Roast Christmas Turkey on the Big Green Egg

Cooking surfaces

Stainless steel grid
Plate Setter

BBQ Temperature

180°C

Main ingredient

Turkey

Cook Type

 

Roast

Cooking your Christmas Turkey on the Big Green Egg means you will have one of the best turkeys of your life. We all know the Egg is just amazing at keeping everything so moist and the Christmas turkey is no exception.

One of the other bonuses of cooking the turkey on the Egg is it frees up your oven for even more roast potatoes or yorkshire puddings.

There are many ways of cooking your turkey from a full on smoked turkey to this recipe, which is the closest to our traditional turkey. A smoked turkey may not to be everyone’s taste so I try and avoid them on an occasion such as Christmas, you don’t want half of your guests not enjoying the main. If you want to smoke a turkey, try it on a less auspicious occasion.

Make sure you serve your turkey will all of the trimmings including a lovely portion of stuffing. However, when cooking make sure you don’t fill the cavity of the turkey, it will slow down the cook of the breasts and could lead to the meat being undercooked. My favourite stuffing recipe is one from my mother-in-law, Mama’s Stuffing.

Bacon lattice turkey

Ingredients

Turkey Injection Liquid

  • 300ml chicken stock or broth
  • 250g unsalted butter (melted)
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • ½ teaspoon garlic powder
  • Salt & Pepper

Turkey

  • 6-7Kg Turkey
  • 15 rashers of bacon

Method

  1. Bring the turkey to room temperature.
  2. Add the butter, chicken stock, lemon juice and garlic powder to a small pan.  Warm until melted and combined.
  3. Use a meat injector to inject the turkey with the stock and butter mixture to about a depth of approx. 1 inch. The best way to do this is to squeeze the liquid into the turkey as you withdraw the injector. I recommend you wear an apron as there is a tendency for some of the liquid to squirt out of the turkey. Inject the meat with a spacing of about 2 inches, you’ll see the meat plump right up.
  4. Place your turkey onto a stainless steel rack or V-Rack with a drip pan below it.
  5. I like to weave a lattice of bacon and place this over the turkeys crown. This will protect the crown and also add a lovely saltiness to the skin.
  6. Grind some black pepper over the turkey.
  7. Preheat your Egg to 180°C and once up to temperature, place your turkey and drip pan into the Egg setup to cook indirectly (plate setter feet up with the stainless steel grid on top). When you shut the lid of your Egg make sure it clears the turkey. If this isn’t the case take out the stainless steel grid and place your drip pan onto a series of small aluminium foil balls placed on the plate setter. The purpose of these is to separate the drip pan from the surface of the plate setter to stop any juices boiling away.
  8. As you’ve added a big piece of meat to your Egg the temperature will drop initially. Don’t change the settings though, the temperature will recover.
  9. Use a wireless thermometer pushed into the thickest part of the meat to monitor the temperature of the turkey as it cooks. Alternatively, you can check it using a probe thermometer such as the Thermapen Mk4.
  10. A 6Kg turkey is going to take between 2.5 and 3 hours to cook. I suggest removing the bacon lattice about 30 mins before the end of the cook to brown the turkey’s skin.
  11. The turkey is cooked when the internal temperature reaches 74°C.
  12. Once cooked take the turkey out and rest it. I prefer to do this by wrapping it in foil and then placing into a cool box and covering with towels. This will keep the turkey hot for several hours. Alternatively, you can cover in foil and rest on your work surface for 30 minutes.
  13. Once rested you can carve the turkey.

Notes

Always take the breast off the turkey and carve across the grain as shown in the video below. This will make the turkey taste far more succulent as the grain of the meat is much shorter. It’s also a lot easier to carve the turkey this way.

Use the drippings in your roasting pan to make a gravy. I like to deglaze the pan using some nice wine and then add stock and gravy thickening to make a beautiful gravy.

 

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