The Juiciest & Perfectly Cooked Spatchcock Turkey

hey I'm Matt with meat church it's time to bust out the poultry shears because today we're spatchcocking a [Music] turkey so if I choose to cook a whole turkey for a holiday meal this is actually the method that I'm going to use I spatch for a number of reasons mainly uh to get this turkey more down flat so it Cooks more evenly um you don't have to worry about you know this stuff like depending on how how you're you're cooking your turkey if you're standing up laying it flat it'll cook more evenly it'll cook quickly and I always say it presents a lot easier you can remove this uh from your desired cooker on out onto a platter um it's easier to carve and so that's the way to go for me and it's super simple we've been doing it every year um unless you're new here you've seen us do this before so what do we have here this is a 122 lb turkey that I brind overnight I always brine my turkeys um I use our bird baptism rind I always say it's our number one product in the fall probably the number one comment I get from our followers is hey followed your turkey video used your brine my family said it was the juiciest turkey I've ever had and I hear that year round like Heard It All Summer in Florida um anyway and you know I I actually think you can brine a turkey that you get from the store that's frozen in a solution I've never had one person say it's too salty so anyway you you kind of do what you want to do but R this overnight all I did was um I use the entire package I heat it up in a pot uh not to a boil just allow all the salts to dissolve lit it 100% cool put it in a put the turkey in a food safe container dump the brine over it make sure it's completely submerged and I leave it in the fridge overnight or I do it in a cooler in the outdoor kitchen with ice depending on your room situation so how do you spatchcock this let me just talk it through here flip over to the back side is really super simple uh invest in some good poultry shears I always say don't get your uh don't open up your wife you utility drawer and get the nasty ass scissors that you cut your mail open with get poultry shears uh that you can wash and only use for this you're simply going to cut down both sides of this backbone it's all you got to do with these you can do it with a knife too it's much easier with these so I'm going to cut down this pull it out and then I'll move on to one additional step that I [Music] do [Music] all right really pretty easy uh it's harder than a chicken but it's not that big a deal um I save this uh along with the giblet bag that's in it anything that comes in the turkey in the neck uh and I make stock with this um we have turkey noodle soup uh recipe on meat church.com um the good thing about doing a bunch of turkey videos this time of year is I have a ton of this stuff so I can make a bunch of stock and a bunch of soup um you could also use that you know for your gravy so what's the extra step I do some people will take their turkey like this and kind of flatten it down and just cook it just like that that is perfectly fine if that's your preferred method um I go one step further and I remove this breast bone so I just put a little pressure here take a really sharp chef knife and just like doing a chi make a little incision there and you want to expose that breast bone this this part's a little more of a pain cuz You' got to get your finger around it um but let me try to show you that here so I'm just going to expose this here and then I'm going to work my way around this with my fingers and I'm going to pull that out the reason I do that is when you're done cooking you can just slice right down uh without having to deal with this so again optional but something that I like to do just like that do the other side get it out one nice clean pull now you're boneless right through the middle much easier to deal with uh at the end okay now let's let's talk about seasoning season your poultry with your favorite rub in my case uh we're lucky I'm going to trim a little fat off while I'm talking to you um we're lucky to have a lot of seasonings that are fantastic on poultry you've seen us in the past do a whole lot of Honey hog Voodoo Gospel Holy gospel um we came out with Texas sugar last year and you know I always tell people it's not as sweet as the name sounds it's actually awesome on Turkey uh a lot of our rubs actually sweeter than this it's just a name that I always wanted to use so don't be don't be afraid of that so I'm going to season underneath um I'm not putting a binder on today because this is just really wet from coming out of the brine you could use a binder if you choose to but we're just going to keep it really really super simple today you could add some pepper if you want you guys have seen me do that a few times in the past bye by the way you guys know we have lots of turkey recipes and videos of all type no matter what type of turkey you're doing uh for Thanksgiving and while I'm season this little note on our brine uh By the time this video comes out we're getting pretty close to Thanksgiving so always be mindful of shipping times uh you might want to choose to use our dealer locator on meat church.com and buy local support our wholesale dealers uh versus having it shipped from us now I'm going to put a glove back on come do little little surgery on this turkey I like to get underneath the skin separate the skin from the meat so I can apply some seasoning directly to the breast meat a lot of times when people carve turkey it's you know obviously pretty easy uh to pull the skin off and that's the only thing you've seasoned uh so I like to actually season the meat as well so I'm going to try to be real careful with this this is oddly satisfying by the way um and you can do most of this with your hand if any of it's being for snicky you can just make some incisions pull it away and do this as much or as little as you want but I I think this is this way you can get some seasoning and penetrate the meat and that'll be a lot better flavor uh when you're eating it there we go and then I'll use toothpicks at the end to kind of pin this skin back underneath so during the cook process uh the skin will stay down and be pretty because remember this is now the centerpiece of your holiday meal and you're going to be judged by your family so you want it to look really pretty you could do this on the legs as well I'm just going to do it on the breast meat I'm going to put a glove on I'm going to shut up uh I'm going to finish seasoning this and then I'm going to let it it here and then we'll get into [Music] cooking [Music] time to talk about cooking today we're running a Trager Timberline XL um you can replicate this on anything that you want to cook it on I love cooking uh turkeys on Trager because honestly they come out super beautiful uh they're going to be lighter in color than an offset smoker or a charcoal so that why i' like it uh for poultry in particular so let's talk about wood today we're running Cherry you don't see us do that too often uh in other turkey videos I talked about wood is an ingredient so really heavy smoke would be like mosquite a little less smoke would be Hickory a little less smoke would be pecan we did that this month uh and then below that would be fruit woods so you get to choose uh your choice uh of ingredients that you want to use but we're running Cherry pellets today uh which is going to be a really pretty color and a delicate flavor um temperature wise we're doing two 275 that's usually what I do for turkey I would I wouldn't really go any lower um you would go lower if you want to get more smoke the skin will get more rubbery my goal is not crispy skin if my goal was crispy skin I would have dry Brin the skin um for at least a day after I wet brined it uh but that's not what we're going for today um you could go higher 300 325 the I warn you you get to 325 your Skin's going to start to pull it may pop so you just kind of have to watch it you might want to base with butter along the way to keep that from happening so this 12 and a half pound turkey it's probably going to take right at 3 hours or so to cook shape it nice and pretty we're going to be good to go we don't have to do anything like I said unless you want to base it with butter which you know I definitely a big fan of that otherwise we're going to let it roll and we'll check back in with you guys at the end so we're at the 3-hour Mark I've been temping along the way I usually temp in a couple places for my competition days you know I'm often in here in this joint just to kind of see where we are but mainly I go back here in the biggest part of the breast and I'm going in deep looking for usually I go to like 158 it's going to carry over cook a few degrees and it's safe at this point anyway uh and we're there so I'm going to go ahead and pull this off probably better to do it with a big spatula but I'm using my hands today and oh over to the board we go all right well this turkey has uh cooled off for quite a while so we're going to we're going to see how we did here uh first I thought well oh let me show you this if you used uh toothpicks to pin the to pin the skin you're going to want to make sure you remove those you don't need you don't need somebody eating that maybe your mother-in-law but otherwise you don't want anybody eating that uh benefit of taking the uh the backbone out so I told you you could just kind of cut right through and good Lord so Juicy Juice just came pouring out of this that's no doubt thanks to uh to all that br um that we've got in here but just easy to deal with honestly and I'm not going to sit here and carve all of this but I find this to be much easier than the kind of traditional style turkey so I'm just going to take a little piece off here see how we did super good the Skin's actually not too rubbery um first thing it's like crazy juicy you can see all kinds I've been sitting here for a while and it's just juicy as can be but I really dig the flavor from the Texas sugar um it's a great addition to our our turkey Arsenal so if youall not tried that I've definitely tried this it's a winner um for sure on poultry but by now you guys have watched all kinds of turkey videos from us um we say a million times we've got all sorts in our turkey playlist fried turkey smoke fried turkey turkey breast traditional turkey but maybe you don't like turkey at Thanksgiving U we shoot all is way in advance of of Thanksgiving so by the time Thanksgiving comes around to be honest with you I don't want to see another turkey much less taste one so we usually do prime rib um holiday briskets things like that we've got videos on all of that as well so be sure to check that out uh thanks for being here like And subscribe and we'll see yall next [Music] week

Channel: Meat Church BBQ

Views: 540,625

Keywords: spatchcock turkey, smoked turkey, turkey on a pellet grill, thanksgiving turkey, turkey, thanksgiving, turkey recipe, turkey brine, turkey recipe thanksgiving, thanksgiving turkey recipe, pellet grill turkey, how to smoke a turkey, traeger turkey recipe, crispy turkey, juicy turkey, how to cook a turkey, meat church, matt pittman, traeger, bbq, grilling, meat church bbq, meat church bbq youtube, Meat Church, Matt Pittman, Barbecue, Grilling, how to, how to make, cooking show

Id: 4I7uERlRMkU

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023