 Okay, May 26, 2012. We are going to have a Memorial Day Thanksgiving feast. We are going to do a turduckin on the green egg. As in my first time doing it, we're going to cook it at about 2.25, 4, 9 hours. And some tools of the trade. Obviously I just mentioned the big green egg. The first step in the process of any good smoke is a nice, clean, thoroughly cleaned egg. Some other tools of the trade are going to be some lump charcoal. I've been having really good luck with the Barbecue's galore. Last year I did a pork butt and I bought some of the big green eggs, I spent 30 bucks for it and got very small pieces. So I've stayed with the Barbecue's galore and I've had good luck. Some other tools of the trade. In my shed. Anyway, the next step here is as you can see, I have a garbage bag out here. I am going to dump out the long charcoal and start stacking inside the grill. The large ones first and then put some medium bricks and then on the very top the smaller ones. That's a help maintain a nice, steady fire over the course of the smoke without having any problems. So I will be back a second. Alright, so as you can see I've dumped the lump charcoal out onto this garbage bag and now I'm going to start picking the largest pieces first and putting them down in the bottom of the fire crate. And as I said I'm going to stack the grill or stack the lump charcoal so that the largest pieces are first and then work my work my way up with medium and then smaller pieces. Okay, so there's the first layer. Those are the largest pieces I'm putting in and now I'm going to go for another row of some medium sized pieces. Okay, well the chart or the lump charcoal part of this is over. As you can see I filled it up to the firing. That is going to be plenty. I have done 19 hour pork butt smokes with the same amount and we're only looking for about nine hours at 225 here. You might notice I have the spider ring in there. It's also great device. I kind of leave it in forever smoke. But anyway, that's the charcoal side of it. Again, I just idea I pulled from the web as everything else I'm going to tell you is all information I pull from the from the internet from different sources. That's why I'm building this movie just to help other newbies feel comfortable with these these cooking adventures. Anyway, next step is going to be getting it getting the fire started and setting up the stoker for 225 and get things wrong. So here's what's left of my charcoal. Again, I think this is probably one of the best bags of barbecue's glow or lump charcoal ever. God had all the pieces exactly the way that I wanted to stack the lump. So we're in a great shape to get things kicked off. Okay, lump charcoal is off the ground back in the back as you can see. Not not one drop lost. The garbage bag trick works really well. The method I'm using to start the charcoal today is just an electric starter. I go in between break, you know, the little fire starters in this thing. This is the most convenient. So I go with it. What I do is I you know, I put it in. Take the top off, open up the bottom obviously and I'll probably let that go for about 15 minutes or so. Maybe even only 10. It usually works relatively quickly. And then I'll lift the top and get a good fire going and then remove the electric starter. Okay, the next tools of the trade is the incredible stoker by rocks barbecue. I'm going to use this to accomplish two things. One is to maintain a steady cooking temperature of 225 degrees as well as no exactly the temperature of my meat. The plan here is to cook the turducken low and slow for about nine hours to 155 degrees internal temperature. At that point we'll remove it. Let it sit on the counter for about an hour to reach 165 and then we'll cut it up. So part of the stoker we're going to have this is your meat thermometer. Take the meat temperature. This is the pit temperature. Although I use it in the dome to manage my dome temperature. And then here you have a 5cfM fan which will be installed down here so that we can stoke the fire every time we need it. And then we have the Mrs. Daisy there. We'll use that to just let enough air through the top so that we can keep temperature within one degree which I've done many times with no problem with the stoker. So as soon as we get the fire going I'll be back. Okay while we wait for the fire to get going here is the guest of honor. This is a small turducken should be 15 to 20 people. I picked it up at Iowa Farms down in the Mission Gorge area of San Diego. It's about close to 16 inches and length. I'm going to probably just tie it up one more time month wise just to hold it in a little bit tighter. My egg is about 18 inches and I want to make sure I have a you know a full inch around the front and back so that I can get a good even cook. So that's what I'm going to take care of right now. Okay let's check out that fire. It's probably been about 10 minutes. It's like got it started and yeah it's looking perfect exactly what I thought I would see. So what I'm going to do now is pull out fire starter. Sorry about that. And I am going to close the lid and you know let the convection start a good flame and I'll start putting the stoker together in the meantime. Okay so another tool I'm going to be using today is called the egg setter. That's so I can cook this turduck in an indirect heat. So that gets placed in right on top of the firing. Next I'm going to lay down a drip tray to catch any dropings. Then lastly my grove. Sit there right on top like that and I haven't decided if I'm going to use my V-rank or not or if I'm just going to place the turduck in straight on this grove. You can also see that wire in front of you that goes up to my dome temp probe which I just attached to my thermometer that I have sticking in the egg. The fan has also been installed and next thing I'm going to do is start setting up the stoker with the parameters that I want to use which as I mentioned earlier is going to be 225 degrees for my dome temperature and I'm going to set the meat temperature at 155 degrees. I'll be right back. Okay in true grilling fashion I kind of changed gears here. I decided that I wanted to use the V-rank so I changed things up a little bit. On the bottom you'll see I have my spider with a 13 inch stone on it. On top of that I put the drip tray and then I have this assembly. I got online that has a multi-level cooking surface and I rigged it up so that I can put my V-rank right on top of it. I just thought it would be a good way for me at the end of the day to get my turducken out of the grill once it's cooked. So that's where we're at at this point in time. Sorry for switching gears on you but again this is the first time I'm doing a turducken and this just seemed like the right way to go. So right now the stokers in full motion were probably... let's see, let's see if I can see it in it. Now you can't really... go scan. Alright so my fire pit is about 152 because I shut things down a little bit while I was getting the new rig set up. 56 cents my outdoor temperature since I don't have it in the meat yet. Fire pit is just starting to come up so let me get it going. Let me shut the dome get my temp up and then we'll be ready to slap this baby on. Okay it's game time. I've got the turducken outside. My temperatures are starting to fall into range. Yeah you can't really see. Yeah it's about 240t overshot a little bit and that's normal. When I did my first cook something like that would have freaked me out. But now I'm a little bit of a veteran and things like that don't bother me too much. Once the turducken is in the lid is closed it'll set down a temperature and as you can see the daisy is on there right now the daisy will and I will probably... just tweak it there. All you need is just a little bit of room for air to escape as the fan feeds the fire and that'll give you a temperature delta of about 0.5 degrees. It's amazing this stoker is just amazing. You can see this case I put it in is basically my waterproof case. Like I said when you do birch-yard butch you do them overnight. This protects it from the weather. I'm here in San Diego it's very rare that I get whether that's bad but just in case you want to protect your investment. So give me a second I'm gonna slap that on the V-Groll. V-Grate and I'll show you the final peak before we set it and forget it. Okay there you have it the final product. I have a turducken on a V-Rack. I got my meat probin center probably the medius part and got my fire probe up there my drip tray is already coming into action. Let's set this guy in forget her. Actually what's gonna happen in about two hours I'm gonna lift the lid and wrap it in tin foil. I help keep in some of the juices so that's you'll see me in two hours. Okay sorry about that last shot. Somehow my camera settings got messed up so my apologies. Anyway so here's a picture of the iPad. I'm running the stoker application. You can see my temperature 224.6. Meat temperature is about 70 degrees. It's about nine o'clock so the turducken's been in for about an hour and a half. We started at around 43 degrees. The one thing I didn't mention is I did get up at 430 to pull that turducken out of the refrigerator. I try and get it close to room temperature. So it was only out for about three hours. I think next time I'll go for about five. Get a little bit closer to room temp. Anyway you can graph this as well. It's a really cool application. I'm seeing some sun that's as hard and hurting us but anyway I just give you an idea of some of the other tools that you get with the stoker. Seen about a half hour when I throw the foil on top of this guy. Okay the turducken has been in for about an hour and a half. I'm sorry about two hours and instructions call for it to be wrapped in foil or at least cover in foil. So let's take a quick peek. Oh yeah. She's looking very tasty. Actually I don't think I'll... yeah I guess I'll cover it based on what they're saying. I kind of wanted to get a nice little crust going on it. I can hear the alarm going off right now because my temperature probably dropped below where I wanted it to be. But anyway I'm gonna wrap it with some foil and I'll see you in another probably six hours. Okay just a quick peek. I just covered the turducken with foil. We're gonna close it and like I said should see in about six hours. Well I promised you a funny story and just to remind you that things are not always as they appear. Remember my V-Rack set up? Well when I went to tuck the foil under the bird the V-Rack slipped off of my set up and the turducken basically rolled on its side almost falling into the drip tray. So in full panic mode I'm grabbing it as it's falling. Thankfully it did not fall apart. Just lost a tiny bit of stuffing. You know I put it all back together but by now the you know the unit was open. The eight temperature rose from 225 to 265. Like oh my god what am I gonna do? So I closed the daisy try to reduce the temperature. Well I did a great job but it took so long that the lump actually went out. What else can go wrong right? Okay so what do I do now? I say let's start up the oven. I get the oven up to 225 degrees in the house. I transferred the turducken into the oven and now I start to try to restart the egg. Easy right? Well as I try to restart the lump I know it is it taking you know a long time. So I pull out the electric starter and find out that it's shorted out. Oh my god what do I do? I send my wife to Barbecue School or for a new starter. Meanwhile I see a few amber still lit. I start me nursing those for the fire back up. Meanwhile the wife calls Barbecue School or doesn't have any starters so it might be great. Thankfully you know I get the lump going again. I get the egg bent to 225. I transfer the turducken back into the egg. Finish the cook. The turducken was as moist as can be cooked perfectly. You know the moral of the story is using the egg in a slow and low strategy. It's almost impossible to mess up these cooks. I shared this cooking adventure just so you know you're not the only one out there that has these funny situations occur although not funny at the time. Well fellow egg heads I bid you farewell. Keep on growing.