All Right folks, Eric Gephardt back here in Wichita, Kansas at All Things Barbecue. We got the Kamado Joes rolling and we're gonna do some fun videos. You know, it's the holiday
season so I'm thinking turkey. We got this great butterball turkey. We're going to inject it with some butter. You know, a lot of people
think there's already butter in a butterball
turkey, there's not. But we're gonna put a pound in this and we're gonna spatchcock it. We're gonna put a little bit of this amazing seasoning on it, it's a Cattlemen's Grill Ranchero seasoning. We're gonna put that on the
outside and on the inside once we've spatchcocked it. Lay that on top of a
beautiful, rustic root roast with turnips and these gorgeous
carrots that we've got. Parsnips, beets, all kinds
of beautiful, aromatic seasonings and then we're
gonna actually make a cherry sauce to go on top of this. So we're gonna throw
everything on the Kamado Joe. Let's get it going. So we've got about a 10 pound turkey and I find that the best
way to cook these things on the Kamado Joe is to spatchcock it. So first thing I do is
kinda open up this skin flap and the wishbone is right here, which is essentially the collarbone. Now we're gonna wanna take
that out so this thing can open up completely, 'cause you can leave that in there, there's still room for air to get underneath. So I just take my knife
and put a little slit on either side and then
I'm able to get my fingers underneath that bone and
I'll break it right up here. Right up here and you don't need to
get that out in one piece but if you got kids around you know they love to do it. They love to... Break that thing off and make a wish. So let's see if we're lucky today. Nope, I snapped it but that's okay. All right so our wishbone is out. Next thing we're gonna
do is stand the bird up. Now I like to stand the
bird up away from me and what we're doing
when we're spatchcocking, essentially we're just
cutting out the backbone which is gonna be here and here. I like to put the knife
inside the cavity, again, the bird is facing away from you. I've got good grip on my knife here and we're just gonna go straight in and we're just gonna go right down and you can see what we did. We just opened that right up, okay? Notice I've got a towel
underneath, that's to just kinda collect some of these juices as well as stop this from sliding around. I'll take the knife and
just pop it right there, get a nice crack, okay? Here's the other so we split on this side. Now we need to take our
knife and chop this out. Once I get to this point boom, just slice it and that'll make some amazing
stock right there, okay? You want to take out the liver as well, but we'll do that later on. So you wanna get these kidneys out of here 'cause they're gonna add a
little bit of bitterness. So any of those things
that you can clean up, now's the time to do that. Next thing we're gonna do
is kinda knock these off. So I take a knife... And just break that off. Slice right through. What's gonna happen is this
is gonna start to pull back and we'll have a really
nice French bone here. Again the heel of your knife... and that's what we need. So now we're gonna sneak
underneath the skin. You don't want to penetrate the skin and we're just gonna
delve this needle in here and we're gonna pump some
butter into this bird. A lot of folks will use
Bird Boost or something like that, that'll have some phosphates that'll retain moisture. This is such a quick cook though. I find that just a little bit
of butter goes a long way. We'll pump a little bit into those wings and again I'm just kinda lifting that up, one, two, three, find another home. One, two, three, one, two, three. And again this is about a 10 pound bird, we're putting a little over
a pound of butter in here. Next we're gonna sneak
into the thigh region. I just kinda sneak in right there and you just come straight in, easy-peasy. Just sneak that needle right in. One, two, one, two, one, two. Now for the next one. All right. So one thing whenever you're injecting that you wanna remember is
you know, we've taken this, drawn the butter, or
whatever our liquid might be, stuck it in the bird, pulled it out, put it back in the butter. At this point every
single thing that you have in here has the possibility
of having Salmonella in it. So just 'cause you have a
little bit of butter left over doesn't mean that you can use it in something else later on. So I'm actually gonna take
this little bit of butter that we've got left over and
I'm gonna put a little bit on my glove and I'm gonna start painting the outside of the bird. Let's flip this bird,
I always like to season the inside of the bird first. Because this isn't gonna
be the presentation side we wanna do the presentation side last. So we've got this nice and buttered up. Now let's take some of
our Cattlemen's Grill Ranchero seasoning and
just season from above. Notice I'm not seasoning
directly on there, you wanna let gravity kinda help you out and pull those granules. This is a labor of love. There's something about
the majesty of a bird that brings a family together
and for some families, it might just be the
one time that everybody sits around the table, but
the bird is the centerpiece. So whatever you're doing, do it with love. Happy people make happy food. All right, we'll flip this. Again a little bit more
butter on the outside. I'm gonna take these little wings here and I'm gonna kinda get a
little half Nelson, right? Pull it back just like that. Pull back just like that. And we've got this nice and buttered. Here comes the seasoning, don't forget to get in here just a little bit. Okay. I see sometimes people trimming this off. Remember as this cooks
it's gonna shrink up so leave as much skin as you can. The seasoning just smells wonderful. I'm getting strong garlic, strong salt. Really nice aromatics in here. And that's gonna be a
beautiful, beautiful bird. So we've got our turkey spatchcocked and injected with butter,
and seasoned up beautifully. Now it's time for the rustic root roast. So we've got kind of a
malage of things here. You can imagine just this
bed of aromatic vegetables and thyme and rosemary and a little bit of bacon in
there to provide fat content, and a little salinity as
well, little saltiness. So let's go ahead and get
these carrots trimmed up. Mixed up with those amazing vegetables and we'll get this root roast and this turkey on the Kamado Joe. Little angle. And that's perfect. We don't want them much smaller than that. Just kinda line them all up. Now we're gonna take them and put them on our board. Got the bacon here, just kinda
mix that up a little bit. Also threw some garlic cloves in here. So just really, really bright bright colors, bright flavors. And let's get a little seasoning on that as well. So after this we're gonna
put the turkey right on top. You can imagine as that turkey's roasting, the drippings are coming
down, everything's happening underneath that bird. There's gonna be some
steam action going on. You know, a lot of times I absolutely love, love, love turkey
but these vegetables can be the star of the show as well. All right so we've got our
beautiful, beautiful bird. We've got an amazing root roast. Now is the fun part, we're
just gonna lift this bird ever so gently, set it right
on top of the root roast. And here's where you wanna shape the bird, 'cause whatever shape you put it in is the shape you're gonna get out. So I like to karate chop right here. Remember we've got the half
Nelson going on right there. And that's us. So check this out, beautiful
things are happening. We haven't even started cooking and we're already winning, all right? The Kamado Joe is set
at about 325 degrees. You could bump up to 350 if you wanted to. The spatchcock really allows us to cook this thing a little bit quicker. We've taken out that big cavity, we've flattened it out,
given it more surface area and really seasoned this thing up. So let's go ahead and get it on. First, let's talk about
how we've got the charcoal set up in the grill,
and we've also gotta get our cherry in there so it starts smoking. So you can see how we've
got all the charcoal banked to one end, one side. So this method of pushing
the coals, or banking the coals to one side, it's
not a true indirect cook but it does allow the
dark meat or whatever meat we put directly over the
coals to cook at a higher rate than what we've got not really indirect, but not directly over the coals. So I'll have the white
meat towards the outside, the dark meat with all the myoglobin in it towards the side that's
right above the charcoal. And now we're gonna get this going. So we've got combustion. We're gonna let that
wood, that cherry wood, kinda heat up a little bit. Everything's going, we'll
start to get that clear smoke. Right now it's still white, billowy. We wanna get rid of that big particulate which brings bitterness,
and get to that sweet smoke. We're gonna use smoke here
as almost a seasoning. Some people think they don't like smoke. Chances are they've just
been introduced to bad smoke. So we're gonna lightly smoke this. Again, one of the
benefits of having all the coals banked to one
side is that we can put the dark meat, which
needs to come to about 185 degrees internal
temperature Fahrenheit to get tender over the coals. Where as that semi indirect will have the breast meat over here. It's not too terribly much of a difference but it's just enough to make sure that that breast meat stays nice and moist, while we get this a little bit hotter. And that's looking great. Again, we've already injected
the spatchcocked bird. We've got that great
Cattlemen's Ranchero seasoning on the outside, amazing
root roast underneath. We're at 325, banked coals. Now we're just gonna shut
this lid and let it go. Again, you wanna see about
180 to 185 on the thighs and 160 on that breast
meat and let the inertia, or carry over cooking, take it to the final 165 that we want. Gonna shut this lid. I'm guesstimating that this is gonna take about an hour and 15 minutes, but it might take a little bit longer. Really, the temperature's gonna tell. Every bird is different. This is a recipe that
I've worked up with a certified master chef, Tony Sita. He's the corporate executive
chef for Butterball and like I said, a certified master chef. There's not many of those
around in the world. So this spatchcock method,
he's had a Kamado Joe for about four or five
years now and loving it. Chef, I hope you're out
there watching this. Let's see how it turns out, all right. All right, so we've got the bird on. Now it's time to make the sauce. So we've got some dark sweet cherries. We've got some creme fraiche, if you don't have creme fraiche you can probably use sour cream. Try to get creme fraiche if you can. Little horse radish and a white onion. Beautiful. Dark sweet cherry, horse radish. That's gonna balance and contrast with the turkey and that root roast. Really rustic and very cool color as well. That's really nice. If your cherries aren't very sweet you can add a little bit
of sugar just to brighten it up a little bit, but I
think this is really nice. Notice how loose it is, that's because we put it and we whipped
it up really well. If you put that in the refrigerator that's gonna tighten up just a little bit and I think before we put it on the turkey we'll need to tighten it up so that it doesn't run on the plate. Beautiful. All right, let's take
a look at this turkey. (laughs) All right. The bone is really showing here. The meat has just retracted
and this beautiful, beautiful color on the crust here. Even the big pieces are
right where we want them. And we've got that nice bacon and thyme and rosemary flavor going on. So let's go ahead and take this off. We're gonna let it rest just a little bit and then we're gonna slice this and plate it up on the platter. The aromas coming off of this
bird are just incredible. All right, so we'll just go ahead and take these leg pieces off. You wanna give it a little pull
and then with a sharp knife make sure and give yourself,
you don't want to take from the skin on the
breast so come underneath. Look at that. Look at that butter pocket over there. I just got a, watch this. (laughs) All right. I mean who wouldn't want that? Just that piece alone,
we could call it quits. But we've got more work to do. Beautiful. All right let's get this breast meat off. That's for me. All right. Just cutting on either
side of the keel bone. Kinda get your fingers in there. Now we're gonna trace the
top part of that ribcage and we're just kinda
taking it off the bone. Beautiful. Sneak into that wing joint. Look at that beautiful color. The moisture content is unreal. Let's let that rest for just a second. These are the best snacks. Some people make soup. Some people make turkey salad out of this. I just eat that up, a little
bit of salt, oh my gosh. Now we're gonna carve on the
other side of that keel bone. Same thing. Kamado Joe roasted turkey breast there. Two very nice wings. Snacks for later. Now let's separate the leg from the thigh. We're just ever slightly just gonna cut right through the joint. So taste your mirepoix, your root roast and see if it needs any
additional seasoning. Take out some of this
fibrous stuff that we used. If you wanna take out
some of that bacon, do so. Or you can chop it up and put it back in. And this is incredible. Just gonna pile this up. Yeah. Sometimes the mirepoix, the root roast, for me is the best part. Sometimes with the thighs
I'll pull and shred this. Sometimes I'll just put them straight on. When you're pulling them, you just kinda get in there and pop that bone right out. And then you can just, no knife necessary. Nice big pieces. Can just picture everybody
sitting around the table at Thanksgiving tasting this amazing bird. Sharing stories. I love Thanksgiving. So there it is. Just a real easy-peasy,
simple turkey to do. Cut the backbone out, flatten
it out, AKA spatchcock the bird, throw it on your
Kamado Joe, season it up beautifully, and let it go. And we've just got an
amazing array of colors, flavors, aromas. We did put a little bit of
extra sugar in this sauce. Just to brighten it up and
bring it forward a little bit. I like to leave that on
the side just in case the kids get freaked out about the pink. But really, really nice and
I hope you enjoy your bird as much as we're gonna enjoy this one. Cheers. Eric Gephardt, Kamado Joe
here it Wichita, Kansas at All Things Barbecue. Hey, thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video,
click that subscribe button. And if you have any questions or comments, or there's anything
you'd like to see us cook let us know in the comment
section down below. For more recipes, tips, and techniques head over to thesauce.atbbq.com. All Things Barbecue, where
barbecue legends are made.
