We ended up with a nice
spread, including some donations from Chris and George and Rachel. (Some of which aren't pictured here.)
We got to sit down to a wonderful meal, and a beautiful table, with great friends and family. Life doesn't get better than that!
All I did for this turkey was do a simple brine and then lob it into the big green egg. For the brine, I just used a simple ratio of 20:1 water to salt (by weight). For a turkey of reasonable size (this was a 15 lb turkey), I usually do two gallons of brine, but I only make about a gallon and a half of water for it up front, using the full measure of salt. The remaining half gallon of water is added at the end as ice to cool things down quickly, a trick shamelessly stolen from Alton Brown.
ReplyDeleteSo, bring a gallon and a half of water together with about 9.6 ounces of salt in a large stock pot. Then, raid the spice cabinet for some stuff: allspice is always good, I usually lob a cinnamon stick in, some peppercorns, mustard seeds, some powdered ginger - whatever seems good. Bring it all to a boil and let it simmer for 10 minutes or so. I then put it out on the back porch for a while to cool off most of the way.
When I'm ready to get the turkey ready, I get out a cooler of about the right size, rinse out the turkey (saving the random parts for gravy the next day), put it in the cooler, pour in the brine, and then add ice up to the top. I then put out on the back porch with a rock on top just to keep the varmints (dogs) out.
Next morning, I fired up the grill, brought it up to about 300 or so with some apple wood and put the turkey on after rinsing it out. It took about four hours or so, keeping things at between 300 and 350 the whole time, and I never opened the grill at all. In order to test for doneness, I put a probe into the bird and threaded it out through the top of the grill and just kept an eye on temp. It was all very easy and very delicious.