Smoking a turkey in a 55 gallon drum

A few months back a friend and I decided to build a smoker.  A big smoker… as inexpensively as possible.  I learned this from my wife’s father, who, with nothing more than the drum, some rebar and a few coat hangers made some of the best baby back ribs I’ve ever had. Inspired, I sought my own more permanent smoker.

Here are the critical ingredients:

- 55 gallon drum (food grade). Craigslist will find you one for about $25.

- Two 3 foot sticks of any diameter rebar. These are available at any home depot style store for ~$2 a piece.

- Coat Hanger / Grill insert.  The hangers do the job (metal only, get real) and the insert will run you $25 bucks.  If all you plan on is ribs rock the hangers, but anything that might fall apart or weight more than 10 lbs will require a surface.

It’s really not half as difficult as I’d suspected.  It took us under an hour to put together, and works well… as you’ll see below. As with any first attempt, I realize some shortcomings and would’ve done some things differently.  In the next year or so my buddy and I will a build another one with all the bells and whistles.  For now, let me share our first bird…

Smoking any meat is divine.  I’ve had incredible success with beef, pork and chicken.  Something, maybe the harvest season, compelled me to give a full Turkey the college try.

With almost 20 guests confirmed for a party, the pressure was on and this is one option that you can really mess up if you’re not careful with the heat.

Here we go…. First,

- Dress the Bird

- Set the house oven to 450

- Heat up the smoker

Buy a Turkey thats 15lbs or less.  Anything heavier will take forever to smoke. Ours is 16, but there’s water weight.  Optimally you want a bird thats never been frozen, but good luck finding that.  One benefit to most frozen birds is they come with a salt brine so we can skip soaking the turkey 12 hours (more on that another time). You’ll need at least 3 days for it to defrost in the fridge if frozen. 

After you’ve removed the goodies inside of the defrosted trukey, fill it with two sliced apples, one sliced yellow onion, a few smaller cloves of garlic and a couple bay leaves.  More, less, give, take, … I think you’ll find it really doesn’t matter all that much what you put in the bird as long as you like the ingredients. As for the outside, I’m keeping it simple and gave it a light coating of olive oil followed by peppercorns and seasalt. I’m betting the smoke will bring a heavy flavor.

After you’ve dressed it, throw it back in the fridge.

Start soaking some wood chips. You can get these anywhere, they come in a bag usually in the bbq section of a store and typically cost about 4 bucks. You’ll want to soak them in water for about an hour, or more.  

Start the oven and set it to 450.

Next, crank up the smoker.  I used this Mesquite Charcoal, and will again.  Regular charcoal will obviously do the trick too though.  I prefer this because it burns longer and gives off a subtle Mesquite smoke. It takes a bit for this to get going strong.  You won’t want to put the bird or the chips on until the coals have established an even heat.  I don’t put the smoker back together until the coals are white.

-          Grill insert

-          Lid (cracked an inch or two)

At this point, if you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to occupy the house wolf with a raw meaty bone. You don’t want him/her getting in you way during the all-important and ceremonial transfer from kitchen to smoker.

Now let it burn for another 15 minutes or so and check the temp. You’re targeting 230 degrees, and we needed to play with our new custom intake valves to get the right air mix. I drilled 4 holes around the bottom of the drum and inserted 6 inch pipe in each one.  Each pipe has a screw end I can attach a cap to (found in the plumbing section). We found the right mix with two open, two closed.

Now we’re getting to the cooking. The oven should be at 450. We put the turkey in there for about 5 minutes to kill any surface bacteria just before transferring it to the smoker. This may be unnecessary, but I like to be safe. And, we’re cooking a slew of other things too.

One last confirmation the temp is where we want it (230).  It is, so we’re going to toss in a big hand full of soaked wood chips.

Then, tranfer the bird to the smoker! 

You can see it’s a touch brown from its very short stint in the oven and the smoker is already giving of a nice cloud.  Some people go straight to the grill without the tin pan.  Since I don’t have too much experience with turkey yet I’m going to split the time evenly.

 …and we’re smoking.  It’s about 1030 am and we plan on eating no later than 7.

I checked the temperature every 20 minutes of so for the first hour to ensure our valves were set properly. We let 2 hours go by before lifting the lid and checking on the bird.  We know the temp stayed perfect and smoke consistent, but I was dying to see what it looked like at this point. 

 Beautiful, isn’t it?

Remarkably, the smoker held perfectly at 230 for the first 4 hours.  I was hands off almost the entire time. Other than our quick visual check earlier, the lid didn’t need to move.

Around 3 o’clock we went out to remove the pan and rotate the bird.  This was a good time for me to add one more big charcoal piece and some more water to the basin (most of it had steamed off).  I also melted some butter and covered the turkey liberally.  This is going to add some flavor, but more importantly it will prevent the skin from burning.

Then, back on.

We locked it up for another few hours occasionally checking the temperature… 

Around 6 (total of 7 hours smoking)  we took an internal temperature gauge to it. Most sites say 165 degrees is the temperature the inside of the turkey needs to reach to ensure it has cooked properly. Ours hit almost 180 and was looking spectacular. We had a little more time before we need to pull it off so I took advantage of it.

I spread another light coating over butter over the top and covered it in some larget sprigs of fresh rosemary.