How Meathead Does Thanksgiving

If you’re going to take turkey-cooking advice from anyone, it might as well be from a Barbecue Hall of Famer, specifically a guy who goes by Meathead. As the creator of the world’s most popular grilling website, and as his name would suggest, he knows a thing or two about cooking turkey.

But the turkey isn’t the only item on the Thanksgiving menu Meathead is passionate about. He loves the entire meal, from his port wine-soaked cranberries to grilled sweet potatoes. On a recent call over Zoom, the two-time bestselling author sat down to dish about his favorite meal of the year, including his brining method, gravy technique, and why he prefers a frozen bird over fresh.

Why do you love Thanksgiving so much?

Thanksgiving, I think, is the coolest of all the holidays. First of all, for those foodies among us, it’s the only food-centric holiday out there. It’s all about food. It’s all about food and family and getting together. And what’s especially cool about it is that, although some people have lasagna or prime rib, most of us are eating the same meal all across the country, regardless of race, religion, political stripe, we’re all holding hands across the big, giant American table, eating turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. And there’s nothing [else] like this that I’m aware of anywhere in the world, and it’s just special. I mean, sure, we all share dinner on Fourth of July and Christmas and stuff, but it’s all different meals, and it’s all different celebrations. But this is a holiday about food.

How do you make your Thanksgiving turkey?

I have tried just about everything under the sun, as you can well imagine. First of all, I cook it outdoors, primarily because turkey really gets along great with smoke, and I give it a light smoke. I use my smoker. But also you have to leave room in the kitchen for pie. You can’t fill up the oven with turkey. And I’ve done the whole Norman Rockwell bird. I’ve stuffed it, I’ve unstuffed it, I’ve butterflied it, or what they call spatchcocking it. And now I have a relatively new technique I’ve been using the last three or four years.

First of all, we go over the river and through the woods. We go to my brother-in-law’s house, where he does a traditional Norman Rockwell stuffed bird in the oven. But I take the bird and I break it down. A problem you encounter with all animals, there’s just a variety of muscles, and they cook different ways. They cook at different times. They take different preferred temperatures.

I carve the breasts off the carcass so that I have boneless breasts. It’s really easy. You find the keel bone, that big, thick bone there, and you put your knife on one side and gently run it along the bone. It runs right along the rib cage, and the breast will come off whole, and that’s how you typically carve it after it’s been cooked. I do this before it’s been cooked, and I cook it off the bone. Basically, I remove the thighs, I remove the the wings, and underneath there’s the oyster. It’s a pectoral muscle hiding under there. Find it. It’s about the size of an oyster, and it’s really tender and really juicy. And you eat it. You don’t serve it to your guests. It’s for the chef.

So I break it down—the drumsticks, the thighs, the breasts, the wings—and they go on in sequence at different times, so they can finish together. Because the wings cook fast, the thighs take forever, and the breasts can dry out very easily if you overcook them. The thighs and the drumsticks can take a beating. You can overcook them, and you won’t hurt them. And, yeah, it’s not as cool as the classic Norman Rockwell whole, big bird, but I get the meat really perfect.

Do you get a fresh or frozen turkey?

Oh, always frozen. I have bought fresh turkeys. In fact, I’m in the suburbs of Chicago. There’s actually a place where you can go in and they’ve got live turkeys, just sitting there, modeling. They slaughter it on the spot. Beware if you go for something like that, because immediately they go through rigor mortis. And you do not want to cook a bird that’s going through rigor mortis. They are just really tough. And I’ve made that mistake. I get them fresh-frozen. You know, a lot of these so-called “fresh birds” have been slaughtered a month ago, and they’ve just been kept cold and shipped, and then they arrive at the grocery store, and they sit on the loading dock for a couple hours, then they go on display in the display cooler.

A fresh-frozen bird is slaughtered and frozen almost immediately, and they have these blast freezers, which are so much better than the freezer in your refrigerator. It creates really small ice crystals. If you stick it in a regular freezer at, say, 34, 32 or 30 degrees [Fahrenheit], it makes large ice crystals, and they puncture the muscle fibers, and that’s why there’s a lot of liquid in the bag.

It takes a week to defrost, so you've got to start defrosting at least five days before Thanksgiving, depending on the size of your bird.

If you’re feeding a really big group of people, should you get one huge turkey or two smaller turkeys?

Absolutely, without fail, get two smaller birds. Get two 12-pounders rather than one 24. A 24-pound bird has this massive breast, so it takes a long time for the heat to penetrate from the skin all the way to the center and make it safe, but a 12-pound bird has got a smaller breast, and it takes less time, so it doesn’t dry out as much. The outer layers that are getting pounded by the heat are not going to be as dry, so you have a much more tender and juicy bird. Plus, younger birds are juicier and more tender. I know a big 24-pound [turkey] is impressive, but if you want it to taste good, get two 12s.

Do you stuff the bird or do you cook the dressing separately?

Let’s define some terms. If you put the stuff inside the cavity, that’s stuffing. If you cook it in a pan or a tray, separately, that’s dressing. When you stuff the bird, you are now making a giant thermal mass. It’s like a bowling ball, and you have to get the center of the stuffing to a safe temperature, 160 degrees Fahrenheit. If you don’t stuff the bird, it doesn’t take as long to cook. You don’t have to wait for the energy to penetrate all the way to the center of the stuffing, and you have to do that because the juices from the bird get into the stuffing and the juices can be contaminated. Raw meat always is a risk. In the process of growing and slaughtering and handling animals, bacteria find their way into the game, and you have to cook them to a safe temperature, and poultry is especially a risk. The USDA says 165℉; science says 160℉ is OK, and that’s what I go for, because that five degrees can make it really cardboard-y.

You can [cook the dressing] in a pan or a tray, but I cook it in muffin tins. I make stuffins. I take the stuffing, mix a little egg in so it’ll bind up a little better. I have the recipe on my website, AmazingRibs.com, to be precise, but I put them in muffin tins, and then everybody gets a stuffing muffin. It’s all the right size. It’s all the same size. It’s got this nice crispy crown. And they look so cool.

Do you use a dry brine or a wet brine?

Soaking a turkey in a brine became all the rage about 15 or 20 years ago, with good reason. Salt is a magic rock. Salt does things that no other spice and herb in your kitchen can do. Salt is just two atoms, sodium and chloride, and when they get wet on the surface of the turkey, they get electrically charged, ionized, and they move deep into the meat. And when they do, they actually change the structure of proteins. It’s called denaturing, and it helps them hold on to moisture. It also amplifies flavor without altering it. Your tongue is really sensitive to salt. Garlic amplifies flavor, but it also alters it. Pepper amplifies flavor, but it also alters it.

If you soak the bird in a salt solution, and you don’t want too much salt—there’s a formula on AmazingRibs.com for that—the salt will penetrate, and it will make the turkey more moist and more flavorful. A lot of people really go nuts with it. They add apple juice in there, and garlic and pepper; none of that stuff penetrates. Only the salt penetrates. The other stuff can’t get past the skin, the molecules are too large.

But in recent years, we learned about something called dry brining. I coined the term “dry brining,” but the concept really kind of grew from Judy Rogers, who owned a restaurant in Berkeley, and it’s just a simple matter of sprinkling salt on the bird the day before. That salt gets wet, it forms the slurry, which is a wet solution like a brine, and it penetrates deep. And it does the same thing that soaking it in a tub of salt water does, and it’s so much easier and simpler.

How do you make your gravy?

It’s just killer. And people who do it write me all the time saying, “Oh, my God.”

I get a 9 x 13 pan or a bigger pan, and I put it below the bird. If I’m doing it on the smoker or a grill, it goes under the grill grates, and in that pan I put the neck and all the gizzards and the stuff that comes in that bag’s cavity, except the liver. I don’t put liver in there. I freeze that. And someday I make a pate, or I just fry it up and give it to the dogs. But liver can make a funny flavor in your gravy.

I trim all the fat from around both ends of the cavity, front and rear, that goes in the pan. I snip the tips of the wings off, that goes in the pan, and then I chop up an apple and some carrots and some celery, dump a little wine in there, maybe some chicken broth, whatever.

But I basically build a stock underneath the bird, and as the bird cooks, it drips smoky drippings. So I’ve now built a turkey stock underneath the bird, and as the bird approaches done, I’ll pull that pan out, I’ll strain out all the solids, I’ll taste it. If it’s perfect, we’re done. If it’s a little thin, which is often the case, I put it on the stovetop and just reduce it with some heat, simmer it down until it’s a little more intense, and that’s my gravy.

Now, I do not add flour. I don’t thicken it. I don’t turn it into wheat paste. Granny and a lot of folks insist on gravy that is thick, and that’s fine, and you can add the flour. You can make a roux if you want. You put it in another pan with some butter, and you stir it up until the flour gets thick and a little golden, and add it to the drippings. But I don’t, because this thin gravy is so rich, so flavorful, that it will actually penetrate the breast meat. If you drizzle it across the top of the breast meat, it’ll penetrate. Flavor it. Moisten it. Fantastic. And there’s almost always leftovers, which I just drink by the coffee cupful on the next day. It’s just delicious.

What is butter balling?

A lot of people want to inject their turkey, and I’ve seen all kinds of ungodly—you know, Dr Pepper. I mean, I don’t want my turkey tasting like Dr Pepper. But if you want to inject, butter is a good thing to inject. It’s like a giant hypodermic needle, and it’s got the holes on the side, not the front, and you stab the turkey a few times, and you inject.

The problem is, the turkey is cold, so when the butter comes out, it solidifies. What you do is you start cooking the turkey, and after it gets warm, say, 80 or 90 degrees, then you inject, and that will keep the butter from solidifying. And butter and turkey go together pretty well. Butter is mostly fat, and fat is flavor. The thighs and drumsticks usually don’t need it. But if you want to stick a little butter into the breast, that’s the way to do it.

Do you grill or smoke any sides?

Yeah, I grill the sweet potatoes. I like to take a sweet potato and quarter it lengthwise, so you cut it in half, then cut it in half again, then I sprinkle a rub on it. I sprinkle my basic pork rub, which has a little brown sugar and rosemary and stuff in there. And that recipe is on AmazingRibs.com. It’s called Meathead’s Memphis Dust. And it’s designed for pork, but it’s really good on sweet potatoes. I have a spray bottle of oil, and I spritz the sweet potatoes a little bit with oil so they’re sticky, so that this rub will stick to it. And throw it on the grill, usually on the indirect side, because potatoes take a long time to cook on a grill.

If you want to cheat and microwave them for a couple of minutes just to get the interior softened, go right ahead. Then you can throw it right on the hot part of the grill with the rub on there. And they’re really good. I mean, everybody likes sweet potato fries. I think I like them better than regular potato fries.

I don’t do the cranberries on the grill, but I have a fun technique for this. I buy cranberry raisins. They call them Craisins sometimes. And I put them in a small saucepan with port wine, and they absorb the port wine and that rehydrates them. They soak up the port wine. So they start out as raisins, but they eventually become like grapes. And I add some orange zest, maybe some orange juice. Boy, those are dynamite. And we also do Susan Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish. She just died this year. She was an NPR commentator, and she had a recipe for cranberry sauce that uses horseradish. And we grow horseradish in the garden. It sounds crazy, but it works. My wife does a cranberry sauce with Asian pears, which is really good. Cranberry sauce gives you a lot of opportunity to fiddle.

How do you do your mashed potatoes?

You know, I could probably change my my name to Potatohead. I absolutely adore potatoes in every way, shape and fashion, from potato chips to mashed potatoes, you name it. And I think the secret to great mashed potatoes is lots of butter and/or lots of cream, and salt them properly, and don’t whip them so much that they turn to glue. I don’t mind if there are chunks in my mashed potatoes. I like the extra texture.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.