The turkey is a tyrant. It is the centerpiece of American Thanksgiving, but it is also the great and unforgiving monopolizer of the oven. For a feast where the sides—stuffing! yams! baked mac! veggies with maple syrup on them!—are arguably the true and most beloved main event, the turkey often gets in the way.
I have made multiple Thanksgiving feasts already this year while testing Thanksgiving delivery meal kits—meals complete with multitudes of sides and dessert. One problem remained constant: oven space. With a turkey in your oven for hours at a time, plotting the logistics of cooking five sides started to feel like a spreadsheet endeavor to rival corporate forensic accounting.
By the time I planned out my second big turkey feast—a complicated filing system of recipe cards, all devoted to avoiding the multi-hour stay of the turkey in the oven—I realized that I should have paid better attention to my father over the years.
If I had, I’d have known that the best place for a holiday meat is always outside, on a grill or a smoker.
Courtesy of Weber
My father’s stalwart belief—never stated out loud but clear to all observers—was that the best place to be when you have 23 people in your house is on the back patio. So while I was growing up, that’s often where he was: outside, cooking meat. It’s a perfectly useful activity that provides perfect deniability—a reason to leave the house that can’t be questioned.
After all, our family is big. Farm-family Catholic and Lutheran big. Big is busy. And big is loud, especially by the time the third bottle of wine is uncorked. If you needed him, Dad was on the deck cooking a pork roast, a pork loin, whatever it took. One by one, the uncles would follow. They’d go out for a cigarette, then stay to “help” the same way old guys help at a construction site, by watching, and jawing a little.
But the one thing we never cooked on the grill was turkey. This was my mother’s province, and it stayed inside. But after prepping a couple of feasts myself this year—always organized around the Problem of the Turkey—I’m now convinced.
The only real way to do turkey at Thanksgiving is outside. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Turkey Day should join the Fourth of July as one of America’s great grill holidays. Rain notwithstanding, crisp fall temperatures are better for grilling than summer. New smart grill technology and wireless meat thermometers make it all a whole lot easier.
And so this month, I smoked up a little 10-pound turkey alongside WIRED writer Brad Bourque. Meanwhile Reviews team director Martin Cizmar grill-roasted a whole turkey according to a recipe from our sister publication Bon Appetit, and the results are clear. Turkey is simply better on a grill or a smoker.
Here’s why, and also how to get it done. And maybe also why there’s no good reason to use a deep fryer.
Smart Grills and Wireless Thermometers Make Outdoor Turkey Easy
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
I know, I know, a roasted turkey is tradition—though probably not quite as old a tradition as you think. Most turkey recipes call for slow-roasting the bird for hours in an oven, at a low heat that’s not overly amenable to cooking other dishes alongside it.
Plenty of vast exurban kitchens sport a double oven these days, but plenty more kitchens do not. Smoking or grill-roasting the bird outside solves a lot of logistical problems. So that’s the motive for why you’d want to be outside with your bird, and out of the way.
But the main reason it’s easy to move the turkey outdoors these days is technological. Grill-roasting a turkey used to be a guessing game, hidden underneath the black box of your grill lid. But these days, smart grilling technology and a whole lot of excellent wireless meat thermometers have made it easy to grill turkey to temp without much trouble.
With three probes constantly on the case, you’re able to monitor the cooking temp to reach the target temp of 175 degrees Fahrenheit for dark meat, and 165 degrees for white meat. No more black box! You can follow along on your dang phone.
Lately, I’ve been having a good experience with the new four-probe WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled Chef IQ Sense ($160), which registers accurate temps even with evaporation taken into account. My colleague Martin Cizmar prefers the Traeger Meater Pro ($349 on Amazon for a four-probe model). Each lets you track your ambient and meat temp on your phone, without lifting your grill.
Cizmar grill-roasted a turkey on his Big Green Egg this year, an experience he described as “extremely pleasant.” He cooked with charcoal, no wood, to get roasty character. He wasn’t trying to smoke it. But he still ended up with a very light smoky tinge from the turkey drippings falling down into the charcoal, a blessed form of meat-on-meat feedback you don’t get from an oven.
This is the way.
“This is definitely how I would cook it on Thanksgiving Day if I were making a Thanksgiving dinner,” he writes, “which I’m not because I will be working to bring our readers the best Black Friday deals.”
Smoked Turkey Tastes a Lot Better
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
But as for me, I’m team smoke. Holiday or no holiday, turkey has a bad rap as the most boring of meats. Possibly, we’ve all just developed low standards for it. It’s a big, irregular bird—and we’ve become accustomed to cooking it slowly and unevenly, without a lot of seasoning, and tasting it dry.
But go to East Texas, and you’ll find that turkey isn’t boring at all. It’s full of hickory smoke, and dry-brined with spice rub. It is delicious. WIRED grill reviewer Scott Gilbertson maintains that the only good turkey is a smoked turkey leg. I also like a whole smoked whole turkey; and frankly you can get great character and even cook out of a brined, rubbed breast.
With the help of WIRED contributing reviewer Brad Bourque, I ran a test run smoking a small 10-pound turkey on the new Recteq Flagship 1600 pellet smoker and grill ($1,480) that Bourque is busy testing. I dry-brined it up for a day beforehand, mixing an herb-garlic and lemon-pepper rub with extra thyme and a bit of brown sugar to crisp the skin during the cook.
In early testing, the Recteq is showing very even heat across the width of the grill when cooking with hickory-cherry blend pellets, better even than the top-line Traeger Woodridge Pro pellet grill, so Bourque laid out the turkey in the middle of the grill at 225 to start—but notched it up to 275 for the back end of the cook to aim for crispy skin. Next time around, this may go above 300 for better crispiness.
In retrospect, we would have also used the Chef IQ probes over Recteqs for better readings on each part of the turkey. The Recteq probes provide excellent data but are a little big to use for poultry. And we might have tried a spatchcock for a more even cook.
But these small shortcomings didn’t matter much. The smoke flavor was excellent, deep, and rich. The difference between roasted and smoked turkey is a bit like the difference between stereo and mono sound: Turkey loves to take on other flavors if you let it, and the smoke also harmonizes with turkey’s ever-so-slight gaminess.
I know a smoked turkey isn’t traditional for a holiday forged mostly in New England. But what I will say is that among three turkeys I’ve cooked this season before Thanksgiving, the one cooked on the smoker had by far the best flavor of any turkey I expect to make this year.
Deep Frying Turkey Is Still Kinda Dumb
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The one thing we didn’t do outside with the turkey was deep-fry it. Every time I bring up grilling a turkey outside, this is what people suggest. And I can see the fascination. Fire! Hot oil! Feelings of excess! Promises of crispness, and maybe a little frisson of danger. After all, Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving without a news story about somebody burning down their $4 million house by trying to deep-fry a turkey in the garage. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, as well as fire departments all over the country, seems to delight in posting videos of turkeys causing explosions when dipped in hot oil.
It’s true that deep frying a turkey is unlikely to start a fire if you do it right. If you know how to measure the volume in advance by filling the oil with the turkey submerged, if you stay at least 10 feet away from your home, and pay good attention so the oil doesn’t overheat. And of course, if you fully thaw the turkey so the water trapped in still-frozen meat doesn’t superheat and explode.
But the fact that I used the word “explode” when describing a possible holiday meal is pretty much the point—as is the fact that FEMA feels the need to put out flyers about the dangers of deep-fried turkey. Multiple WIRED staffers remember watching in fear or horror as their partner or father deep-fried a turkey. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe said her mother used to tightly grip a fire extinguisher as the bird lowered into the oil. Each attests that the purported extra crispiness and flavor enhancement never quite materialized.
In the experience of WIRED reviewers, the results from deep frying a turkey don’t really bear out the risk or the hassle. But as for delicious smoked turkey? Grill-roasted turkey? Turkey in front of an open sky? Consider it the only real way to honor the wildness, independence, stubbornness, and intelligence that once made this native bird a would-be symbol of America—before, of course, we bred the poor thing into fat stupidity. Besides, backyard meats are the true American pastime. And grilled turkey should pretty much take over Thanksgiving.
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