Our family celebrating Thanksgiving Early this year. With work and schedules, Holidays often don't fall upon a convinient time. I am of the firm belief that the most important thing about holidays is the drawing of people together to celebrate them. That being said, the date matter little to me as compared to the act. Therefor, we had Thanksgiving on Tuesday. I was extremely excited because, this meant I had the opportunity to cook up the Turkey. This is how I went about doing it.

I started by mixing up some brine for the bird. Here was the recipe I used.

Water
64 oz Apple Juice
1 cup Sugar
1 cup Kosher Salt
1/4 cup Chicken Dust
1 Lemon (Sliced)
1 Lime (Sliced)
1 Large Yellow Onion (Sliced)
1 Celery Heart
1 Can Lemon Lime Pop (I used Diet Mist)
1 Can Light Beer

Use half the Apple Juice and combine the rest of the ingredients in a large pot and use water to make up a gallon. I then cooked it for 20 minutes.

This was then dumped in a bucket, the rest of the apple juice, and enough water was added to make 2 and 1/2 gallons. The bird was then dropped in to soak.

Right now it is around 30 degrees outside most of the time so, instead of trying to shove the container in a fridge or use a cooler to keep everything cold, I just set the bucket outside.

Meanwhile I got the smoker loaded up with charcoal and pecan shells. To give you an idea, I filled the basket with about 4 inches of charcoal, then put in about 4 handfulls of pecan shells, then went about another 2 inches with charcoal and added 4 mor handfulls of pecan shells. 18 coals I had started in a chimney then went on top of this.

After a little 2 hours of soaking, I took the bird out and dried it. 2 hours is the minimum on this. If you could go 4 or 6, that would be ideal, even 8-12 is fine. When drying the bird I first patted it down with paper towels and let it sit in the air for about 20 minutes. If you can fit your bird back in the fridge during this time, I recommend it. You keep the skin dry to help get that perfect bite through or crispy skin.

The wings were doing their own thing way too much so, I trussed the bird up. The important thing here is to treat the bird as much as one large piece of meat as possible. By tucking in the wings and legs close to the body this will cause the bird to cook more evenly and keep those outer limbs from drying out.

I sprayed the whole thing down with a light coat of olive oil (Pam) then came some Chicken Dust and another shot of Olive Oil Spray. Make sure to lift up the flap of skin that covers the neck opening and rub the seasonings into the breast meat under the skin as much as possible then tuck the skin flap back under the bird to keep juices from leaking out during cooking.

The smoker had just hit about 225 and on went the bird.

After a half an hour, I opened up the vents to kick up the heat. When an hour hit, I Put the turkey in an aluminum pan and then tented it with some foil. You'll notice that I didn't seal up the bird as tight as possible, the truth is that if you have foil covering just the part of the bird, this will hold in a large amount of moisture while giving that great wood fired flavor. It gets the flavor but doesn't turn nearly as dark as if you straight smoke it.

The temp on the drum rose to just over 300. The bird continued to cook for 4 more hours until the breast hit an internal temp of 165. Then off it came. (as a side note here, you can dump those dripping from the tray into a sauce pan add a couple table spoons of flour and make up some killer gravy. The flour might not seem like it is enough at first but, apply medium heat to it and continue to whisk. Soon you will find that the, now gravy, thickens up quite nicely. Should be enough to make atleast 2 cups worth. I didn't even need to add seasonings to it, there was so much flavor.)

I then sliced up the bird and served it up. We didn't have a ton of people for our meal but, I still was shooting for it to look good. I think I pulled it off.

I must say that this was one super tasty and moist bird! Everyone loved it and it was hard to put down the fork. The thing I love best about doing Turkeys this way is you get a nice light smokey flavor but, the skin doesn't get overly dark and its even crispy or bite through just like oven baked. Also, the meat stays moist just like if you deep fried it. It's like the turkey that is the best of all worlds.
We served it up with Mashed Potatoes, Squash, fresh veggies, Gravy (of Course), rolls, and Cranberry BBQ Sauce. It was truly a meal to be thankful for. Almost makes me sad that Thanksgiving only comes once a year.

Thanks for looking!