Happy Thanksgiving

Updated November 28th, 2020.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. I’ll spend my Thanksgiving cooking a turkey in the Primo Kamado cooker on the balcony, doing a little online shopping, and keeping an eye on the key football games. Here is how I do it. You can do it too.

Cooking a turkey in the Primo Kamado

A Primo Kamado is a ceramic cooker, something like a Big Green Egg. I’ve cooked a lot of turkeys on my Primo over the years and they have all been delicious. Turns out that the preparation and cooking are much more important than the spices. There are probably fifty ways to cook a turkey on a barbeque but here’s the one way I do it every single time.

Get your cooker going with plenty of fuel. Your turkey will cook for about three hours, maybe a little longer. Set it up for about 300 degrees F. You don’t want flames to touch your turkey so put a pan down on a lower rack to block the flames or just put the coals on one side of your cooker and the turkey on the other. I have an old cookie sheet (a round one) that I put on the lower rack and it catches the drippings and blocks the flames.

1. Start with a nice fresh turkey. Frozen is OK but if a fresh one is available, get one. I usually pick one that’s in the 12 to 15 pound range. If you go too big you won’t be able to fit it on the cooker. I’ve cooked brined turkeys, Butterball turkeys, plain fresh turkeys, and probably some other kinds that I don’t remember and they all came out great.
2. Take out the neck and giblets and do whatever you want with them. That’s up to you.
3. Cut the backbone out, using heavy kitchen scissors or poultry shears. Some people call this “butterflying,” some people call this “splaying,” some people call it “spatchcocking.” Watch this video, and call it anything you want. The video shows how to do it to a chicken but it’s exactly the same on a turkey, only harder. You will need some strength. Watch your fingers. The reason you do this is it cuts your cooking time almost in half.
4. Cut off any extra fat and rinse the turkey off. Pat it dry with paper towels. You will need more paper towels than you thought.

Like I said, the preparation and cooking are more important than the spicing. I’ve made great turkeys using Dizzy Dust, Grub Rub, Texas BBQ Rub, and Bob Tallman’s Ranch Rub. These are all fairly heavy on the brown sugar. You’ll need a good bit, maybe half a bottle. You’re going to apply rub inside and out, and under the skin, so plan accordingly. Pour a bunch of rub into a coffee cup or some other smallish container and put a spoon in it now because your hands are going to be all slippery pretty soon and you don’t want to make a mess of your cupboards if you can help it. While you’re at it set out another coffee cup and put an inch or two of olive oil in there. You’ll need a brush to apply the oil later so you may as well get that out now.

First, run your fingers under the skin on the breast meat to loosen up the skin as much as possible. If you are careful you can get the skin completely loose from the breast. Get a spoonful of rub and put it onto the breast, under the skin. Do it again on the other side and pat it down with your fingers. You will almost always wish you used a little more rub so this is the time to do it right. Put some more in there.

Next, do the same thing with the thighs. The skin comes loose very nicely and you can dump a good bit of rub onto the thighs, under the skin. This takes a bit of time but it’s worth it.

To this point you have not put any rub on the outside of the turkey. It is all under the skin, which is great because the rub you put on the skin isn’t going to get into the meat nearly as well as the rub you put down under the skin.

Now put the turkey breast-down, exposing the inside of the bird. Brush the inside of the bird, and any part of the bird that is exposed in this position, with olive oil. There are three reasons for this:

• It makes the skin brown up very nicely
• It makes the rub stick to the bird
• Olive oil makes a lot of stuff better and this is no exception.

After you’ve brushed everything you can reach with the turkey breast-down, sprinkle rub all over the bird, knowing that you are later going to roll it over and do the other side. Give it a good healthy sprinkling. Like I said, you will usually wish you’d used more.

Now you are almost ready to cook. Hopefully your cooker is ready to go. Put the bird onto the cooker with the breast up.

It will look something like this:

You can see the rub under the skin on the breast.

Take your olive oil and brush everything you can reach. Sprinkle with rub. Yes, the fire is going but it won’t be so bad. Work fast.

Your turkey will look like this when it’s olive oiled and sprinkled with rub.

Close the lid to the cooker and let time do its magic. A thermometer with a digital read-out outside the cooker will be very handy so get one of those if you can. Put it into the thigh and in a few hours have a look. When it’s 170 degrees in the leg your turkey is done. In my experience that’s going to take somewhere around three hours. That is probably less time than you expected but that’s part of the point of spatchcocking. (The other part of the point is you are cooking from both the top and the bottom, instead of just from the outside, so your turkey cooks more quickly and more evenly– no more dry miserable no-good breast meat.)

Your turkey will look something like this when it’s ready to come off. I use tongs to lift the turkey but the legs will be pretty loose and might come off, so I have to be careful. You should be careful too.

Put it on a rack in the kitchen and let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s impossible to carve when it’s super hot, so let it cool down a bit. Then, carve it following these instructions. This is the finishing touch and it makes all the difference. Forget about carving it at the table. Carve it in the kitchen and bring out the cut-up meat. Everyone will be impressed and it will be a million times easier to serve. (This video is better but you may need a subscription to the New York Times to watch it.)

Here’s what it looked like when I’d carved one breast for transport to a friend’s house.

Notice that the breast meat is cut much thicker than what you’re probably used to. That’s the right way to do it. Note that this kind of cooking does not result in a smoky flavor. What it does result in is a juicy, delicious turkey that looks and tastes great.

Practice on a chicken (cooking time: about an hour) and be an expert by Christmas.

Online Shopping Tips

My sister likes to get up early on the Friday after Thanksgiving and get deals at the stores. I like to sleep in and do my shopping online. Here are a couple of tips that will save you money while letting you shop from home.

• Visit www.dealnews.com. Set up an account and have them send you emails when items you want are on sale. I devoted an entire blog post to them and here is the link. Hint: sort the list of deals chronologically. That way, when you check the site a second time, you can quickly see what’s new since your last visit.
• Visit www.retailmenot.com before buying something online. RetailMeNot finds discount codes which you can use to save money on your online purchases. This should be part of your routine. Find the item you want to buy online, then make a new browser window (File menu) and go to retailmenot.com to see if there is a discount code for what you’re about to buy. I wrote about this site a bit ago and here is the link to that.

You’ll probably save money with these tips and you’ll definitely get more sleep. For some people, the thrill of the hunt makes getting up in the dark and driving to the mall worth it. If that’s you, tell me about it sometime after 9 AM.

Keeping Track of the Football Games

You’re probably thinking “turn on the TV, silly.” Turns out that I don’t have a TV, so I keep up with the games in other ways. First, there’s the ESPN ScoreCenter app for the iPhone and for the iPad. This keeps you up to date on the scores of the games. Next, there’s the Watch ESPN app, for the iPhone and for the iPad. This one actually lets you watch the games right on your iPhone or iPad, with some restrictions based on your internet provider. I also use the Watch ESPN website to watch games live, but also to watch games I’ve missed, on my Mac. It is very cool to be able to jump to the 4th quarter of a game, or to rewind a game in order to see a key play. Even Monday Night Football can be seen this way.

I also use Yahoo’s Sportacular app on the iPhone and on the iPad. These apps do a great job of keeping up with scores and they also provide written play-by-play, so you can keep up with a game without really watching it. Very handy stuff. With several key games this weekend, college and pro, you need all the help you can get.

So there you have it: turkey, shopping, and football. If that’s not Thanksgiving in a nutshell I don’t know what is. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thanks for visiting the blog.

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