Honey Smoked Turkey Breast

Hey, welcome back to How to Barbecue Right. I'm Malcolm Reed. Today I'm going to show you how I do honey smoked turkey breast. I've got a couple large boneless skinless turkey breasts here. I want to get them seasoned and in some pecan smoke. I want to finish them off with the honey and brown sugar glaze and use a little bit of raw sugar on top to give it a little texture and a little crunch. It's gonna be better than any of that honey baked stuff you can buy. Let's get to cooking. So these turkey breasts came out of my freezer. My buddy Kevin down at the butcher shop sent them to me back when I did that Texas smoked turkey breast. I thought it was a great time to do them here for Easter. I thawed them out for a couple days in the refrigerator. Slow thaw and then took them out of the package. Took the skin off the outside because I want them boneless and skinless. I didn't have to do much trimming to them. Just cleaned them up just a little bit. Took off any excess fat. A little of the silver skin. So I'm going to get some seasoning on the outside of these turkey breasts and this is one of my favorites for poultry. Turkey, chicken, anything like that. This Twine Life Mississippi Grind is great because it has some savory notes. A little bit of sweet but it's really balanced and it gives poultry a very nice flavor. It's gonna be pretty color when it cooks up. Season the outside pretty generously. I'm not holding back and we're gonna flip them and get the top side and this is the side that's gonna cook up the entire time. You want to make sure you get the edges. So that looks good for the seasoning. It's got good cover. It's kind of melted in. Now I want to get some flavor, some moisture on the inside and I'm using an injection. I've got Butcher's Bird Booster Honey mixed up. It's just one scoop of the Bird Booster, two cups of water and you just want to move your injection spots out. We're putting about a cup at each turkey breast. I'm not overly saturating it but you can see it's kind of blowing up. Some of it might leak out. That's okay and you can also brine these breasts if you wanted to. Just a simple brine. Brown sugar, water, salt. Anything you want to do to get some flavor on the inside will be perfect. Now I'm just going to let these turkey breasts hang out here on the cutting board while I fire up my grill. Now today I'm going to be cooking on my pellet grill. I've got my Traeger going. I'm going to set the temperature at 300 degrees. I've got some pecan pellets in there for smoke. I really love that flavor that pecan gives but you could use whatever flavor pellets you want. When the grill comes up to 300 degrees, we'll put these turkey breasts on and start cooking them. Traeger is sitting right on 300. I'm just going to take these breasts, put them right on the rack, kind of in the center. You want to set them just how you want them to cook. So I'll kind of tighten them up, push them up a little bit. We're not going to move them. I'm going to hit them with just a little bit more grind. Fix any spots that I may have had from picking them up where it melted in. I'm ready to close the lid on the Traeger. Let it work its magic. All right, after 45 minutes I'm coming back in checking on these turkey breasts. Color's looking good. You can see the rub setting on the outside. What I'm going to do now, I've melted a couple sticks of butter here in a small pan. I'm just going to braise it over the top. I'm just going to use this butter to get some moisture on top, some of that butter flavor on the outside, on that bark we're creating. It's going to make them brown up real pretty. I'm not really brushing, I'm just kind of letting that butter drizzle all over the top of these turkey breasts. They look really good, smell fantastic. Also going to get a probe right in the thick part of this turkey breast. Now right now I've got my Thermowex dot set for 150. That's when I'm going to start glazing them, let that glaze cook on. You can see it's about 102 right now, so we've probably got, you know, another hour total cook time. We'll check on these in about another half hour, baste them with butter again, see if it's time to start glazing. So it's been about 30 more minutes. Total cook time has been an hour and 15. Those turkey breasts are looking fantastic. I want to go ahead and brush them with a little more butter. The butter's doing its magic by making them turn brown. I'm ready to eat some now. What about y'all? Just going to get it closed, come back, check on about 15 minutes. We've reached 150 on these turkey breasts. Now they're looking exactly like I want them to. I mean that crust is really tightened up, the butter's made it look fantastic. I've mixed up a glaze here, some brown sugar, some honey, a little apple juice, a little orange juice. It's going on the outside, this is our glue for our raw sugar. I'm just going to drizzle it over the top. I'm not brushing the turkey breast, just letting it run down. It's going to be sticky, it's going to be sweet, it's going to mix with those spices in the seasoning. Once you get it covered pretty good, got some sugar in the raw in a little dredge here. This is going to give us that sugary texture, that honey baked texture on the outside. The heat's going to melt the sugar, it's going to kind of caramelize over it. It's going to give it that almost praline-like crust on the outside of the turkey breast. That looks fantastic. About 15 more minutes, we're going to be done. I'll be ready to take them off. You know I got to slice it up and try one. So these turkey breasts have been glazing about 15 minutes and you can see that sugar's melted down now. It's kind of creating that crunchiness on the outside of it. I'm just going to check with my Thermapen. 160, that's perfect. That's exactly where I want them. Feel great. I'm calling them. I want to get them off five degrees before 165. They're going to carry over. I'm going to take them out, put them on the cutting board. So let's just slide them out here. Check that out. I mean that's a beautiful honey smoked turkey breast with the little raw sugar glazed over the top, creating that crust. That's absolutely beautiful. All right, so I just let these turkey breasts hang out here on the cutting board for about 15 minutes. Let them calm down. Let them cool off a little bit. Now I can't wait to slice them up. I mean they look beautiful. They got that beautiful texture, that crunch on the outside. I don't know if you can hear it, but that sugar kind of caramelizes a little bit. It makes a sugary crust all over it. Now to slice them up, I'm going to cut them thin and all I'm doing is taking my slicer knife on the thin side of the edge. You want to skew the knife a little bit so you get a little bit taller slice. As you come up the turkey breast, you can kind of straighten the knife up, but down here on this end you get some beautiful slices by just angling that knife just a little bit. It's so easy to cut up. You can make them as thick or as thin as you want. Now we're starting to get up into the taller pieces so I can kind of straighten my knife up a little bit and I'm just cutting them about a quarter inch thick. Number two pencil slice. If you wanted to shave it, you want to cut it thinner for sandwiches, you could. For serving it for a nice dinner, this is exactly how I would do it. Let me just kind of fan it out here so you can see this turkey and it's juicy. It's cooked all the way through. That is absolutely gorgeous. I see plenty of honey smoked turkey breast sandwiches in my future. Beautiful Easter dinner. I'm going to leave one of them whole. I'm going to reheat it later on in the week, but I get a ton of slices out of one of these turkey breasts. It's enough to feed a family. You'll still have some left over. Now I've got to get a piece out. I'll take one out of the center here and look at that turkey breast. Moisture through and through. We've got it perfectly cooked. It's cut across the grain there so you know it's going to be tender. I'm going to get a bite right out of the center. I want to taste that sugary glaze, pecan smoke. Oh man, the ejection's perfect and it's got a ton of flavor in the meat. Doesn't just taste like plain turkey. That's a winner. Wow, that Swine Life rub does an awesome job bringing some savoriness to it. It's got that beautiful color on the outside and then the sweetness is balanced out with the glaze we put on it. So good. That is incredible turkey. All I did was take two boneless skinless turkey breasts, seasoned them with the Swine Life Mississippi Grind, shot them up with the Butcher's Bird Booster Honey, got them in that pecan smoke, brushed them with a little melted butter to make that color on the outside kind of golden brown. Then I whipped up that simple glaze. Brown sugar, honey, little orange juice, little apple juice, and then dusted the top with the sugar in the raw to create that sugary crust on the outside. That's the honey baked effect all done on a grill. So if you're looking for a turkey recipe to try for Easter, give this one a shot. It's gonna be better than anything you can order. Thanks for checking us out here at How to Barbecue Right. If you like what we're doing, subscribe to the channel. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Michelle and I'll talk about this recipe and all the other delicious stuff we're cooking on our podcast. We'll even release the video version of that later next week. Thanks for hanging out with us today. We'll see y'all next time. I love this recipe. It's great on that glaze. It's great on ham, but it's even, man, on turkey, it is phenomenal. What would I say, Chell? Winner, winner, turkey dinner. Got me gobbling.