Growing up half Canadian and half Italian lent itself well to exposing turkey for the sham that it is.  Half of the holidays were spent eating the bird with all the variety of being served ‘cold’ or ‘warm’, while the rest of the holidays were spent eating things that generally had flavour.  It is only fair that I went on to marry an English girl who simply demands that thanksgiving revolve around a bird too lazy to fly.  A bird so lazy it makes you sleep after you eat it.  A bird so lazy you can use it’s name to express discontent with other people, you turkeys!  My point is that it barely seems fair.  So for several years I’ve used all manner of techniques to attempt to make this bird as great as people make it out to be.  This year, I think I have.

Note: These techniques can be used independently of each other, so I am separating the recipe into 2 steps

Brine

Ingredients

The following is a ratio, double, triple, whatever you need to completely cover your turkey.

• 1 gallon of water
• 1 cup salt
• 1/2 cup of maple syrup

The rest of this is not a ratio, just use what it says

• 1 turkey
• 1 whole head of garlic, unpeeled, sliced in half
• 3 sprigs of rosemary
• 5 springs of thyme
• 10 leaves of sage
• 2 tbps whole black peppercorns

Directions

First off, this will work for any sized bird, but I used a 18lb turkey, which required 3 gallons of water to cover. I am going to use those measurements for this writeup, but as long as you follow the ratio above, you’ll be golden.
Put 1 gallon of water in a large saucepan. Add 3 cups of salt, 1 1/2 cups maple syrup, garlic, pepper, rosemary, sage and thyme. Heat up until all the salt is dissolved, should take 10 minutes or so. Let cool. Add turkey (upside down) to food safe container in which it can be completely submerged (cooler, bucket, whatever you got). Add 2 gallons of heavily iced water to the bird. Add mixed up mess from the pot. Leave for about 8 hours.
Brine does not preserve the meat through science or magic. Keep bird refrigerated!
Remove bird from brine and rinse thoroughly, inside and out.

Smoking

Ingredients

• 1 turkey (preferably prepped from above)
• 1 cup apple juice
• 2 sprigs of thyme
• 2 sprigs of rosemary
• 6 leaves of sage
• 1/4 cup of canola oil
• 3 tbsp garlic powder
• 2 cups apple wood chips, soaked

Directions

Now this felt weird. Every time I’ve ever cooked a turkey I’ve had to shove butter and herbs up in between it’s skin and it’s meat, or massage the carcass with some remarkably complex oil flavour concoction. But here I am, meant to believe I’ve already seasoned this thing, but it looks naked. It looks… Canadian! I couldn’t leave it alone. Put a bbq poultry stand (beer can chicken style) into a roasting pan. Fill the beer can part of that with the apple juice thyme, rosemary and sage. Plop the bird on that, sitting all pretty, all naked. Here I just painted it with canola oil and sprinkled it with garlic powder. I did this mainly because I couldn’t stand thinking about not putting ANYTHING on the outside of this bird, and it was likely not required. Preheat your bbq to 350ºF then put your wood chips down. Put a pizza stone on the grill and the roasting pan on top of that. Creates indirect heat while still having room for the bird, but you should probably have checked to make sure before this point.

Cook till the coldest part of the breast you can find reaches 163ºF (the temp will continue to rise after you remove it from the heat). Put onto a cutting board (with paper towel under it) and make a tin foil tent on that beast. Make gravy or something, but leave it for 20 minutes. To carve, cut the whole breast away from the turkey, cutting down the back bone. Place the breast skin side up on the cutting board and slice thin (see pic). EAT!