Why should you cook a turkey outside on Thanksgiving?

A lot of spacious suburban kitchens have a double oven these days, but many don’t. Smoking or grilling the bird outside solves many logistical problems. This is why you want to be outside with your bird and out of the way.

But the main reason it’s easier to transport turkeys abroad these days is technological. Hidden beneath the black box of the grill cover, roasting a turkey was a guessing game. But these days, smart grilling technology and a lot of excellent features Wireless meat thermometers It has made it easy to grill a turkey to temperature without a lot of hassle.

With three probes constantly on the hopper, you can monitor the cooking temperature to reach the target temperature of 175 degrees Fahrenheit for dark meat, and 165 degrees Fahrenheit for white meat. No more black box! You can follow along on your dang phone.

I recently had a good experience with the new four-sensor WiFi with Bluetooth Chef IQ Sense ($160)which records accurate temperatures even taking evaporation into account. My colleague Martin Cizmar prefers the Traeger Meater Pro ($349 on Amazon for a quad-probe model). Each allows you to track the ambient temperature and meat temperature on your phone, without lifting the grill.

Cizmar roasted a turkey on his Big Green Egg this year, an experience he described as “a lot of fun.” He cooked with charcoal, not wood, to get a grilled feel. He wasn’t trying to smoke it. But it ended up with a very slight smoky tinge from the turkey drippings dripping onto the coals, a blessed form of meat-on-meat feedback that you don’t get from the oven.

This is the way.

“This is definitely how I would cook on Thanksgiving Day if I were making Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m not doing it because I would be working to bring the best Black Friday deals to our readers,” he writes.

Smoked turkey tastes much better

Photo: Matthew Corvage

But for me, I’m a team smoker. Holiday or not, turkey has a bad reputation as the most boring meat. We’ve probably all just developed low standards for it. It’s a large, irregular bird, and we’re used to it being cooked slowly and unevenly, without a lot of seasoning, and tasting dry.