Cold Weather Bird

Cold weather continues to plague us here in the Midwest. With the cold comes illness and our little girl, Nora, got bit hard by the cold bug. A weekend out and about quickly turned into a home based one and left me with a Sunday free to experiment.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently picked up a small charcoal bullet to practice on. A free Sunday seemed like the perfect time to toss on one of our favorites for the smoker; a turkey breast. I made a stop at Aldi on Friday and picked up a frozen bone-in breast. Tipping the scales at just over 6.5 pounds, the bird (part) set me back $8. Since it would just for family consumption, I opted to make my own rub and injection.

Since this is meant to be Paleo, we tossed out brown sugar (a staple of many rubs and injections) and went with coconut sugar. We also kept everything else Paleo. Here is the recipe for each:

Apple wood smoke smelled glorious!

Injection:

½ cup maple syrup

¼ cup water

1/8^th  teaspoon of Tumeric

1/8^th  teaspoon of Cayenne 

1/8^th  teaspoon of Cinnamon

*Bring to a boil, let simmer, then use your injector.*

Rub:

3 x ½ tablespoon of coconut sugar

½ tablespoon of Pink Himalayan salt

1/4^th  teaspoon of Paprika 

1/8^th  teaspoon of Cayenne

Check out my first post here.

Once the bird was injected, I sprayed the outside skin with cooking spray to develop the golden skin color. It also helped bond the rub. While this was going on, I went outside to setup the bullet. Using the minion method, I got my hardwood lit and off to the races we went. Of note, this smoker isn’t the greatest (hence the $19) since there is no vent on the bottom. I’ve found that getting a good, steady temp, is quite difficult. I’m going to try to add some sand to the water pan for the next go around. Also, I used Applewood for the smoke.

The turkey was super tender and sweet!

I got the bird on the grate around 12:45 and pulled it after the internal temp hit 165 at 4:15. The temperatures in  inside the pit bounced around from 273 to 334 according to my ThermoPro monitor. Once again, I will try a few things different with this setup the next time I use it.

So, on to the big question………… How’d it taste? It was a bit too sweet yet very delicious! Since my wife and I saved this recipe, we made some adjustments such as backing down the maple syrup to ¼ of a cup (to match the water) and added more salt to the rub. All told though, this turkey breast sliced up very easily and was very, very moist and tasty. This one was a KEEPER!

Also, we wanted to try some desert on the smoker so we dialed up this excellent Oatmeal Raisin Cookie recipe from www.PaleoRunningMomma.com. The only changes we made was to through just a pinch of our smoked salt on them and cooked them with the Bullet. AMAZING!!!!

So, some lessons learned but we still ended up with a great turkey breast and some bonus cookies. Now, if only we could get the sickness gone………

Total surprise that these ended up as good as they did.
Credit to the Paleo Running Momma