Smoking a turkey is not difficult as long as you know a couple of little tricks.

Food safety is very important when handling poultry (as it is with any meat).

You want your bird to spend as little time as possible in the temperature “red-zone”, the area between 40 and 160 degrees. For that reason, hold back on buying the 18 or 20 pound turkey. If you need that much bird, just buy two smaller ones.

Start with a self-basting turkey around 11-15 pounds.

Thaw the turkey according to the package instructions.
Remove all the innards they put in that little pouch inside the body cavity.
Trim away any extra skin flaps or fat (usualy some around the tail area).
Rinse the turkey inside and out and pat dry with paper towels.

Next part is optional, but it works great for me!
Make a couple of small slices on the top of each breast and the top of each thigh.
Put butter (or herb butter) inside the cuts between the meat and the skin. This will help keep the turkey moist.
Rub a light coating of vegetable oil (or butter) all over the outside of the turkey, and season with your favorite rub.
I usually use a spinoff of the Wild Willy’s Wonderful Rub with a few extra added spices. (My secret).

Time to put your turkey on the smoker.
If you are like me and use a Weber Smokey Mountain or similar water smoker, you will not be adding water to your water pan.
Foil your water pan to collect any drippings you wish to use for gravy.
Bring your smoker up to temperature, around 300 degrees.
Put the Turkey on the smoker and open all the bottom vents. Leave the top vents wide open.
Your smoker, if like mine, will likely climb to around 300 to 325. Perfectly fine for this cook.

This pic is after about an hour on the smoker.

Rotate the turkey halfway through the cooking time for even cooking if necessary.

At this point, I usually lay some foil over the breasts to keep them from drying out. It isn’t necessary, but I’ve never had a bad turkey!

Cook the turkey until it’s done. Cooking time will likely be around 3 hours.
Breast temperatures should be 160-165°
Thigh temperatures should be 170-175°

Remove the turkey from the smoker and let rest for for 20 to 30 minutes.
You should not put foil over it during the rest period, as this will make the skin soggy instead of the desired crispy skin.

Enjoy your fantastic Turkey!

One of the most important things to remember is that to create excellent bbq, you need to be able to maintain a constant temperature around 225 degrees for long periods of time. You can do this in a $20,000 trailer mounted, custom-painted bbq rig, or you could do it in $40 Brinkman off the shelf. The choice is yours to make. I’ll give you my opinions based on experience and observation, and hope it’s enough to help you form a solid decision.

Things to consider:

Type of bbq pit: Wood, Charcoal, Propane, Electric

Shape of bbq pit: Horizontal, Vertical

Quality of workmanship: Thickness of metal, how well it seals, proper airflow

Price: Budget, Moderate Expensive.

Type of Pit:

Before you can really begin to look for a pit, you need to know what you are looking for. For starters, what kind of fuel will you burn. Why does it matter?

Wood Burning Smokers: ”Wood Burners” are what most people think of when they think of bbq smokers. Many of the large cylindrical shaped bbq pits on trailers burn exclusively wood. While these could be considered the “cadillacs” of bbq pits, there are much more cost effective means for the home bbq cook.

Pros: Man – Wood – Fire Like Mother Nature intended.

Cons: Can be a little more difficult to master than charcoal. Uneven sizes of the log,    moisture content, sap, etc can effect the amount of heat put out by wood.

Charcoal Smokers: Charocal smokers come in all styles. They burn either lump or briquette charcoal. One of the greatest benefits of charcoal smokers is that you get consistent heat every time. Wood chunks can are added to the charcoal to produce smoke giving you much the same flavors you will get from an all wood-burning smoker. Since all pieces of fuel are the same size, they all burn at the same rate. This makes the learning curve on a new smoker much shorter.

Propane: Propane smokers are usually vertical cabinet style smokers. Essentially a steel cabinet with a propane burner in the bottom. There will be a steel container of some sort to hold wood chips or chunks to produce smoke to flavor the food. Propane bbq’s are great for a beginner or someone who doesn’t want to put too much commitment into bbq. Just the temperature where you want it, and you won’t need to adjust the fire until its done. Very low maintenance during the cook time.

The only real con to propane smokers is that you traditionally will not get a “smoke ring” with gas. Smoke rings are a chemical reaction between the smoke produced by burning wood and the meat, that turns the top 1/8″ or so of the meat a pinkish color. It doesn’t affect flavor, but a good smoke ring is equivalent to bragging rights in the bbq community.

Electric: My first smoker was a Cookshack electric smoker. It was basically an insualted steel cabinet with an electric burner and basket for chunks of wood on the bottom. Bradley makes a similar model, but uses smoke disks to create the smoke. Electric Smokers tend to seal up really tight and hold heat very consistently. They create incredibly tender brisket, ribs and pork. However, the one drawback I found, was they tend to seal up a little too tight. It creates a moist bbq’ng environment that affects the “bark” or the crust that forms on the outside of good bbq. A good bark is another one of those things that isn’t necessary, but definitely enhances the meat and provides some serious bragging rights.

Conclusion: All that being said, what you want depends on you. If you live in an urban environment, I’d strongly suggest either propane or electric. They produce less smoke and easier to maintin.

If you like to take your time with your projects, really get to understand the bbq process and just like to futz with things, then Charcoal or Wood will help get that fix.

Cooking a pulled pork is, in my opinion, the easiest of the meats to bbq and get right. All it takes, as with most bbq is time and temperature.

A good pulled pork will also give you the most bang for the buck. It’s inexpensive, hard to screw up, and it always gets garners a load of praise by the lucky folks partaking in your smoky hobby.

Start with the meat. Pork Shoulder is often called pork butt. This is because it’s at the butt of the shoulder joint. It comes from nowhere near the pig butt!

For this cook, you can use bone-in or boneless but. You can buy the picnic ham which is much larger piece of meat. Same rulese still apply. Slow and low!

First, open the pork shoulder from it’s packaging and rinse well under cool water. Rinsing isn’t necessary, but it can’t hurt. You never know what the meat came in contact with between the butcher and the package.

Next you want to apply a rub of your choice. Again, the Wild Willy rub on my recipe page works very well. If you like, you can apply yellow mustard all over the shoulder before rubbing. This is a common practice and does not impart any mustard flavor to the cook. It only serves to help hold the rub in place. I’ve done many bbq shoulders both way, and can’t tell a difference.

Put the rubbed shoulder in a container or plastic bag and refrigerate until ready to place on the smoker. I like to apply rub up to 24 hours ahead of time.

To inject or not to inject. The choice is yours. Just before putting on the smoker, I like to inject my shoulder with any number of liquids. Most often, I use a mix of apple juice and my bbq rub. Inject all over the shoulder, moving the needle around in each hole you make. I’ll post a video of this later on.

When your smoker is preheated and you’ve got your thin line of smoke rising from the top, it’s time to put the shoulder on.

Put the meat on whatever rack you desire and put a thermometer probe near the meat if you have one. NOTE: The thermometers that come mounted on budget smokers are often inexpensive and not very accurate. Do yourself a favor and pick up a digital thermomter.

Get your smoker dialed in to the magic number, 225, and wait. And wait. And wait. This is going to be a long cook. On average, cook time for pork and beef is around 1.5 hours per pound. So an 8 pound pork shoulder should fall somewhere in the range of 12 hours. Now the fun part. Don’t buy any of it! Yes, it SHOULD average somewhere in that range, but the one primary rule of bbq is this. Write it down. Stamp it on your forehead. Tell your wife. Whatever you gotta do to keep it in your mind.

BBQ IS DONE WHEN IT’S DONE. One more time.

BBQ IS DONE WHEN IT’S DONE.

There is little more you need to know than that. You can’t rush it. You can’t crank the heat up. You can just wait and be rewarded for your patience.

That being said, you can after 4 or 5 hours or more, wrap your shoulder in foil and put back on the smoker. This will actually speed the cook time a little and ensure it doesn’t dry out. The drawback to foiling shoulder is that you won’t have the same tasty “bark” as you would by not foiling at all. Bark is the crusty outer “shell” that forms after being on the smoker for hours on end. And it’s damn good eatin’.

So, now it’s 12 to 15 hours later and your shoulder is looking good. Next question is, do you want to Pull it, or Slice it. Or you can chop it.

Pulled pork is cooked to an internal temperature anywhere between 195 and 215 degrees. Sliced pork is cooked to an internal temperature of about 185 degrees.

When your shoulder is to the desired temperature, remove it from the smoker and wrap in foil for at least 15 to 20 minutes. The juices of the meat need time to redistribute throughout the shoulder.

Now it’s time to pull or slice. If pulling, just grab a couple forks, your fingers, or any other instrument capable of pulling the meat apart. Then have at it. Just start pulling it apart until you get to the size pieces you want. The choice is yours.

If slicing, well.. pick up your knife and get to cutting.

Enjoy that wonderful pork awesomeness.