey how you get it off of the carcass is not so important so you could you could pull a leg off and then you could eat it and it would be fine and let me tell you if you do it this way it's going to be a heck of a lot better than those turkey legs you get at disney the flavor of smoke that you get is going to be far superior [Music] all right so we look at the color so we think we have the smoke we cut off the breast and cut against the grain so we should have the tenderness by looking at the slice it looks like it's got the moisture now we're just gonna have to see if it has the flavor so let's give this a taste and see how it turned out perfect yes with that taste test i am very satisfied with this it's about as good as i could hope a turkey breast would turn out because it's got all the things you want it's tender it's moist it's got smoke flavor which is actually hard to achieve on a bird this big so i'm very happy with that but i'm going to show you guys it's not really a trick it's more of a cheat on how to make your turkey breast even better now remember at the beginning i said that i didn't want to put herbs on the outside of the turkey because i thought that they would just burn i asked me how i know because i've done it before so what i do is i take those herbs that i would have put on the outside of the turkey and actually melt some butter mix it in with the butter and then drizzle that all over the turkey breast now aaron franklin when he cooks turkey breast guess what he dunks it in butter this is a cheap easy way to make the breast succulent and juicy and to add more flavor from those herbs that you didn't want to put on the outside [Music] now that this turkey is swimming in a lake of herb butter let's see what difference it made yeah that's just phenomenal so to me this is the perfect bite of turkey breast i have the ancho chipotle that i injected earlier i have these herbs that complement it then i have the background layer of smoke to me it's absolutely what i want to eat when i want a thanksgiving turkey now the only thing left to try is some of the dark meat and i love the dark meat so i know it's going to be good too but let's give it a shot as you can see it's very tough um just the smell of smoke on this is incredible that's good juicy flavorful it doesn't need any of your butter yeah this is top notch now if you're wondering if this has bite through skin i think that's your answer i hope you guys enjoyed the video and i wish you all a very happy thanksgiving i hope you get to spend it eating some great smoked turkey if you enjoyed the video hit the like button down below you can leave a comment you can also subscribe and hit the notification bell so you get notified every time i put out new content finally you can follow me on instagram and twitter at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 552,652

Keywords:

Id: D28zmomwv9k

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020