Here’s my T-Day Smoked Turkey recipe

Here’s a recipe in honor of my most excellent Prostate Surgeon:

Step 1: Get a turkey! …

Step before 1, get a Traeger wood pellet smoker and a bag of Traeger Turkey pellets.

The Turkey pellets have a blend of wood optimized for Turkey / Poultry, and includes Rosemary seasoning. It also includes a Brine packet and a Rub packet, and basic instructions which are a good starting point.

The short course is:

Brine the bird for about an hour a pound.

Coat it in the rub.

Smoke it till it reaches temp.

Here’s a good basic Turkey brining article from Traeger:

https://www.traeger.com/learn/turkey-brine

I also watched a bunch of youtube videos, but the best one that I sort of followed is from this article, also on the Traeger website: https://www.traeger.com/recipes/traditional-thanksgiving-turkey
https://youtu.be/WX2t7690SOA

From this video, and others, I learned how to truss the bird, and how to carve the bird. Not like my family used to, but cutting the entire breast off then slicing it so every slice has some tasty skin. This carving technique was in several videos, like the one from ACE Hardware with chef “Diva Q”.

To the Traeger brine mix, I added 1 cup of bourbon, and some Orange juice, couple good glugs … maybe 8 to 16 oz.

I wasn’t as fancy as the chef in the video. I didn’t put butter under the skin. Instead when applying the rub I coated the bird in a generous layer of Dukes Mayonnaise and then applied the rub. This is very much like coating pork in mustard to hold the spices on. Quite a bit easier and very effective. Also I simply thickened the drippings with flour and some half & half for the gravy. I stuffed some herbs (sage, rosemary and thyme) from my wife’s garden and a stick of butter into the cavity.

I couldn’t find the butcher’s twine so I cut some strips from an Reynolds oven bag to act as twine which worked just fine.