Smoked Citrus Stuffed Turkey Video
Holiday Turkey time at the Cooking Outdoors house. A perfect primer for the new griller or smoker at home looking to smoke their first turkey. Part 2 covers how to smoke a turkey with citrus stuffing and a citrus rub for a unique holiday feast!
Part 2 of 2
(Closed Captioning available on this video)
Part 1 – Citrus Brine Video
Citrus Brine ingredients
1 gallon water
1 cup salt
1/2 sugar
1 1/2 pickling spices
1 lime, quartered
1 lemon, quartered
1 tangerine, quartered
1 orange
Citrus rub ingredients
3 tbs Tajin seasoning
1 tbs dried orange peel
1 tsp dried sage
1 tsp salt
1 tsp coarse black pepper
Video Transcript:
Presenter:
Today it’s smoked citrus turkey on the Cooking Everything Outdoors show.
Gary House with the outdoor cook Cooking Everything Outdoors show, I hope you try this at home.
So, what is smoked citrus turkey?
Something I enjoy, something that I put together…no clue if it’s original or not, I haven’t done the research for that, but I find it refreshing.
Quite often we have heavily saged-basted or buttered-basted turkeys, very common, very used to that.
What I’ve done with this is I have created a profile that is citrusy, and clovey and sagy all at the same time.
So really packs a unique profile to this turkey that I think you’ll enjoy.
I certainly enjoy it.
And the video before this which is the brining one, you saw high brining.
I use citrus-based brine.
I did brine that for almost 10 hours.
So I went a little bit longer than I had planned, but it’s still…I think it’s going to be a fantastic.
I’m using a 10 pound turkey.
And now we just need to get the stuffing together and get it going.
So taken my turkey out of the brine, washed it off completely.
If you don’t do that, you’re going to get a lot of salty residue.
So I’ve washed it completely, padded it dry.
And now we want to start preparing it.
I want to take some nice olive oil.
And I am going to just oil the carcass.
And this is really just going to do really two things.
It’s going to act as a binder.
And it’s going to crisp up that skin.
So don’t be afraid to get in there and just give everything a good rub down wings, the legs.
Once you got that, you want to add your rub.
Now, my particular rub is the one that I’ve made up.
And I’m using this.
And I believe it’s pronounced tajin or tajine and it is a clasico seasoning but it’s citrus baste.
So what I have here is 3 tablespoons of tajin.
1 tablespoon of orange peel.
And 1 teaspoon dried sage.
A teaspoon of salt.
And a teaspoon of pepper.
That’s fresh coarse ground black pepper.
And we’re going to flavor this up and get a nice coating on it.
I’m going to save about a 1/4 of this for the inside cavity.
And just take that leftover there and throw it in there.
Okay?
Now, let’s start putting our stuffing together.
It’s not something we’re going to eat, it just add aroma and flavor to this.
So I have a small sachet of…well, it’s actually a large sachet of fresh sage that I want to stuff in there.
Probably we’ll take a lemon, a tangerine and a lime.
And basically, with these I am just going to slice them.
I have washed them.
And I’m going to quarter them up.
Also I’m going to take some cloves.
Now these are whole cloves.
I won’t need that much.
I probably have may be 10 here.
And then I’m just going to add these to the cavity in there.
Really just the same thing.
Get lemon, orange, tangerine, and pack it in there.
Alright.
So let’s truss up these legs.
And I am not a trussing expert by any stretch of the imagination.
Tied off a couple of times.
Only reason I want to do this is during the cooking process I don’t want any of my goodness popping out there.
So, how we’re going to go about this?
I’m using the Camp Chef’s Smoked Vault.
This is the 18 inch version.
And it is going to be very, very simple setup with this.
I have my smoking chips.
Now, what I’m to be using, our apple smoking chips.
I have some in there already.
You can soak these if you want.
Soak them in an apple juice or a peach juice or something citrusy, if you will.
You can soak it in beer, whatever you want to do.
I’m going in dry on this.
That’s just the way I like to do it.
I have a water tray right here.
I’m going to fill that up with water.
And then I have a drip tray that I’m going to be putting right like so.
And then my turkey is going to go in there.
So first thing we’re going to do is add our water.
Okay, so fire this up.
Get that going.
Turn that down to medium to start with.
Once I have the flame going, I’m going to turn and open up the bottle all the way.
My drip pan in place.
And now I want to put my turkey on it.
But before that I’m going to give it a good coating of cooking oil or spray to help prevent the turkey from sticking because I’m putting that turkey bare butt right on that rack.
Good coating in non-stick spray.
I want to take my turkey in my smoker.
That little 10 pound turkey fits just perfectly.
So at this point I need to regulate the temperature.
Now, this is a 10 pound turkey and you can pretty much go with the rule of thumb of 30 to 40 minutes per pound when you’re smoking.
Now that’s at 225-250 around that range.
I’m going to do 2-step smoking on this.
And what I mean is, is I’m going to drop this down as low to 225 as I can for the first few hours because at lower temperatures the smoke is able to saturate the meat better.
So I want a real nice smoke ring on my turkey.
And then towards the end I’m going to turn it up so I can crisp up that skin.
So it can get a double whammy on that.
These chips are already starting to smoke.
So I want to turn my temp down.
I want to close it up and start monitoring my temperature.
Our citrus stuffed turkey has been smoking for about two and half hours now.
I did a quick check on the temperature with an instant-read thermometer and I’m at about 135.
So I’m pretty comfortable saying that I want to stop just my general smoking right now and I want to turn up the heat.
So I kicked it up.
I’m at 275 right now.
So I went from 225 to 275, might even creep up towards 300 to start crisping up that skin.
But I really wanted you to take a peek at this real quick because it is just a thing of beauty.
I hope you can see that in there, but that turkey is just golden brown, beautiful smoked.
Just coming along absolutely phenomenally.
We’re done.
Actually let it cool down for a bit.
Oh yeah.
Okay, let’s see how we did it.
It’s nice and tender there.
Look at that.
Little moisture in there.
If you can see that or not, don’t tell anybody I’m going to take a bite of this.
Tender and delicious and moist.
There you have it.
There is my smoked citrus turkey.
Try it if you want something a little bit different for this Thanksgiving or this Christmas holiday time period, whatever you celebrate.
And you might just find yourself hooked on this whole concept of citrus flavored turkey.
Hey, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Cooking Everything Outdoors show.
But without my sponsors, none of this would be possible, Camp Chef and www.OutdoorCooking.com and Island Grillstone at www.IslandGrillstone.com.
They make all of this possible.
And they are great companies.
They’ve got super good product and really good customer service.
So please take a minute and go visit him.
Say thank you and buy something.
If you want to find out more about me, you can visit me on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes and of course, www.Cooking-Outdoors.com where I’m always cooking up something new.
This is Gary House.
And I’ll see you when I see you.
