Due to a couple of factors, this was the first Thanksgiving we spent in Maryland. It was also the first time my wife and I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner. My parents came out and there were five of us. As I usually handle the meat, I decided to cook the turkey on our pellet grill. It's a Green Mountain Grill Daniel Boone, and it's great. However the grill has seen some use (we got it in 2013) and needed some maintenance. It no longer was getting hot and the last couple of times I had to take out everything and start the fire manually, which is in no way ideal. So after ordering a new starter rod I replaced it the day before Thanksgiving, which was actually pretty easy. I was blown away by the rough shape of the old piece.
Wednesday I also did a little bit of prep, but it was just slicing up a few vegetables for the 'gravy' and putting together a rub. Our turkey was about 12 lbs, and fresh from Aldi so we didn't have to worry about defrosting.
If you don't know already, the guy I look to for everything barbecue is 'Meathead' at amazingribs.com and you should do the same. Here's the page for doing a turkey. https://amazingribs.com/tested-recipes/turkey-recipes/bbq-and-grilled-turkey-recipe
Thursday morning we butterflied (or 'spatchcocked') the turkey, which we had done before with chicken but not a turkey. You remove the backbone and flatten the bird by pressing down until you hear a crack. With a spread out and flattened bird, it cooks more evenly and quickly. I've never really enjoyed Thanksgiving turkey because the breast meat is just so dry. I did this because I wanted a juicier bird. Here's how it looked after applying a rub very similar to Meathead's Simon and Garfunkel under the skin as possible and on top.
I also had prepared a few foil pans with carrots, onions, celery, juice from inside the bird, and various other parts of the bird (neck, gizzard, etc) but not the liver. I put these pans underneath the grate to catch juices from the bird as it cooked with the idea everything would be used to make gravy when the bird was done. If or when I do this again, it will be a single pan under the grate instead of multiple and make sure there's plenty of liquid. The pans kept drying out even though I repeatedly added water/chicken broth so this part of the cook did not go as planned.
After reading the article, I expected about a two hour cook once the bird went on. After heating up to 325, the bird went onto the grill and I didn't look at it for an hour. After checking the breast temp it was only 110. We were looking for 160 everywhere, so I knew there was a ways to go. Still, I didn't want the wings and legs to dry out so I wrapped them in tin foil.
From then on I checked the temp every 20 minutes or so and it seemed we were only gaining about 10 degrees each time. The turkey ended up taking a little over three hours which would've been fine if we weren't trying to have everything ready at the same time. My wife did a great job and everything worked out, but it was a little frustrating how long it took. The difficulties I was having with the gravy probably made it worse, as adding water repeatedly would've lowered the temp of the grill, slowing the cook. Anyway, after everywhere I probed showed at least 160, the bird came off.
The foil pans were dried out again, but we salvaged some gravy by adding water, straining, and putting it in a saucepan to cook down. It did taste pretty good when splashed on the turkey and mashed potatoes.
The turkey was crispy on the outside and nice and juicy on the inside, an improvement over my normal turkey experience. There were a few lessons learned along the way but I would do this again. Now we just need to figure out what to do with all this leftover meat.
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