Ryan took one bite of the practice turkey last Saturday, chewed for a long time and said, "That's a country ham with wings." He wasn't wrong. The bird was beautiful, mahogany brown and smoky all the way to the bone, and it was so salty I drank two glasses of water with dinner.
The brine was my job, so the brine was my fault.
Thanksgiving is at our house this year, sixteen people, and Ryan wants the turkey on the pellet grill. Before we bet the whole dinner on that, we ran a practice bird two weeks early: 12.1 pounds from Kroger at $1.19 a pound, $14.40, which is cheap tuition. Ryan worked a Saturday overtime shift, so it went on at 3:15, right after he got home.
Here's what happened. The brine recipe I used called for a cup of kosher salt per gallon of water. I was out of kosher salt, so I used a cup of table salt per gallon, and then I left the bird in for 18 hours instead of 12 because I didn't want to get up early. A cup of table salt is not a cup of kosher salt. Table salt crystals are tiny and pack tight, so a cup of it holds about twice as much salt by weight as a cup of Diamond Crystal kosher, whose flakes are big and hollow. I doubled the salt and then added half again to the time.
Everything else went right. The brine sat in a clean cooler in the garage with two bags of ice, and I checked it with the instant-read thermometer before bed and again in the morning. It stayed under 40°F. The grill ran at 300°F, and the bird took 3 hours and 10 minutes to bring the breast to 165°F and the thighs to 178. The skin came out browner than any oven turkey I've made.
Pellet grill or oven for sixteen?
On Thanksgiving Day the oven is the most crowded spot in the house. The pies get baked Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday still has dressing, sweet potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese and two pans of rolls fighting for one oven. Moving the turkey outside frees up four hours of oven time and spares me wrestling a 16-pound bird around everybody's elbows.
The downsides are real. If it storms, Ryan is standing in the rain. If it's cold and windy, the grill burns through pellets and runs long. The drippings taste smoky, which makes good gravy but different gravy. And a bird on a smoker can't be stuffed, because stuffing inside a turkey heats slowly and can sit too long at temperatures where bacteria grow. Our dressing bakes in a pan anyway, so that one costs us nothing.
So the plan is the pellet grill, with the oven as the backup. If Wednesday night's forecast says thunderstorms, the turkey goes in the oven at 325°F and nobody argues.
Ingredients
- 1 turkey, about 16 pounds, thawed in the refrigerator (give it four days), neck and giblets removed
- Brine: 3 gallons cold water, 3 cups Diamond Crystal kosher salt (or a scant 1 1/2 cups table salt, on purpose this time), 1/2 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons black peppercorns, 4 bay leaves and an orange cut in quarters
- Rub: 1 stick softened butter, 1 tablespoon smoked paprika, 1 tablespoon black pepper, 2 teaspoons garlic powder and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage, with no salt at all
- About 12 pounds of hickory-blend pellets
Here's the plan for the real day:
- Wednesday, 8 p.m.: stir the salt and sugar into a gallon of the water until they dissolve, add the rest of the water and the aromatics, and sink the turkey in a clean cooler. Add ice to keep it at 40°F or below, and check it before bed.
- Thursday, 8 a.m.: out of the brine after 12 hours, no more. Rinse, pat it very dry and rub the butter mixture under and over the skin.
- Heat the pellet grill to 300°F. Turkey on at 9:00, with a drip pan underneath for gravy, one probe in the thickest part of the breast and another in the thigh.
- Figure about 15 minutes a pound, so roughly 4 hours. It's done when the breast reads 165°F and the thigh reads 175°F.
- Rest it 40 minutes under a loose tent of foil while the temperature creeps up a few more degrees. Carve, and eat at two.
As for the practice bird, most of it is in the chest freezer in two-cup bags. Salty turkey is bad on a plate and fine in a pot of soup made with unsalted stock, which is where it's headed.
