Pre-Holiday Warm Up

Can you believe the holidays are already almost upon us? As we get into October, many of you are thinking about what you are going to cook for the holidays. Tradition dictates turkey during Thanksgiving and Prime Rib for Christmas but many people change things up with pork tenderloin or ham, etc.

                             

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I have always recommended if you have not smoked any holiday meats to "practice" first before you just jump in for the family and/or friends. I usually grab some of the super cheap turkeys that are sold the day after Thanksgiving from the previous year and throw them in the freezer to either smoke during the year or to test new recipes on. 

Trust me when I say smoking a turkey isn't NOT that hard and the results will often times rival oven roasted turkey. (My next blog will be all about how to smoke a turkey) You can even practice with a large chicken roaster if you don't have a turkey laying around. 

Some things you will need to think about are:

1. Will you wet brine your bird? If you do went brine, what is the easiest way to do this? (Hint, see below) 

2. Will you inject your bird? This adds so much flavor and enhances the moisture of the meat. 

3. Will you enhance the flavor of the meat with a dry rub? My personal opinion is this is a must. 

Let's talk about brining poultry.  First of all, what is it? Brine is usually a fancy word for salt water for the most part. 

Secondly, what does it do? Brining meat usually is all about adding moisture more so than it is flavor. In fact, you will usually rinse off most of the brine anyway. When meat, especially poultry, is subjected to heat the moisture in the meat will evaporate out as well as the cells will push out water during the cook. When the salt (sodium chloride) joins with the cells in the meat, it causes the cells to not let go of so much moisture during the cook. In other words, your meat stays more moist as long as it isn't over cooked.

So to recap, brine is water with salt and sometimes sugar and other spices that penetrate the meat when submerged in said brine helping keep the meat from getting dry if cooked to recommended temps. 

And lastly, how do you do it? Basically submerge your meat (in this case poultry) in the brine water mixture. The easiest way I have found to do this is with a Briner Bucket®. 

These buckets (they come in 8 qt or 22 qt sizes) allow you to submerge the meat without incident. You put your meat in, pour the brine in and "lock" the plate down to submerge the meat under the brine and place in the fridge for however long you want to brine. Some recipes call for hours of brining and others call for days. 

If the Briner Bucket® isn't your thing, then you can use large Ziploc® bags. The only thing with these I have found is they can leak sometimes causing a mess in your refrigerator. When I grew up in Michigan, we could use a food grade bucket and just place it in the garage as the temps were low enough (below 40 degrees) so the meat didn't spoil. Here in Colorado it could be 40 degrees at night and 70 during the day so that isn't a viable option unless you put the bucket in ice. 

Once your meat has brined, you rinse the brine off (otherwise your meat will be very salty) and then smoke the poultry. I will talk about smoking turkeys in my next blog. 

If you haven't tried brining meat, I urge you to give it a try. It does require some planning and a bit of patience before your cook but the outcome is so worth it! 

Dan M.

Colorado BBQ Outfitters