Smoked Turkey Breast

If you read the blog regular-like, you'll remember we covered smoking a whole turkey a couple years back, and it came out great.  I now do one every year--come Thanksgiving and Christmas (and sometimes, a few other times as well)--in addition to my roasted and my fried turkeys.  Yes, we like our turkeys here at An Eat'n Man, but we also like turkey leftovers, and with the size of the Eat'n Man's extended family, one turkey just won't cut it.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum, what if you just don't need that much turkey, or just don't care for the dark meat.  Well, perhaps this is your answer--a single turkey breast.  Just enough for a meal for say four to six, with maybe a smidge left over for a sandwich the next day.  The folks at Butterball hawk a nice pre-cut, pre-packaged turkey breast that is basically ready to go in the smoker.

Looks like this when you get it out of the bag.

Note, it'll be a little smaller than you thought it was--they usually include a bag of gravy mix inside there with the breast, so your eyes will deceive you from when you first heft the package.

Anyway, fire up your smoker with a nice light wood like apple or peach--poultry meat readily absorbs smoke flavor, which is good, but this means more pungent woods like hickory and definitely mesquite are out.  Set your temperature to 300-325˚F.

Oh, before we begin smoking, you might want to remove the stretchy webbing that surrounds the breast.

I didn't, and I found it sort of cooked into the turkey meat, and was a bitch to remove.  The only problem is, if you do remove it, the breast may sort of droop or fall apart.  Solution:  Take it off and then tie the breast up with a few loops of kitchen twine.  Problem solved.

Smoke for 30 minutes.  Breast should now look like this.

Rotate breast around 180˚ and smoke for another 30 minutes.  Check the temp with a meat thermometer in the thickest part of the breast.  It should be getting close now.  Continue smoking until the internal temp hits 160˚F.

Take out and let rest in a warm spot in your kitchen.  Internal temp will continue to climb to 165˚F, which is just right for turkey breast.

Slice and serve--it's just that easy.

Until next time--no reason to go cold turkey with this recipe!

Chris