I just got done baking two huge batches of cheddar-pepper braided cheese rolls (I switched yam duty for roll duty) and am now on my way out the door to join the live TurkeyTracker action.
I’ve been watching the guys with the smoker all morning, and my family has been calling saying “when are you going to go over there and wave hi to us?”
Oh yes, and I almost forgot my other duty: to bring THIS GAME. Get ready for us to make total fools out of ourselves…
-Robin
This morning I placed our bird, along with two extra drumsticks into a very large pot, and filled it with water, 1 cup of salt, 1 cup of apple cider vinegar, 1 cup of whiskey, 1 bunch of radishes, 1 yellow onion, 1 white onion, 3 sliced carrots and 3 chopped celery stalks. The pot is now covered in the garage and packed in ice. Here’s a picture of the whole thing before I took it out back to sit til tomorrow morning.
The Turkey Tracker turkey brining for 20 hours.
Hi there! We’ve just had some friends over for Taco Tuesday and made some cranberry sauce in parallel; the new batch for this year has loads of ginger and citrus with pear and clove hints. It’s in the canning pot right now sterilizing! We have three cans from last year we might try in a vertical tasting.
Note from Robin: One of the first things I learned about Chris when I met him was the story of his famous cranberry sauce making skillz. This year I documented his annual ritual in photos:
Our FAQ probably answers most of your questions about the why and how of Turkey Tracker, but I wanted to share a bit about our temperature tracking system. From the FAQ:
Our ambient and smoker temperature sensors are bolt-on thermocouples with glass-insulated wire rated to 480degC (900degF). The probe for the turkey itself is a custom ordered probe that has a advanced ceramic insulation made by 3M that’s rated to 1200degC (2200degF). The thermocouples generate a current proportional to the temperature, which we amplify with an Analog Devices AD595 chip. The AD595 is then connected to an Arduino microcontroller board that is programmed to output the temperature, in Celsius, over USB. We have a ruby script that collects the data on the serial line and converts it to Fahrenheit. For graphing, we use RRDTool. The data is polled every minute. The steps you see in the graph also depict minute intervals.
Here’s a picture of the finished product:
Completed Wirebird 2.0 Rig
Last year, we didn’t have the high temperature wires, and we lost our sensors when they touched the shell of the smoker. We track the bird temperature (looking for 160° in the breast), the air in the smoker (we want to keep it between 200° and 225°) and the ambient temperature (we can expect about 50° to 55°). We will probably move the bird to the oven for finishing, so that we can eat at a reasonable hour, when it hits about 140°.
In addition to graphing the temperature, the data collection script also sends updates for major events and warnings if one of the temperatures veers outside the norm so that we can quickly address the situation. Standing in 50° weather with smoke billowing out into your face is tough to keep up, even when it’s sunny out.
The leaves have really turned here, and they are dumping off the trees. Any high-traffic entry is strewn with red and yellow folliage that came in on the soles of our shoes. Now that Halloween has officially come and gone, we can start talking about Thanksgiving and Turkey Tracker in earnest. Forget Christmas, November is really the most wonderful time of the year.
This year is looking to be an excellent event. We’re expecting 12 people for dinner, with the possibility of a couple more showing up for dessert or appetizers earlier or later in the day. We’re going to be getting the menu together soon too, so we know what everyone is up to, and we’ll share that with you all.
We’ve got the hardware figured out, and the website is ready to go. Next I need to get the camera location planned and ensure that we have everything set for a stable network connection for the laptops that drive the show. This year, I’m hoping to setup a second camera directly above the smoker, that we can cut to when we lift the lid for action shots of the bird.
Thanksgiving is mere weeks away. We just started this blog so I’m going to post a few belated updates about what we’ve already done in prep for the big day:
And me? Um, I took some photos. And started up this blog. My responsibilities are pretty much: moral support, spreading the word, and cooking some sort of dish with yams.
Turkey Tracker Blog 