Kamado Joe smoked turkey. JoeTisserie Turkey vs. Spatchcock Turkey face-off thanksgiving special

hey i'm james from smoking dad barbecue and welcome to a thanksgiving special that's right just a couple of weeks families everywhere will be celebrating thanksgiving and i hope you take advantage of the amazing smoker you've got in your backyard to prepare this year's bird now a lot of you asked questions which way should we do that you've got a lot of choices whether we roast it spatchcock it or even rotisserie it and so i thought i would put the two most common methods today head to head so i went out and got two turkeys the same weight and one of them we've been spinning on our joetisserie oh that one's looking good and the other one we've got on the big joe hanging out over here spatchcocked i'll move the camera a little bit closer so we can catch you up on everything that's going on to get to this point but i'm going to be covering three things in today's video i'll put chapter links down below if you want to skip to the section that's most interesting to you so first i'm going to walk you through how to prep the birds regardless of the style that you choose whether you want to use your rotisserie which i'm a huge fan of or if you want to spatchcock it which is when i'm doing chicken my favorite we're going to find out how it goes on today's turkey the second chapter will be how to set up your joes for today's cook in terms of should you use smoking wood where you should place it charcoal if you're going to be using the rotisserie or you're going to be using the rack system that you might have saw in that intro setup scene i'll walk you through the house and wise what's uh for each setup and then lastly we're gonna have a good old-fashioned taste test and see which one if there's any difference stands out and maybe accentuates that turkey holiday flavor along with the best of barbecue for you and your family to enjoy so that's what you're in for and if at the end of this video i've earned it please go ahead and smash that like button and hit subscribe to catch future videos alright so let's get started with our first chapter while i do my best to stay as dry as possible one of the things i'm not thankful for thundershowers in the middle of a youtube video outside of that we have a lot to be thankful for i just kid so let me walk you through the setup for today's method first thing i'll do is share an article down below it was written a couple years ago in new york times and it was i think titled something the end of brining and the rise of dry brining and that article has been hugely influential in how i like to prepare my poultry including turkeys it's a great read i'm not going to cover everything that's in it but i highly suggest you go check that out one of the reasons that i love it is i find a you get amazing results i also find the dry brine helps add that crispy skin that we're looking for and frankly it's just so much simpler rather than making a a homemade from scratch wet brine soaking the bird overnight then getting it dry i've just never got that skin or texture that i'm looking for some amazing flavor but not the skin and so if you love skin on your bird i definitely suggest the salt dry brining method so for our setup what i did as soon as i got these two birds home is just got them out of the package and went ahead and started to spatchcock the first bird if you've not heard of that term what you need is some sharp kitchen scissors or shears and you want to remove the spine cutting up each side until the spine has been removed the next thing that i like to do when i'm spatchcocking a bird is just use that scissor again to break the breastbone so i can go ahead and remove that center plate from the bird and that allows us to cut right through the bird and make a better presentation when it comes to carving for our rotisserie bird followed very similar steps minus the removing the spine area just drying it really well removing any of that excess skin anything that we don't want on the bird and then we salted them both liberally with diamond kosher crystal salt it's one of my three favorite salts you hear me talk about it regularly on the channel i'll put a link down below if you're looking to find what that looks like so you recognize it when you're out at your local grocery store and then after we've seasoned them both liberally with our diamond kosher crystal salt it's putting them to bed in the fridge on an air rack overnight and that'll bring us into this morning when we're ready for our next step okay so after our birds have been to rest for about 24 hours what we want to go ahead and do is start seasoning them and since i found the aromatic seasonings tend to burn up when we put them on the barbecue a little method that has been working really well is to go ahead and take some olive oil bring that to a mild simmer add in some garlic some rosemary some thyme and some sage and stir that really well under some low to medium heat for a couple minutes until you see the garlic start to brown then what we're going to do after that cools is strain off the aromatics and set aside for later that aromatic infused olive oil for our basting solution after we've got our basting solution ready the next thing we want to do is add some seasoning to your bird you can add it inside if you like i suggest doing this the evening before because after you do the salt brine the skin is a little bit more difficult to remove without tearing i like our seasoning on the outside so i just used our household rub that we use all the time which is a rub with no salt since i love dry brining everything ahead of time the base elements of this is uh sorry no salt pepper garlic onion some smoked paprika and a little bit of cayenne just for that kick on the back of the tongue uh it's even kid friendly and i highly suggest i'll put some of the ingredients down below if you'd like to make it for yourself the next thing that we're going to want to do as well while we're seasoning up our birds is go ahead and prepare our bird for the rotisserie and just get some butcher twine and we want to try and hold those legs together as well as those wings since you're just gonna wrap each spot and tie some knots and that'll just keep it from flailing especially as it cooks and it gets more tender you don't want a leg falling off or wings falling off or being more exposed to the heat so that's everything that we need to do to get ready for our birds after we've dry brined them prepared our basting solution as well as season them up and trust them up nicely got them ready to go on the kamado joe let's go to our second chapter now where it's everything you need to know for each setup whether you're going to do spatchcock which i'm doing today on the big joe or the jotisserie on my left okay so for setting up our joes i like to keep it pretty simple when it comes to smoking wood don't want too much wood and i want to make sure that it's going to burn cleanly so that either means we have enough air or we're going at a hot enough temperature that that wood becomes fully combusted my very first turkey on a ceramic cooker i made a bunch of mistakes i actually followed a recipe on youtube and it does everything that i've turned out to not like which is getting wood chips soaking them and cooking that bird really low and slow and i know this is kind of a gross analogy but it kind of tastes a lot like a bird that was out in this rain storm very very gross just wet smoky a little bit like a tree nobody liked it myself included and so to help prevent that we're going to put our smoking wood on both grills right on the bottom grate add our charcoal on top of that and today i'm using two kamado joe fire starters to help get our fire started quickly so once we've got our fires started you'll notice on the rotisserie unit i want to bank those coals towards the back so that way we're still getting a little bit of a direct area to help finish our skin but also a cool side so that we're just not over cooking the outside and having a raw bird inside my very first experience with the joetisserie one of the mistakes i made is going for a high high heat which got an amazing outside bird but we ended up having to throw it in the oven and we couldn't eat dinner when we thought because the inside was not done well enough and so we're gonna be aiming for about 320 to 350 degrees which is going to help us find that perfect balance of cooking the inside all the way through as well as getting a great skin on the outside to set up our big joe where we're doing a spatchcock what i'm doing today is i'm using the heat deflector plates in a low position on the x accessory rack and then i'll be putting an aluminum drip pan on the grid as well as using my rib v-rack this accessory is really handy for doing ribs vertically but it's also really handy for situations like this which is holding our bird up so that we can capture those drippings added a little bit of water in that drip pan just so that the drippings don't burn and we can use those to make a gravy after the birds are done if we'd like so now that both grills are ready let's go ahead and get them on so i'm counting about a two and a half hour cook on the sorry a two hour cook pardon me on the rotisserie and about an hour and a half cook on the spatchcock so you notice i definitely lit the fire first on the classic and that's just to get that bird a little bit more time since we're going to be going a little bit slower spatchcock birds i love to do about the 400 degree range since we help crisp that skin up on the outside as well as render out that uh fat more effectively so we'll be taking these until the breasts read about 160 165 degrees and the thighs are reading about 170 580 degrees and they'll continue to climb a little bit more in terms of the temperature for keeping everything under control i'll be using my meter probe in the rotisserie bird because there's no wires to get caught and tangled and this is where this probe absolutely shines versus its wired companions and to help keep track of the spatchcock bird i'll be using the ink bird bbq 4t finally remember the name of it i always just call it a bunch of the letters and numbers uh to help track our grill temperature as well as our bird temperature on the spatchcock bird anyways that is it for the setup of our grill let's uh regroup once we have these off rested sliced and we can do a bit of a taste test and final thoughts all right i waited as long as we could but this rain is not letting up so we let our birds rest for about 20 minutes and we are pretty close on the timing so the jot history bird was just about two hours and 11 minutes before it was probing exactly where we want it in the dark meat and our spatchcock bird a little bit quicker about an hour and a half so after they've rested i've gone ahead and sliced those up put them on a platter i'll put a picture up on the screen with the rain i'm not able to bring everything out and show you as i wanted to but it looks and smells awesome so anyways let's go ahead and get into our taste test now full disclosure we have some friends over for friendsgiving and take advantage of it i've already done samples and passing around and we have a unanimous winner here so i'm going to go ahead and taste it and share what i find but i already know what everyone has voted for so let's dig in and see if we can taste the difference between our two birds so i would normally hold this out i don't want to get it all wet so this is our spatchcock bird so we've got some white some dark this is our rotisserie bird again some white some dark let's go ahead and start with our spatchcock i'm starting with the spatchcock because that is our reigning champion reigning sometimes the dad jokes just write themselves when i've done this test before using chickens i actually preferred the spatchcock bird to the rotisserie so i'm going to start with the winner our seasoning is on point this has got just a little kick i mentioned just a dash of cayenne i'm gonna be putting a little bit more into a dash there this is really really good you know what it's a touch dry i know that's a trade kind of a trademark of staple of turkey if you will versus chicken and i love spatchcock that you know chicken let's just touch dry i'm going to go ahead and try the white now from the rotisserie bird see where we're at just looking at it i can see the difference between the two you could serve me this turkey any day i'd be happy that is amazing and that's the breast from a turkey it's moist ton of flavor great mouth feel i'm really happy with that let's try the dark i'm going to go dark with the spatchcock first i i miscut that i had a little bit of a little bit of bone but outside of outside of that much much better than the the white and again rub is on point let's go ahead and try the dark from the rotisserie bird see i don't know why i don't listen to you guys i full expected when we started today's test this would just be a repeat of the chicken experiment where we did a rotisserie bird spatchcock bird everyone in the family voted for spatchcock i'm afraid with turkey though it's a hundred percent the jotissary bird is everyone's favorite and i can see what they were telling me about inside why they love it it's moist it's got that great smoked charcoal flavor but it's not overpowering it's just like an ingredient we want to use it like a seasoning we don't want too much of something treat smoke like you would salt a little is good way too much not so good so i was really surprised with you know today's results i thought you know we did a couple things that worked out really well one doing the spatchcock on the v-rack with the drip pan that allowed us to capture those drippings and make some gravy so if you want to make some gravy uh you know absolutely the spatchcock method you know can work and save the the gravy whereas the joetisserie bird i was only able to capture a little bit of drippings after letting it rest for those at you know 20 minutes the rotisserie bird on the other hand we didn't do that today but if you like to make stuffing i think we absolutely could have stuffed this bird and cooked it on the joj history and gotten the same great result and we have a bird with stuffing and all the fixings all off our kamado joe so we're going to call this one lights out hands down winner joe tissery and this has just upped the high level of respect that i already had for the uh the joetisserie i've done some legs of lamb and other things on it and it's been spectacular but as of late the non-jotissary experiments have been winning you know chicken wings uh for example i think it was the last one that i did where the non-joe history wing beat the uh jolt history wing but today on turkey it's unanimous 100 percent the winner is the joetisserie if you've not seen one before in your store i'll go ahead and put a link down below for my amazon store you can find one there keep your eye out for black friday sales holiday sales if you didn't already have this on your wish list i think you'll go ahead and make an awesome gift idea and a perfect addition to your barbecue arsenal anyways i hope you enjoyed today's video in terms of how to prep turkeys for thanksgiving your holiday feast as well as how to set your job up for regardless of which two setups you want to do as well as learn something in terms of the cook and how to pull that off regardless of the method that you're using until next time i'm james from smoking dab barbecue signing off you

Channel: Smoking Dad BBQ

Views: 27,972

Rating: 4.9647579 out of 5

Keywords: smoked turkey, grilled turkey, thanksgiving turkey, kamado joe, turkey recipe, turkey recipe thanksgiving, joetisserie turkey, joetisserie turkey recipe, spatchcock turkey smoked, spatchcock turkey grill, spatchcock turkey kamado joe, spatchcock turkey recipe, bbq turkey, kamado joe turkey rotisserie, kamado joe turkey recipe, kamado joe classic 3 turkey, kamado joe spatchcock turkey, kamado joe classic turkey, kamado joe big joe turkey, kamado joe smoked turkey

Id: 85eiXHO2LcU

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020