Okay, this response is very late... but our turkey was soooo good. Every time I open a bag of it in the fridge, I want to start nibbling. I've been cooking our turkeys on a Weber barbeque grill for the last few years, but this year, I did more. First, I brined it for about 24 hours. This means soaking it in a solution of salt (lots of salt), hickory smoke flavoring, pickling spice, cloves, and plenty of my father's honey. (My father's bees' honey, actually. Mine now, though.) I couldn't find a container that would hold the turkey (almost 21 lbs.) in brine in our fridge, so the brining took place in an ice chest on the patio. I added bags of ice periodically to keep it cold enough to prevent spoilage. Didn't take as much as I expected, though.
Thursday morning around 10:30, the bird went on the grill, but not quite as usual. I had bought some pecan and hickory chunks, which were soaking in water for a few hours. They went on top of the charcoal for smoke. I have little "fences" for the Weber for "indirect" grilling, allowing stacks of charcoal on two sides of the grill, out from underneath the meat. Normally, one cooks with the Weber with its vents wide open, but for smoking, I close the vents almost completely. That lowers the temperature considerably and traps the smoke in the grill longer. Ideally, to truly smoke-cook food, the goal is to hold the smoker/grill at the temperature you want to achieve when the meat is done. Thus, for a turkey, you'd want it to be around 180 degrees. I didn't aim for that, though. It's a lot of work to keep a regular Weber grill at that temperature and I wasn't sure it would be done on time. Besides, to cook at that low a temperature, I probably would have wanted to add a curing solution to the brine (although the salt and sugar accomplish a fair bit of curing on their own). Most of the day, the temp was around 275-300. It was done around 5 p.m. The skin was just about black from the sugar in the honey, which surprised me a bit, since I had rinsed it after brining, expecting to prevent the skin from getting too dark or chewy. The thinner parts of the skin are edible, but the thicker parts are not. As I said, the results were great. Tender, juicy turkey with a fantastic smoke flavor. The only slightly surprising negative result was the gravy, which turned out to be quite salty. I guess the pan dripping became concentrated from the heat of the fire. Next year, I think I'll take drippings out every couple of hours in hopes of avoiding that. But the saltiness was quite tolerable. As is traditional for us, I also made a couple of pecan pies and one pumpkin pie. We've had so much to eat that we haven't touched the pumpkin pie and only half of one pecan pie is gone so far. This isn't helping me cut down on simple carbohydrates... ;-) Nick
