Smoking a 14 lb. Turkey - October 11, 2025

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 First time smoking a Turkey. A lot of ways to do it according to You Tube. There seems to be
the first rule is to use a water pan but don't put any water in it. It will hold back the temp
so you won't get it up to around 300F. Well, I can do that but have to do a couple of other
things first. Use a SS bowl on the bottom of the smoker just above the lower part and put
your water pan on top of that. It supposedly won't get the bird too rubbery with all of the
extra humidity when using it with water. You have to adjust the temp with the lower vents
almost closed and the upper vent wide open. I am sure I will have to adjust the upper vent
so don't walk away too much. Buy a cheese cloth to put over the bird for half of the cooking
time to stop it from getting too dark. Install the lower grate over the hot coals and then the
SS bowl and then the water pan over that. The water pan won't burn the drippings because
of the SS bowl is used as a heat buffer. Brining the turkey will be done already and you are
ready to smoke. It will take 3 hours to do, so be prepared to drink lots of beer. I am unsure
when to start smoking. We will eat at 5 pm and it will be starting to get dark but not totally
dark by then. The sunset time for Oct. 11 is 6:37 pm.


                         INSTRUCTIONS ARE IN YOUR SMOKING BINDER

I am going to start the smoking process at 11:30 and it was done around 4:30. So it was a 
5 hour smoke. It turned out good. I am still not hooked on smoked turkey though. It was
juicy and not dry. I used 1 lb. of butter and some Olive Oil to inject in it. The cheese 
cloth worked great. I poured some of the melted butter on the cheese cloth. I didn't really
need to remove it as it browned up good. Maybe next time give it a good hour to crisp up
if I want the skin to be more crispy. Easy to cook, just sit there for 5 hours and drink beer.
The temperature got to 165 F on hour 5, like near the end of hour 5. 1 F every 5 - 8 minutes.
I didn't think it would get there but it did. The smoker did get up to 280 F at one time if
you believe the WSM temp probe. It went slowly down the last hour but I still got to 
165F. One leg was quite dark even though it was covered with the cheese cloth.














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