Happy Thanksgiving!
We have lots of stuff to be thankful for around here. We have a great house that is being quite forgiving of our restoration successes (and failures). We have each other. We have good friends. We have awesome families. We have our two cats who are still putting up with our human antics. Fortunately, we don’t have a cornucopia with a cat inside, surrounded by two strangely-dressed toddlers. That would be a little odd, don’t you think?
Jenny and I usually alternate parents’ houses for Thanksgiving. This year we were at my parents’ house. My Mom and Babcia always make enough food for 40 people or so, even though there were only eight of us there this year (not including some folks who showed up later for dessert, etc.). I went up early to help with one of the turkeys (yes, that is plural–they usually make one whole turkey and one large turkey breast). My Mom did one in the oven with what has become a traditional brine treatment. I volunteered to try to smoke one this year, thinking that might be a fun thing to try (I am learning how to smoke things, and enjoy experimenting a little bit). She did the whole turkey in the oven, and decided on a southwest-style brine for the breast that we were going to smoke. She got the brine recipe from Emeril. She did the brining overnight, so it was ready this morning. I got up there at a little after 10AM to get the grill started. I got the charcoal all ready while she applied the suggested dry spice rub to the turkey breast. I use what is called the “Minion Method” for lighting charcoal for smoking. The process is basically to start one chimney (the charcoal lighter things that don’t use lighter fluid, just rolled-up paper) full of charcoal. Once that is fully started, it gets spread around the drip pan (I have a regular Weber kettle grill–this is still too much of an extra-curricular to justify me getting the dedicated smoker that I really want). The smoke wood gets added to that, and then another chimney full of unlit charcoal gets put on top of all of that. This enables longer-term medium-high heat (around 300-350F) indirect cooking, without having to add more charcoal into the process (which also would require opening the lid of a kettle grill, which can cause all sorts of havoc when smoking). I have two corded-probe thermometers, one for the meat being cooked and one for the inside-lid temperature, so I put those in the right places once the breast was on the grill, and closed up the lid. We estimated between three and a half to four hours for this nine-plus pound breast.
Monitoring smoking with the thermometers on the outside of the grill makes things really easy. There’s no guessing, and plenty of feedback on how the fire is doing and how the meat is cooking. Things progressed as predicted, with inside-lid temperature starting at a bit over 400F, then quickly dropping to about 350F, where it remained for the majority of the cooking time. When the bird was at about 150F, the inside lid temperature had dropped to about 310F. I figured that if it went much below 300F, I would add a half-chimney of lit charcoal. Our goal temperature was 165F. I decided to let it go, figuring that it would be able to polish-off that last 15F even if it did drop below 300F. At a little over three and a half hours into it, the internal meat temperature was at 165F, and the inside lid temperature had risen from 306F (its absolute low for the cooking time) to about 315F (the wind had died-down a bit, which probably helped to let the temperature rise a little bit). I took it in so that it could rest for about 30 minutes before carving, and took in the drippings caught in the pan for making gravy.
Let me just say that the turkey done like that is one of the best turkeys I’ve had in a while. That is definitely a winner of a recipe, and really easy to smoke, too. As long as the temperature inside the grill stayed up there long enough, it could just sit in there and roast. I was also happy to see a good smoke ring through a good portion of the breast, which meant that it got a good dose of smoke at a proper temperature to let the smoke really get into the meat. It was awesome.
While that turkey was cooking, I also got to make the spaghetti sauce (yes, we have spaghetti, too; and no, we’re not Italian–my Dad isn’t a huge turkey fan, so we started making spaghetti and meatballs for him a while ago, and it’s developed into a tradition for all of us now). We got the recipe from a family friend, and it’s really easy (and really good!). I’ll have to do it sometime for us at home, now.
In other news, I updated the entry from yesterday about our progress on the house, and included some pictures. Mmm. Juicy pictures.
By the time we had dinner, I was full on smells and tasting things as we went. I had dinner, but couldn’t fit dessert. Maybe in a little while….
jonathan
