Gobble Gobble

I know its been a while since i’ve posted, just been really busy with life in general. I hope to be a little more frequent with my posts in the future. I’ve also noticed that my topics lately have been strickly food oriented, I’m going to try and find some stuff to blog about that isn’t food centered.

BUT, its Thanksgiving week and I would be remiss if I didn’t have a Turkey Day Blog. I’m so thankfull for the good things in my life. Specifically God and His Grace and my wonderful wife. We are blessed with a little boy on the way, due Jan 6th, but the way things are going we think he may come a little sooner. The wife and I both have some crazy extended family issues going on right now, it been so nice to have each other to hold when our families make us want to pull our hair out.

Now to jump track and move to something food related again. Sorry, I can’t help it. Smoked Turkey. Last Christmas I wanted to make a smoked turkey for my family’s Christmas dinner. I lucked up and created a really good recipe that really pleased everyone at the table and it has become my go to play when its time to cook up Big Bird.

It starts out with a 24 hour brine. What is a brine? Well, thank you i’m glad you asked. 😉 Basically a brine is a saline solution. Its a specific mixture of water (or juice), salts and sugars that is chemicaly designed to open the cells of the meat to absorb the water (or juice). Think of it as a marinade on ‘roids, it makes the finished product much, much juicer. I won’t go in to the full ingredient list ( can’t reviel all the tricks you know) but my recipe has pinaples, brown sugar and apple juice for starters.

The turkeys (we cooked 4 yesterday) sat in the brine for 24hrs and then were pulled out, rinised off and Inected. We use an injection that is very sweet and has just a little spice to it. For the spice part we use YardBird Rub a great poultry seasoning made by my friend Todd at PlowBoys’ BBQ. Once Jeff Had them injected I rubbed the outside of the birds down with a good coat of the YardBird Rub.

The turkeys were then put into the smoker and cooked at 250-300 degrees for about 6 and half hours. We used nothing but apple wood in this cook and the sweet aroma it let out was unmatched by any wood I’ve smoked with before. Once cooked the birds were double wrapped in foil, placed in a cool and covered with ice to be delievered Wednesday morning at my office. I’ve enclosed some picturs of the cook, I hope you enjoy! And again, click on the picture for the full size, worpress seems to want to cut off the right half of all my pictures.