Friendsgiving 2017

Let’s go back to Thanksgiving – Nothing beats thanksgiving with the family, but sometimes it would be good to have a Thanksgiving where you didn’t need to worry about getting too drunk, having obscure -slightly offensive conversation, or … behave. That’s what Friendsgiving was created for – A complete Thanksgiving dinner with a good group of friends, where everyone practices a dish or two that they might be trying for Thanksgiving with the family, and gets drunk.

We had a pretty good group for Friendsgiving – and plenty of alcohol to go around!

Everyone planned their meals in advance so we knew all the necessary components to a holiday meal would be there – I planned the turkey!

I had experimented with Turkey as you might recall from a sous vide experiment I posted about. But that was just a breast, not a full turkey with the legs – so I put together a serious plan. I knew I was going to smoke the turkey then sous vide it, but I knew I couldn’t do the breast at the same temperature as the leg quarters – the quarters would ‘seem’ undercooked – so this was the plan:

Step 1 – Brine the turkey for 24 hours

Step 2 – Break the turkey down into the specific cuts

Step 3 – Smoke the turkey for 3 hours

Step 4 – Vacuum pack the smoked turkey

Step 5 – Sous vide the breast at 132 degrees for 24 hours – then refrigerate

Step 6 – Sous vide the leg quarters and wings at 138 for 24 hours – then refrigerate

Step 7 – Day of Friendsgiving, sous vide all components at 124 degrees to warm them up for finishing

Step 8 – Carve and serve turkey!

The brine was a pretty standard brine with a bunch of water, some beer, salt, sugar and a few aromatics and spices, I unfortunately needed to work late the day that I planned on smoking the turkey, so the brine was actually closer to 30 hours rather than 24 – which I hear is too long, but I wasn’t going to worry too much about it, because I wasn’t cooking my turkey using a standard technique – I figured I’d be ok.

I didn’t grab a ton of pics of the process, but here are the pics!

My butchering skills are not that shabby! I think it took less than 5 minutes for me to break my chicken down into the parts. You’ll notice below, that I have a tray of all the weird parts that people use for making stock – I am disappointed to admit that I smoked those as well, but forgot them on the smoker for 3 days before I realized what I had done! dammit! (went in the trash)

I did a simple SPG sprinkle on the parts on both sides.

Then onto the smoker they went:

Looks good, my fire was super small, so I really achieved the cold smoke technique on this – I stayed at about 150 for the whole cook. (3 hrs)

Then the vacuum packing:

Breasts:

Leg Quarters..

And wingees! (someone told me they wanted to eat the wings)

From this point, the documentation dips out – but the 2 days of 2 batches of sous vide cooking went perfectly with my wi-fi anova – I was able to check the cook from work to see if I was getting the bizarre temp hike that occasionally happens to my cooker – it didn’t so I was pumped.

Heating the refrigerated components up so that 10 minutes before serving everything else it could go into the broiler and brown the skin was the best thing I could have done. I had no worries, I knew the anova would do its job and keep that turkey on deck, and I would kill it. Which I did.

So moist!

I had someone tell me that it was the best turkey they’ve had in their life – and that’s a victory folks. When someone says that, they might be just being your friend and being nice, but for real – I think I nailed this turkey. The gravy? not so much – too salty (d’oh!)

But that didn’t stop people from grabbing dishes and crushing food –

A damn fine plate of food!

Do a Friendsgiving – even all you parents out there that have your children and relatives over – do a thanksgiving with some good friends . Get drunk, get weird, it’s like everything you like about thanksgiving without all the behavior.

Chris did some smoked jalapeno poppers –

and I tried roasted chestnuts for the first time!

Bonus feature – cats love blue lights.

Demon…

Oh and I realized I never told you how the ribs came out from my post yesterday..

They were great. Thanks.

 

 

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