Roast Turkey

A more conventionally roasted turkey

Although my first attempt at a big bird on the Kamado was a smoky slow cooked one, it was time to try roasting the bird at a higher temperature.

It was the week of Thanksgiving, and although our long standing tradition is to go to a Chinese seafood restaurant on the holiday, Lauren does enjoy cooking a turkey or two this time of year. Aside from the roast itself, she does a nice turkey pot pie, sandwiches, and soup with the leftovers.

This was also the first test of the lower brackets for the Kamado. These two rods are used to suspend a grill, drip pan or a pizza stone a few inches below where the main grill normally sits.

In the Turkey Adventure page, I show a rack made of aluminum tubing that I constructed before the Kamado made bracket became available. The big advantage of the new bracket is that it's made of stainless steel, and can stay in the cooker all the time (I don't think the aluminum would react well to high temperature cooking).

I put a 16" pizza stone on the lower bracket for a little extra support for the 14 lb. bird, and a bit of heat deflection.

I used a Spanek roaster sitting in a 16" deep dish pizza pan. The turkey was brined overnight (1 gallon of water, 1 cup salt, one cup sugar, and a few spices).

I placed the bird on the Spanek and poured some orange juice in the drip pan. Coated the bird with a mixture of olive oil, garlic, onion powder, paprika, salt and pepper. The giblets went into the bottom of the pan.

I cooked it at 450 degrees for 30 minutes, then dropped the temperature down to 350 degrees for 3 hours or so. I basted the bird every once in a while.

I finished it off at 550 for 10 minutes to further crisp up the skin

The results were very good... though I wound up putting the dark meat back on the cooker for a little while longer.

The bird was very moist, and most of the skin was nice and crispy. Brining is a good thing.

Oh, and once again, the giblets are a real treat. They were ready about 90 minutes into the cooking.