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

Meat is done when the internal temperature gets to the level you want. Fast cooking (high oven temp) will achieve doneness quicker that slow cooking (low oven temp). Fast cooking will also result in a greater difference between external and internal doneness. The outside will be very well cooked by the time the inside is done. Slow cooking will result in more uniformity between outside and inside. I can't give you any rule for different cooking times. Just make your best guess for starters and use a thermometer. To offer an example, I like steak well charred on the outside but red inside. That is achieved with a hot fire. If you don't want medium rare turkey, it may be wise to keep the temperature lower. Jim

Thanksgiving is the only day we eat turkey. The rest of the time, give me a roast capon or a duck prepared almost any way at all. DH and I are just not turkey lovers. My niece makes a very fine brined and roasted turkey, but once a year is enough for us. We're sauce and gravy people. Stews, braises, casseroles - we love them. I do a fair amount of cooking and a lot of dining out, and we hold that a fine sauce is a work of art. Even though we eat a lot of steaks and roasts, a great sauce is always to be admired. There are too many bad ones around to not acknowledge when something is done correctly. One of our favorite restaurants does a great poached monkfish. This is the fish known as "the poor man's lobster" for both its taste and texture. It's a great little fish, with wonderful flavor. But nap it with Amoricaine sauce, and it rises to a whole 'nother level. This is a Bretonnese classic, and for good reason. Red wine and marrow Bordelaise on a rib-eye? Absolutely! Black truffle cream sauce on a filet? Yum! Mop that goodness up with a well made starch - roasted fingerling potatoes, barley risotto, fresh pasta, freshly baked bread rolls. Gravy and sauce was the way to extend meat to feed a lot of people. Most of the world still loves sauced dishes as treasured childhood memories. Like soup, they are warmth and comfort, soothing and homey. Chicken strips that are velveted and steamed with lop cheong sausage (classic Chinese technique) are stunningly tender, almost as soft as sous vide but we like the flavor and texture better. Perfect with a roasted garlic-oyster sauce gravy over lots of rice! Far better than stir-frying or roasting. As Charles Phan of The Slanted Door restaurant in SF points out in today's WSJournal, steaming is considered the ultimate test of a professional chef in Asia. Getting back to the NY Times' and Pepin's suggestions for steaming, one of the greatest dishes in Chinese cuisine is steamed sliced chicken breast with thin slices of Hunan ham. My mother introduced me to this dish (she took classes from one of the leading Chinese restaurateurs in San Francisco) and it still ranks with DH and me as one of the three finest poultry dishes we've had in our 45 yrs of dining. A glaze should always be light. Heavy-handedness is the mark of a bad cook. Peking Duck would not be the same without the glaze applied, for example.

Just got off the phone w/ my son who cooked his first turkey yesterday using your pre-salt/high heat techniques. He was so pleased with the results! He & his fiancee are living/working in Denmark and it was his first Thanksgiving away from the U.S. They decided to host a traditional TG meal on Sunday for some of their colleagues. Of the 8 diners, a real international mix, he was the only American. He said his only regret was that the others couldn't fully appreciate how great the turkey came out because they hadn't experienced previous years of dry or poorly cooked turkeys. Thought you'd be interested to know that your tips served our family well - both near and far!