Why You Should Cook Your Turkey Outside for Thanksgiving

A lot of huge outdoor kitchens these days have a double oven, but not many do. Smoking or grill-roasting the birds outside solves many logistical problems. So that’s why you want to be outside and out of the way with your bird.

But the main reason it’s easier to take out a turkey these days is technology. Grill-roasting a turkey used to be a guessing game, hidden under the black box of your grill lid. But these days, smart grilling technology and plenty of excellent wireless meat thermometers have made it easy to grill a turkey to perfect temperature without any hassle.

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

Lately, I’ve been having a great experience with the new four-probe WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled Chef IQ Sense ($160), which registers accurate temperatures even when taking evaporation into account. My colleague Martin Szymer likes the Treasure Meter Pro ($349 at Amazon for the four-probe model). Each lets you track your surroundings and meat temperature on your phone, without having to pick up your grill.

Czymar grill-roasted a turkey on his Big Green Egg this year, an experience he described as “extremely enjoyable.” They cooked the food without charcoal to get the roasted character. He wasn’t trying to smoke it. But still, the turkey’s drippings falling into the coals gave it a very slight smoky color, which is a blessed form of meat-on-meat feedback that you don’t get from the oven.

This is the way.

“If I were making Thanksgiving dinner I would definitely cook it this way on Thanksgiving Day,” he writes, “which I’m not doing because I’d rather bring my readers the best Black Friday deals.”

Smoked turkey tastes much better

Photograph: Matthew Korfage

But as far as I’m concerned, I’m Team Smoke. Holidays or not, turkey is one of the most boring meats out there. Probably, we have all developed low standards for this. It’s a large, irregular bird – and we’ve become accustomed to it cooking slowly and unevenly, without much spice, and to its dry taste.