June 15, 2006
Smoked Turkey Breast - June, 2006
I couldn’t pass up the bargain - 7 pound turkey breast at $0.49/lb, and already defrosted.
Nothing is all that original to me. I always start a BBQ session by searching the pages and forums at the Virtual Weber Bullet. Here’s my starting point. I’m not going to buy a gallon of apple juice but i did have a quart of Apple Cider in the fridge and a really old container of frozen orange juice concentrate so I used those and 3+ quarts of water, 3/4 C Kosher salt, 1/2 C honey, 3/4 C white sugar, 1/4 C brown sugar. I didn’t measure those very carefully because my bargain bird was brined at the factory (AKA self basting) and I’m not convinced I’ll tastes the apple or the orange or the sugars. It is good to get that stuff out of the fridge though. I didn’t boil it the brine, just heated the solution until all the sugar dissolved and put it in the fridge to cool.
On the chance that the new brining solution will replace the old brining solution, I soaked the breast in lots of cold water. Lot’s and lots of cold water, like you would do to defrost a frozen bird in a hurry. Seems silly to waste a bunch of paper towels drying the bird just before dunking it in the brine for a long time. I cleaned up bird, cutting off some of excess skin and fat.
I’m not a huge fan of turkey skin, crisp or otherwise, so I probably won’t do some of that other stuff in the master recipe, like trying to run the WSM at 325 to 350 degrees, and using a boat load of fuel. If high heat is what I wanted, I’d using the Weber Kettle grill. Done that with turkey (and it was good). I like the low and slow, fret and worry approach. This is also where the poultry police show up.
One thought is that a low and slow turkey spends too much time in that “kill you” danger zone temperature. If I was doing 30 lbs of cold turkey on the WSM, I might worry about that. 7 lbs? That’s like two [small] chickens. Yes the distribution of the mass is different but lets use a little logic and experience. The turkey will have been brined (mine and the factory’s) for a number of hours (or days) and mine uses a fair amount of salt and I’ve yet to die or even get sick from low and slow chicken, some of which were almost as hefty as this turkey breast and brined at lot less aggressively. I probably won’t die from this. You could probably search the web and find the statistics for poultry related illness vs just being in the wrong spot at the wrong time incidents. I think I’m more likely to get hurt driving to the store to buy the stuff than eating it. But I haven’t done that analysis.
It’s all in fridge now, brining. I could smoke it Friday or Saturday but I’m leaning towards Saturday, unless I think the OJ citric acid is going to cause major changes. It could.Then again, it’s mostly headed for sandwich meat and leftovers. Showy presentation and crispy skin and gravy makings is not a priority.
[Next Day]
It’s been in the brine for a full day, maybe more. Now I need to decide what I’m going to do next. The drying thing, or or. Or actually, I don’t really have a choice. It has to unbrine right? I’m a bit worried about that OJ turning it to mush meat if I leave it in there much longer. What to do?
It’s only a turkey. I’ll follow the recipe, sort of and see what happens. It wouldn’t hurt me to see if I can get the WSM up to 325F or higher. The citrus did cook some “look at me, I’m so alone” turkey bits, but not as much as I feared. I smell a success. I think I’m about to invite six or seven or eight people over. I baked up a full batch of the beans, I’ve got a butt load of sourdough bread in the freezer as well as all the pulled pork they can eat and more damn lettuce than one person should see.
[The Cook Day]
It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have some trouble. Timing is the first one. Turns out out I’m going to take the turkey to a friends house so I don’t have the luxury of them setting at my house waiting for me to finish. The bright side is my cleanup is minimal. So, I carefully miscalculated that the bird needs to come out at 6:20 (or sooner), and the bird should go in the 325 - 350 degree smoker at 4:00PM. I decided to follow the recipe in the link above rather than low and slow for 7 hours. Follow the recipe if you don’t know what your doing and I’ve never run the smoker at that high a heat so that I’ll teach me something.
The plan was to light a full chimney of charcoal at 3:00PM and when ashed over, put that in the charcoal ring of the smoker, cover that with another chimney of unlit charcoal and by 4:00PM, it should be running at a pretty high heat. I lit the first chimney at 3:10PM. I’m already late. The first chimney didn’t light. 3:20PM, try again. 4:15PM: My newly installed thermometer say’s 270F at the top. Crap! I’ve used up all my safety margin of time!. I put the bird in, added the smoke wood. The temp dropped to 220F but quickly went back to 270F. And stayed there while I fretted. I fretted a lot. I decided I’d better get some more lit charcoal in there and I fired up another chimney. While the newspaper was still smoking, I had the bright idea to use my old candy thermometer in the top vent hole. 335F! Perfect! Damn new thermometer. I know, I should have tested it.
I smothered the other chimney and sort of fretted just slightly less. All vents are 100% open, it’s low 70’s outside and there’s a small breeze. 6:00PM, the meat probe is 131F and I want 165F and even worse the the smoker temp is dropping, even after a little stirring of the coals. The two chunks of apple wood are gone so there’s no more smoke to be had, so I turned on the indoor oven to 350F and transferred the bird to the oven. I even turned on the convection part of the oven. The temp on the probe started climbing, I called my hosts said I was running 15 minutes late.
When those 15 minutes were up, the probe read 163F. I wrapped the bird in foil, put it in the cooler and drove over (10 minutes). They too were having charcoal delays (for grilling steaks), but with a cold one in my hand and nothing more that could be done for the turkey, I finally relaxed. Even if the turkey is bad, no one will leave hungry. A half hour later, we opened the foil and sliced the turkey. I grabbed a small bit to taste. Pretty good. Not underdone, a little closer to too dry than I wanted, but not bad considering I had to finish it in a convection oven at 350F which is going to dry it out and the citrus in the brine. Light but obvious smoke flavor. The smoke component is just right.
Of the 9 people, 8 claimed it was very good to “best turkey ever”. Several times each. I held to my “it’s pretty good” rating. If all you know about smoked turkey is the stuff in the deli or the mega-mart, then it would indeed be the best ever. It may even be the best I’ve made, but I know I could have done better or made fewer mistakes. That’s me.
The true telling is in the aftermath. Properly smoked poultry won’t be off putting the next day so when they cleaned up and asked what to do with left overs, I said I just wanted enough for a sandwich if there was any left over. I spent another hour outside smoking and joking with the crowd and then it was time to leave so I went to collect my left overs. “They’re in the cooler”. So I looked. The carcass was wrapped in foil and the hostess explained that the kids had decided I probably had enough meat on the carcass for a sandwich and the rest of the beast should stay at their place.
That is a thumbs up vote on my Q when they won’t let me take the left overs. That made me grin. A lot. Then I knew that their “best ever” talk wasn’t just saying nice things to the old guy. The host started to explain and I cut that short, “Dude! You fed me steak, we’re even”. The blogging rights alone make us even not to mention my big grin.
Then they (successfully) convinced me to take home four bottles of the St Pauli Girl six pack that they bought when they heard I was coming. I protested mightily since I’m walking out with more dollars in hand than I walked in with. I wonder what they would have done if the turkey was better than pretty good.
For the record, skip the OJ. I think it cooked (toughened) some of the outside and as best I can tell there’s no taste of it in the result. If it was me, I’d skip the Apple Juice too (Cider in this case). I didn’t taste that either. Brining is important though and using enough unlit charcoal and some more time would be a worthy improvements. Still, I pulled this Q out of my ass, as we say up here when the result of many screw-ups is still “pretty good”. If I could talk these folks into buying a packer brisket and the beer…
OK, That’s just crazy talk. Sorry. Won’t happen again.