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Once upon a
time, there was...
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The
Wrapped Smoked Turkey
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Okay, it took
me a while to dig out these pictures. This was our very
first foray into smoked turkey, back in, what, 2006 or
so?! Note the presence of the Bar-B-Chef offset, so you
know it was back in the good old days!
General notes: I am a staunch fan of fresh over frozen
turkeys, and brining. I just can't stress enough how these
two choices produce much better results, and both shorten
cooking times.
I've always gotten petite 9 to 11 pound turkeys, and
rather than go bigger I would get two, as we did on that
occasion, just because lower temps are involved than when
roasting in an oven and you don't want things to take too
long to warm up out of the "danger zone". Oh,
and DON'T stuff, for the same reason.
So we had our two turkeys, and I made something like two
pounds of melted butter. The turkeys got seasoned and
wrapped in cheesecloth:
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Then they got
soaked with all that wonderful butter:
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Then they
went into the Bar-B-Chef, at what was probably somewhere
in a wild range between 225 - 275 (hey, we were still new
at this stuff, and that thing is a leaky old tub).
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I do remember
that we basted the cheesecloth a couple of times with more
butter and some broth, to keep it from drying out and
sticking. This is what the turkeys looked like at about
the three-hour mark:
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As always,
doneness was checked with a probe thermometer, and when
they were close, the cheesecloth was removed -- it cracked
off in a perfect turkey-shape like a mummy casing, leaving
this:
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We probably
tried to raise the heat a bit at the end, to crisp up the
skin, but then again it didn't need much more help at that
point. The turkeys looked weirdly Norman Rockwell
overperfect, as if they'd been airbrushed or photoshopped
or something.
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And that was the big First
Smoked Turkey Adventure! Those birds were some fine
eating. We hope your Thanksgiving turkey turns out
just as well.
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