Smoking a turkey

deandean

Hi, I am new to this forum but I am a big outdoor cooking fan.

I am close to buying a charcoal smoker, such as the Weber Smokey Mountain, mainly for cooking the christmas turkey. Here is an example from a.n.other:

youtube linky

I am big into slow cooking, e.g. roasts, ribs, etc. But I have never eaten food cooked on a smoker.

Has anyone here eaten food from a smoker? Especially a turkey? Does it taste good?

I'd hate to go to all the effort, then find I don't like the taste!

Thanks for any input

Merkin

We hot smoke most of our fish and it tastes amazing. Mackeral and sea bass are especially nice and it's great fun experimenting with different types of wood chippings to give off a different flavour, got some delivered from Canada the other day! I don't know anything about smoking a turkey though. It has such high chance of becoming a dry meat on cooking at the best of times so I'm not sure how that would translate through smoking. I guess you should probably do a practice run before Dec 25th to suss it out!

trackguy

I'd recommend starting with chicken first and experiment a few times before cooking a turkey.

You'll need to use an appropriate amount of wood chips along with the charcoal and also check which woods and seasonings are to your taste. This will only come with experimentation.

Rest assured though, hot smoked poultry is incredibly tasty and when you get it right, it's so tender.

SBWife

We've cooked a number of turkeys on the BGE and all have been wonderful.