Why You Should Cook Your Turkey Outside (But Not Like That)

Plenty of vast exurban kitchens sport a double oven these days, but plenty more kitchens do not. Smoking or grill-roasting the bird outside solves a lot of logistical problems. So that’s the motive for why you’d want to be outside with your bird, and out of the way.

But the main reason it’s easy to move the turkey outdoors these days is technological. Grill-roasting a turkey used to be a guessing game, hidden underneath the black box of your grill lid. But these days, smart grilling technology and a whole lot of excellent wireless meat thermometers have made it easy to grill turkey to temp without much trouble.

With three probes constantly on the case, you’re able to monitor the cooking temp to reach the target temp of 175 degrees Fahrenheit for dark meat, and 165 degrees for white meat. No more black box! You can follow along on your dang phone.

Lately, I’ve been having a good experience with the new four-probe WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled Chef IQ Sense ($160), which registers accurate temps even with evaporation taken into account. My colleague Martin Cizmar prefers the Traeger Meater Pro ($349 on Amazon for a four-probe model). Each lets you track your ambient and meat temp on your phone, without lifting your grill.

Cizmar grill-roasted a turkey on his Big Green Egg this year, an experience he described as “extremely pleasant.” He cooked with charcoal, no wood, to get roasty character. He wasn’t trying to smoke it. But he still ended up with a very light smoky tinge from the turkey drippings falling down into the charcoal, a blessed form of meat-on-meat feedback you don’t get from an oven.

This is the way.

“This is definitely how I would cook it on Thanksgiving Day if I were making a Thanksgiving dinner,” he writes, “which I’m not because I will be working to bring our readers the best Black Friday deals.”

Smoked Turkey Tastes a Lot Better

But as for me, I’m team smoke. Holiday or no holiday, turkey has a bad rap as the most boring of meats. Possibly, we’ve all just developed low standards for it. It’s a big, irregular bird—and we’ve become accustomed to cooking it slowly and unevenly, without a lot of seasoning, and tasting it dry.