Growing up, my family always had big Thanksgiving dinners with family and friends crowded around a long chain of card tables. We'd cook one turkey in the oven, and then smoke another in the backyard. I picked up a sale turkey last week and tried it for the first time myself, using a box smoker (pictured) I picked up at Home Depot for $60. Slow smoking works adds so much flavor yet doesn't dry out the turkey -- no brining or elaborate herbs and spices needed!
I used kiawe wood for my smoke and it worked well, but conventional wisdom is to use mild fruit wood like apple or cherry. Use whatever you can get your hands on, including bags of pre-chipped hickory or mesquite from City Mill.
Smoked Turkey
Special equipment: a smoker
- wood chips
- 12-15 lb turkey, thawed
- olive oil
First, plan ahead. It takes 2-3 days to thaw a frozen turkey in the refrigerator, or 6-8 hours in cold water. After the turkey is thawed, pat it dry with paper towels and then let it rest in the fridge for another 3-4 hours to overnight. This dries the skin out so that the smoke adheres better. On top of all this, you should plan 30 minutes per pound for cooking. A 12 lb. turkey smokes for six hours! Adding it all up we get 3 days in the fridge + overnight drying + six hours to cook: about three and a half days!
Early on Thanksgiving Day, soak your wood chips in a bucket of water for about an hour before you start cooking. Wet wood == more smoke.
Light your coals. In your smoker, you ideally want your coals on the lowest level. Above that, I have a rack with a metal bowl of water to help regulate the temperature. The water isn't required, but it helps prevent burning and keeps the turkey moist. (If your setup can't accommodate a water bowl, push all the coals to the outer edges so they aren't right under the turkey.) At the top of your smoker, you want a wire rack for the turkey itself.
When the top coals are showing white ash around the edges, rub down the turkey with olive oil and set it on the rack. Toss a handful of wood chips on the coals and close up the smoker. Your goal is to keep the temp around 230 degrees. Open the vents or add charcoal to increase the temp. Add wet wood chips or close vents to decrease the temp.
Add wood chips whenever the smoke wanes during the first two hours. After that point, you don't need to worry about smoke. Too much smoke is overpowering. Instead, worry about keeping the temperature up by adding fresh charcoal as needed.
The turkey is done when an instant read thermometer reads 165 degrees when inserted deep into the thigh. DON'T OVERCOOK IT. Overcooking dries the turkey out. Nobody wants turkey jerky for Thanksgiving. Remove that bird from the smoker and let it rest for 30 minutes before carving. Enjoy!
Related posts:
→ Oven Kālua Turkey, if you're in the mood for melt-in-your-mouth
→ Top Ten Reasons Thanksgiving is Better in Hawaii
Cooking relaxes me.
The meditative rhythm of the kitchen slowly rolls back the chaos of work. Tweak the seasonings, sear a little hotter this time, maybe spill a little on the floor. The reward is in the smiles as people eat. I begin to unwind.
Yet there are days when even cooking sounds like too much work. You know the ones? Computer crashes, unreasonable people, impossible deadlines and nothing goes right. At the end of it all I want to collapse. It's on those days that I reach for my easiest dinner recipes. Unagi donburi, literally "eel rice bowl," can be prepped in the time it takes to cook up a pot of rice and it requires only common items from a Japanese pantry (soy sauce, dashi, mirin, rice), plus prepackaged eel.
Unagi kabayaki (grilled eel in a sweet sauce) is generally sold frozen in Japanese groceries. I picked up an 8 oz. package for $5 at Marukai and held it in the freezer until I needed a quick and easy meal. It kinda defeats the purpose if you have run out shopping for unagi in order to make "quick" and "easy," so buy a package in advance and just hold onto it.
Traditional unagi donburi consists simply of eel over rice. I like to add egg and scallions to turn this into a one bowl meal. Other variations could add shiitake mushrooms or bamboo root. My son likes green peas in his. Whatever floats your boat -- the whole point of this meal is to restore you.
Unagi Donburi with Egg
Serves 2-3
- cooked rice
- 3/4 c. water
- 2 T. mirin
- 1/4 c. soy sauce
- 2 t. dried dashi soup base
- 1 T. sugar
- 3 scallions, roughly chopped
- 8 oz. package unagi kabayaki
- 2 eggs, very lightly scrambled
- shichimi tōgarashi (optional)
Start your rice cooking. Wait a few minutes, because you don't want to finish the eel before your rice is ready. Now would be a good time to set the table, or depending on how bad the day was, crack open a cold one.
Once the rice is well on its way, heat the water, mirin, soy sauce, dashi, sugar and scallions to a simmer in a small skillet. Any optional variations like mushrooms, bamboo or peas should also be simmered with the stock to ensure they have enough cooking time.
Once the stock begins to boil, add the unagi. Cook 30 seconds, then pour eggs over top and cover with a lid. Cook one minute then serve immediately over rice in large, deep bowls. If there's any sauce left, drizzle that over top. Add a dash of shichimi tōgarashi for heat.
Then you can put your feet up, knowing that even the worst of days can't keep you from eating well.
The rise tonight of Nāhuihuiamakaliʻ (known in English as the constellation Pleiades) marks the beginning of the Makahiki in Hawaii, a four month celebration of the harvest, and a time of renewal and rest. Wars were forbidden to allow chiefs to freely move around the islands collecting tribute to Lono, the god of the harvest, and to allow the people to come together for feasts and sports. In modern times, the arrival of Makahiki is greeted with small ceremonies and reenactments around the island that attempt to preserve and perpetuate a small piece of the past for future generations.
Happy Makahiki!
Related posts:
- You can learn more about Makahiki from my post a couple years ago.
November 16-22, 2009
"The second annual Restaurant Week Hawaii will be a seven day celebration of the cuisine scene in Hawaii. From fine dining to fast-food, participating restaurants will feature special menu items, promotions and discounts. Diners can sample Hawaii's newest restaurants, dine at old favorites and taste a variety of exceptional dishes now being prepared by Hawaii's chefs using locally grown produce. Restaurant Week is a reminder that Hawaii is a culinary destination with top chefs, farm to table dining, wonderful wine and a lot more to discover and explore.
"A portion of the proceeds from Restaurant Week Hawaii will support the Culinary Institute of the Pacific at Diamond Head."
Having grown up on flavorless cardboard tomatoes from chain supermarkets, the switch to locally grown tomatoes was glorious. No big surprise, but tomatoes suck when they're picked early, preserved with chemicals then shipped several thousand miles. Local tomatoes, picked ripe, are like a completely different fruit.
You can't get any more local your own front yard. We grew the Green Zebra tomatoes pictured above on a rocky cliff face below our driveway, a mere 20 feet from the front door, alongside collard greens, Manoa lettuce, scallions, various herbs, eggplants, jalapeno peppers, Okinawan sweet potatoes, radishes, beets, and a pathetic little coffee bush.
We started our garden last year when funds got tight and food prices soared. Much like the victory gardens of World War II, our little patch was a way to make sure we could continue to eat well even if we reached a point where we couldn't afford all the produce we'd like. I'm happy to say it never got that dire, and I'm also happy to realize that--for the first time ever--the cost savings of eating our own produce outstripped the costs of growing it. Growing our own vegetables is delicious and economical.
We'll plant another garden next year. This time around, it won't be because we're cheap, but because we want real tomatoes again.
