After reading and viewing Larry "How bout them Redskins!" Wolfe's post on pulled turkey, I thought I'd give the low & slow a try. And by the way, didn't the Skins have a great game against the Eagles
??
Picked up a 12 lb 'fresh & natural' bird on Fri. It did say nothing added, but did state that there was up to 6% liquid retention...hmmm..Anyway, I went ahead and brined it for about 15 hrs. Rinsed and dried the skin off with paper towels and let it air dry in the fridge for another hour. Then chopped up some carrot, onion and celery. Tossed that with some commercial
turkey rub and stuffed the bird. Used olive oil on the skin and rubbed with above mentioned rub.
Lit the coals via the Minion Method, put the bird on and let the temps climb to about 250.
It took about 4 hrs for the breast to reach 160.
Tented the bird and worked on the gravy and asparagus as the homemade mashed potatoes were already done (you can't beat homemade mashed pots).
I had placed a pan under the bird to catch the drippings and got about 3/4 C of juice to make the gravy. I thought that wasn't very much, but when I pulled out the probe, quite a bit more came out. Once I removed a whole breast for slicing, quite a bit more juice came out and is visible in the bottom of the pan.
This bird had a plastic temp thingy in it, but when I pulled at 160, it was still in...I wonder if it would ever have popped out? Lesson: don't trust those things!
Sliced the breast for plating...
And served with mashed pots and asparagus. The creamy sauce on the asparagus was just some sour cream, butter, lemon juice and dash of white wine.
Overall it was a tasty bird. Probably a little drier than normal, but not bad at all. The gravy came out fantastic.
