Hey ho, All! Just found this site! Ive been grilling/hot smoking the birds for Thanksgiving, Christmas and other festivities for about 20 years. I learned from my Dad. He started when he got his first Weber back in 1965. He always used to say that the best use of the Weber instructions were to light your first fire! HereÂs what he taught me: Soak a 5 pound bag of hardwood chips (hickory, cherry, apple, alder) in water overnight. On the day of the cooking, start with a CLEAN BBQ. No ash residue. Clean grill. Load the grill with a 10 pound bag of good charcoal. Get it lit and wait until the coals are grayed out around the perimeters and the smell of any starter is long gone. Push the coals to two sides, leaving a space in the middle. Put a heavy duty aluminum foil drip pan in the middle under where the bird will sit. This will catch the drips. TheyÂll be way too burned for dripping gravy. The object of the pan is to reduce the clean up and flare up potential. Put two decent handfuls of drained chips on the coals; one handful on each side. Brush the grill with peanut oil and pop it on the BBQ. Put the bird breast DOWN on the grill. Yes, breast down. You wonÂt touch the bird again until you take it off the grill. The higher fat content in the thighs and back will help baste the breast and make it much juicier. Tip: if you use one of those metal turkey lifting racks, itÂll be WAY easier to remove the bird later! Stick a meat thermometer in the thigh toward the bird. Make sure you donÂt touch any bone. I use two thermometers; one on each side. YouÂre going to be looking for an internal temp of about 180ºF. Put the lid on and LEAVE IT ALONE!!!! Open all the vents wide to allow for good air circulation and maximum heat. Do NOT open the lid for at least one hour. YouÂll drop the heat level in the ÂQ, lengthen the cooking time and dry out the air around the bird making for a drier bird. After one hour, load more chips on the coals. YouÂll notice that the skin looks really black. DonÂt worry, itÂs not burned, itÂs really heavily smoked. Put the lid back on and walk away. Resist the temptation to look! You may need to put more coals on each side if the fire has burned really hot and the coals are turning to ash piles. About every 15 minutes after the first hour, put on more chips. The bird should take about 9 minutes for each pound of bird. A 12 pound bird should take about an hour and three quarters to cook while a twenty pounder should run about 3 hours or less. Take the bird off the ÂQ and left it sit quietly for at last 15 minutes, preferably about half an hour. This will allow the juices to stabilize and give them some chance of remaining in the meat instead of pouring out on the carving plate. The meat will be juicer and pinker than birds done in the oven. The meat will have a delicate smoked flavor. The stuffing recipe that my mother passed down to my wife is a sausage and sage recipe that is cooked before it goes in the bird. I have heard from a number of sources that you should never stuff a bird being BBQÂd. My family has been doing just this for over 40 years with no ill effects. I think that there are two reasons for this: 1) the stuffing is cooked before going into the bird; and. 2) the temperatures at which the bird is cooked far exceeds anything your oven could muster. Dad passed away fifteen years ago, by his "Bird ÂQing Lore" lives on. Cheers, all! Have a great Thanksgiving! Ian Wilson

No bag vote here. No you are not an idiot, just a woman on a mission seeking info. No you don't need a rack if you use the bag method. Just put the bag in the roasting pan. I've never used the bag method. I've seen other roasts (beef) done in a bag, just haven't ever seen a turkey. If you like the skin to brown, I don't think you can't get that when using a bag. The bag will give you a moist turkey, just not a brown one. DH likes to see brown skin when I roast a chicken or turkey. If you don't do the big presentation of the whole turkey at the table all dressed like MS was in the kitchen, then I say go for it. Any event, hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Last night was my experiment. I fully preheated the oven to 500 deg. I prepared my chicken - rinse, dry, salt, pepper, into a #7 Griswold pan - and let it sit at room temp for a good half hour while the oven preheated. Put it in the oven on the second lowest rack. That's all there is to it, right? When the breast was a beautiful golden brown I checked the temp. The breast was already at 180. I poked at the thighs a bit and found areas as cool as 140. Clearly it needed more time in the oven despite the breast already being overcooked. After another fifteen minutes or so (I wasn't paying attention to the clock during any of this) the thighs were just barely approaching 165 so I pulled it out of the oven. Immediately after setting it on my counter I noticed that while the top of the drumsticks were nice and brown like the breast, the majority was a flabby pale beige. Same for the entire thighs and most of the wings. While carving the chicken I took a bite of the breast. Predictably it was dry, but my wife seemed to enjoy it nonetheless. I chose to eat the dark meat and sadly peeled off the skin. It was flavorful and extremely juicy if somewhat undercooked for my taste. In hindsight I know I made one mistake. I put the chicken in head first, whereas the instructions make a point of saying legs should face the back. Given this, I will give the method another shot even though being in the back didn't help the wings out any. On a positive note, I'm convinced of the small-pan tip. The oven didn't smoke at all, and the splatters on the wall were minimal. Who'da thunk, "place in pan and throw in oven" could yield such varied results.

I often roast two small chickens in a pan just big enough for them and occasionally a wing will touch the sides of the pan. No rack. I put just a small smear of oil in the bottom of the roasting pan so that the birds do not stick. After 15 minutes I give the pan a good shake to make sure that they are not sticking. If I'm roasting a turkey I might do that once more after a half hour. Otherwise I just leave them be to roast. I never add veggies or liquid to the pan. Ann