How to Smoke a Turkey

Discover how to properly smoke a turkey this holiday season.

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to gather with friends and family to celebrate everything you’re thankful for. And of course eat lots of great food! No Thanksgiving meal would be complete without a turkey.

There are plenty of ways to prepare the pinnacle turkey. You can roast it, fry it…or even smoke it. A smoker can help lock in flavor in a way that a fryer or roaster oven can’t.

If you’re thinking about smoking your turkey this year, get started with these tips from Blain’s Farm & Fleet and Weber.

1. Prepare the Turkey

First, you need to decide if you’ll use a fresh or frozen turkey. Either option is fine. But a 20-pound frozen one will take about four to five days to thaw in the fridge. That’s why we recommend you use a fresh turkey.

Take advantage of the smoker dome. The Weber smoker has a higher-sized dome lid than a traditional kettle grill, so you can fit a larger bird on the grate. Use Weber’s turkey clearance height guide to make sure your turkey will fit in the smoker:

Smoker Size	Upper Cooking Grate	Lower Cooking Grate
14.5″	7.5″	5.5″
18.5″	9.25″	7″
22.5″	10.75″	8″

With these measurements, you’ll have enough clearance to help with circulation and consistently smoke your turkey.

When you smoke something, you will lose about 20% of its size. To add some of this size back, we suggest you brine your turkey.

Another thing many people choose to do for the holidays is add stuffing to the bird. If you decide to do this, you want to make sure the turkey is cooked all the way through. You can use a meat thermometer to check this. The stuffing internal temperature should be 165° to 170° F.

Feel free to dress the turkey in butter, turkey rub, and any other seasonings you’d like.

2. Set Up the Smoker

Get Consistent Temperature & Heat

Using a charcoal smoker gives you a more consistent temperature because you aren’t opening the lid every hour to add briquettes and check on the bird.

Weber experts suggest using about 3/4 of a chimney full of briquettes in a smoker for four to six hours of cook time. In comparison, a standard kettle grill would need about 50 briquettes to start. And it would need an additional 18 briquettes every hour to keep a consistent temperature.

Both the distance that the turkey is from the fire and the humidity from the water pan contribute to keeping the temperatures low. This allows for the convection heat to cook your turkey.

Low convection heat creates a turkey that’s more moist because the heat is not too intense. So it won’t push out flavor from the bird.

Water & Wood

You need to use both water and wood in your smoker. For a six to eight hour smoke, you should add about two to three liters of water to the water pan.

For wood, we recommend using chunks instead of chips. When using wood, remember that a little goes a long way.

3. Smoke the Turkey

When smoking your turkey, you want to make sure you’re keeping consistent smoking temperatures. You can do this by utilizing the dampers and the lid.

To get your turkey to a nice golden brown color, wrap it in a cheesecloth before putting it on the smoker. This will prevent it from looking burnt.

It will take about five to six hours to smoke a 20-pound turkey. About halfway through cooking, remove the cheesecloth to get the perfect color.

Use Smoker Capacity Wisely

According to Weber experts, capacity is key. There’s enough room to do two things at once on the smoker because of its size. You should put the turkey on the bottom rack. This way, it doesn’t contaminate any of the other food you’re making in the smoker.

That being said, you can definitely do two turkeys on the smoker.

This blog post was originally posted by Kevin Kolman on Weber.com.

For more tips and how-tos like this one, check out our Grilling & Smoking Blog.