The Bar-B-Q Turkey - Theory and Practice

[This picture is a link to someone else's blog showing that bloggers bar-b-q turkey.]

After the Thanksgiving out, BrooklynDodger obtained a turkey for barbeque at home. This would be a most ideal guy thing for Thanksgiving at the venue, since it gives a reason for being outside, but busy, when everything else is inside.

So, you get a turkey defrosted. You get a Weber kettle. You start the coals in the fire started chimney - charcoal lighter is pretty sure a carcinogen. Also, when it's cold out, charcoal lighter doesn't work very well anyway. You take the gravy pan and put it onto the charcoal rack in the kettle, build up lighted coals all around the pan. Best to put aluminum foil over the pan while fooling around, so ashes falling into the pan can be taken out with the foil. [There's a lot of fooling around here, almost a fire sculpture to be built.] Put the turkey on the grill above. Put the kettle cover over the turkey.

For a big turkey, it's done in 2 hours, half the time or less than doing it in the oven.

When the turkey comes out, the drippings are pretty well brown to black in the bottom of the pan, but can be dredged out for serious flavored gravy. This time, the Dodger put onions in the pan, which went beyond carmelized and so added maybe too much grit. Might have been better to find a way to put them in half way through.

Point here is that this arrangement solves the age old problem of the back of the turkey [and the turkey is lying on its back] being underdone when the breast is done right, or the other way around. This way, the radiant heat from below on the back and drum sticks causes them to cook faster than the breast on top, so without artificial effort to tent the breast, it comes out perfect.

In this case, the plan was to start the fire at 12 for a 6 o'clock dinner. OK, the Dodger feared the turkey would take oven 4 hour bake, leaving an hour to get the fire going and some time for the turkey to rest before carving. One thing and another, the fire was set by 2:45, the turkey very well cooked by 5, and well rested. Carving is much easier when its rested.