A Griller Mystery
By John O’Bryan
Until seven years ago, at the ripe young age of fifty-five, I had never cooked. Seriously, never. Totally inept, I didn’t have the foggiest idea where to begin. This may sound like an exaggeration, but just ask my family. I still would be able to claim this distinction if I hadn’t been forced into cooking because of a stupid family reunion my wife, Kelly, claimed she had to go to. She left, and a few days into my Alone Period, the magic clothes cleaner stopped producing clothes, and the cold thing with two doors stopped producing food.
I was left desperate and wanting, so I boiled an egg. Please note that I did not say I boiled eggs, plural. I boiled an egg, singular, and it required watching a ten-minute YouTube video three times to figure it out, but I was determined. I boiled only one egg because I did not want to risk the derision of my wife, who no doubt would discover my folly and make fun of me for boiling a dozen eggs that, when cracked, probably would ooze yellow jelly.
When my egg was done, I set it on the counter and stared at it, wondering if I should eat it. Salmonella is a real thing, and even though I removed the egg from the magic cooler and immediately immersed it in water on the stove, heating it up could have rapidly incubated the poison, killing me the instant I put it in my mouth. In a moment of rogue indifference, I grabbed the egg and cracked it. The shell stuck fast. I picked at it carefully, but it would not peel correctly, and when I finally was able to remove the shell, all that was left in my hand was a little yellow ball of yolk. It was pretty, an orb of sunshine. It seemed cooked, but when I popped it in my mouth, after liberally coating it with salt, it stuck like a piece of sulphurous taffy. It took five minutes and eleven toothpicks to get the stuff from between my teeth. This was the last time I attempted to cook anything…until recently, when I did something really stupid.
You might guess I’m not a foodie. If I partake of a nice meal, I’m thankful and enjoy it, but the truth is, even if it was the best meal I had ever eaten, I could eat a bowl of cereal (vanilla, not cinnamon) three times a day for the rest of my life and be just as happy. I never complain about food, no matter how bad it tastes, and am grateful for every meal set before me.
The problem is that my best friend Dave is a gourmet cook. It’s not what he does for a living, but he loves to cook almost more than anything, and whenever we get together, he goes on and on about how he cooked this thing or that. He tells me in great detail how he prepares his favorite cuts of meat (why you need more than one cut is beyond me) or how he loved the salmon he recently made for his family (I had salmon almost every night when I was young and just to hear the word “salmon” can elicit a gag response), or how he blanched the beans before brazing, caramelizing, glazing, deglazing, brining, and dredging them. As he pontificates, my eyes caramelize and don’t deglaze until he stops talking or I can change the subject to something more interesting, like what kind of mouse traps he uses in his garage.
More than anything, I like to buy things, and one evening, Dave leveraged this fact by playing an unexpected card. We were sitting on my deck, watching the evening sun turn Moscow Mountain a beautiful shade of orange. The fire burned nicely, and even though I had started in on the inspiring topic of gravel versus river rock for driveways, he once again began to talk about food.
“Pellet grills. Am I right?” he started.
“Um, what’s a pellet grill?” I stupidly asked.
“It’s a grill that uses pellets to smoke and then cook anything you put on it.” He took out his phone and pulled up a picture of a chunk of meat he had smoked and then cut into. He pointed to a thin rim of red at the edge of the meat. “That’s the smoke ring. Need I say more?”
“Yeah, a lot more, actually. Like the reason I would ever care to have a ring of smoke in anything I would consume.”
“It makes even the worst cuts of meat worth eating.”
“Can it smoke cereal?” I asked, trying to throw him off the subject.
“Yep.”
“What?”
I listened for the next ten minutes as he talked about all the things a pellet grill can smoke, which included: beef, pig, deer, elk, fish, fruit, veggies, and how smoke even makes nuts and seeds, and cereals taste amazing.
He told me I could smoke ice if I wanted my bourbon to taste smoky. I stopped listening to his blatherings as visions of smoked cereal floated in my head, and then asked the dumbest question I’ve ever asked in my life.
“Are you sure this isn’t just cooking in disguise?”
Dave looked exasperated. “It’s grilling and it’s something every real man needs to know how to do,” he declared with a finality that was like an exclamation point. I heard the questioning of my manhood, but still tried to escape.
“I hate cooking. I would hate grilling.”
Dave took a sip of his bourbon and tilted his cowboy hat back. “It’s not the same as cooking. It’s grilling and it’s so easy, even a helpless little man like you could do it.”
I was sunk and knew it. I navigated on my phone to the website of the brand of pellet grill he told me to buy. I hesitated and then looked at my puny bicep. I flexed it a few times, stuck out my chest, sucked in my gut, and tapped, “Buy now.” If I had been listening closely, I would have heard the sword of Damocles unclick and begin its slow descent towards one of the worst food experiences of my life.
Dave was wrong. Grilling is cooking, it’s just done outside. It turned out I hated grilling even more than boiling an egg. There are too many variables and things to know. You can’t just throw meat onto the grill and cook it without first marinating it, or brining it, or touching it. Once I put the meat on the grill, it eventually turned a golden brown, which fooled me into thinking it was ready to eat, but when I placed it on the table for everyone to enjoy, and someone cut into a piece, blood poured out like it was alive.
Gourmet cook, David Leach. Courtesy of John O’Bryan.
Goopy turkey. Courtesy of John O’Bryan.
Smoked turkey when it is done. Photo credit: Treg Owings.
Smoker. Photo credit: John O’Bryan.
Turkey being smoked. Photo credit: Treg Owings.
To keep this from happening again, I purchased a digital meat thermometer to stick in the largest patty of meat. I reasoned if the largest piece was done, the smaller pieces should be done too. Yeah, not so much. What you aren’t told is that different areas of a pellet grill have varying temperatures. Even though the computer says it’s a uniform 350 degrees, only one section of the grill will be that temperature. The others will hover between 200 and 350 degrees, and while the largest chunk of meat may be perfectly done, the rest of the pieces will run red. To alleviate the chance of my entire family experiencing the joys of explosive diarrhea, I grilled everything to a crisp and then microwaved what remained, just to be sure. But after that, whenever Dave visited, I never microwaved his burgers.
Oh, and cereal on the grill? Yeah…no. It’s not good.
Whenever it’s my day to grill, Kelly gives me ample warning weeks in advance and then texts reminders as the day draws closer, so I’m mentally prepared when my cooking day arrives and won’t lock myself in the closet. When I get home on my day of cooking and see the burgers neatly laid out on a tray, my shoulders slump like I’m a human Gumby. I shuffle to the garage to get the thermometer, and then to the kitchen to get the meat, and then to the grill to put it on.
Given all this, it will be a mystery to you why, oh why, I thought it would be a good idea to grill the Christmas turkey.
I blame my friend and neighbor, Treg. He’s also a foodie and an expert griller. One day, as I stood in my driveway, I saw smoke rising from the pellet grill on his back deck.
“What are you cooking?”
I wish I had never asked. I should have just pointed to his tires and told him how many miles I thought he had left on them.
“Smoking.”
“What?”
“It’s not cooking, it’s smoking.”
“Right, smoking.”
“I’m spatchcocking a turkey.”
Spatchcocking sounded to me like a medieval torture technique, but he took my horrified glance as an opening to tell me about his grilling technique, his brine recipe, and the rub he used. Apparently, rubbing a turkey or chicken, or beef muscle (also known as cuts of meat) may sound like kindness to the animal, but it’s only done after it’s been butchered. I paid little attention to the conversation, having gotten good at nodding and smiling while thinking about other things, like, say, compost piles. It took me a few moments to realize he had stopped talking and looked like he was waiting for a response of some kind. He asked again.
“It’s probably done. Do you want to try a piece?
“Um, sure.”
When he finally got the turkey off the grill and cut it up, he handed me a piece. I slowly put it in my mouth, and then everything stopped. The flavor was indescribable. It was the very best piece of meat I had ever eaten. It might have been better than cereal.
I walked home in a daze, the wheels turning, the memory of the meat still fresh upon me. A crazy idea churned in my head. What if I cooked the Christmas turkey this year?
Christmas was still a few weeks away, and during the days leading up to it, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching the very best way to cook a turkey on a pellet grill. The more I researched, the more I wanted to do this. Everyone I read or watched seemed to think spatchcocking was the bomb, but this technique required the turkey to be splayed out on the grill. The approach might make for flavorful meat, but it would look more like roadkill than a Norman Rockwell painting as I put it on the table, and more than anything, I wanted this foray into cooking, I mean grilling, to look and taste perfect on Christmas Day.
A few days before the holiday, I sat next to my wife on the couch, something I never do, since I’m kind of scared of her most days. She looked at me and smiled.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I want to give you an early Christmas present.”
“I didn’t get you anything. We never get each other presents.”
“This is different. I think you’ll like this one. I want to grill the Christmas turkey this year.”
She stared at me like I was crazy for even thinking such a thing.
“Okay, I know. It’s out of character…”
“It’s not just out of character. It’s lunacy, is what it is. You know nothing about cooking a turkey.”
“Grilling.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ve been researching. It’s easy…and it’s good. It will be the best turkey we’ve ever had.”
“No.”
“Come on, it will be fun.”
“Listen, John. I know nothing about this, and neither do you. I want to be very clear. If you do this and something goes wrong, and it will, I do not want to be involved, and I don’t want any added stress to the already stressful Christmas meal. Do you understand? I do not want to be involved.”
I nodded. “Got it. You will not be involved. Nothing will go wrong. Merry Christmas.”
I stood up.
“I certainly hope so,” she said as she turned back to her book.
According to those who know, the grilling time for a turkey is twelve to fifteen minutes per pound. I have a communications degree from the University of Idaho, but forty years ago, math wasn’t a required class for me. I checked my numbers five times. When I turned to Kelly to ask if she would double-check them, she pointed at me and put on the “Don’t you dare ask” look. I didn’t ask. According to my calculations, a twenty-pound turkey would take between four and five hours to be fully cooked. It was Christmas Eve, and I was ready.
Christmas is normally a joyous occasion in our house, unless the tree falls over, which it has [see “The King Saul Tree,” IDAHO magazine, December 2023]. We have snacks and mimosas, and presents in the morning, and a beautiful family dinner in the afternoon. I was up long before any of the festivities could begin. I had to get the carcass prepared and ready to put on the grill. I cleaned and rubbed and slathered the bird with all the things I had read about on the internet that would make this the best Christmas turkey ever.
I had filled the hopper with apple pellets to give the turkey an extra-special flavor that would be talked about for years to come. Things were going well, and I thought I might even have to start a YouTube channel or blog to teach people how to make awesome turkey. I even began to think that grilling may be different than cooking after all.
I placed my new wireless thermometer in the thickest part of the meat, making sure the tip wasn’t touching a bone. I would smoke the turkey for an hour at 225 degrees and then turn it up to the cooking temperature of 350 degrees. After an hour, the temperature of the turkey had risen only a few degrees and was still a long way from the finished temperature of 165. I turned the grill to 350.
I sat in my chair and breathed a sigh of relief. It was all going as planned. In five hours, I would pull it off the grill, place it on the table, brown and steaming, and enjoy the oohs and aahs of my family.
Then all hell broke loose, literally. I watched as the temperature of the turkey began climbing rapidly. And I mean rapidly. It looked like a speedometer going zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds. I searched the internet. It said the meat’s temperature will sometimes rise quickly and then stall and stay there for hours. This was false hope. I waited for the stall, but it never came. It just kept rising. It was like a portal had opened directly to Hades, heating my Christmas turkey with a nuclear flamethrower.
I ran out to my grill to check the temperature. It was holding steady at 350. I turned it down to 300, which did nothing to stop the ascent. In the one hour since I had turned the temperature up to 350, the meat had reached the finished temperature of 165 degrees.
I ran inside and screamed, “Kelly, the turkey is done! What do I do?”
It was her turn to scream at me. “I knew this would happen! How would I know what to do? I don’t want to be involved, remember? How could you do this to me on Christmas?”
I called Treg. He was not much help. “Um, I have no idea. Maybe take it off the grill, wrap it in a thick towel, and put it in a cooler until dinner.”
It was something. I did what he said. The cooler sat in the corner and stared at me all day. I feared that if I opened it, the contents would jump out at me like a grotesque jack-in-the-box and chase me around the house.
In spite of the cooler of pestilence, we still had a very nice Christmas morning. To her credit, Kelly didn’t say anything about me being an idiot, although when she looked at me, her smile might have been a bit more forced than usual.
When the afternoon Christmas dinner rolled around, everyone helped set the table and arrange bowls of stuffing, yams, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green bean casserole so they could be easily reached and passed. When the cutting board was set in the middle and the candles were lit, all eyes turned to me. By now, everyone knew why the cooler was so prominently displayed in the corner. I rose ceremoniously from my chair and walked to the cooler. I turned it so no one could see inside as I opened it, which I quickly did. I pulled out the turkey still wrapped in the beach towel. As I laid it on the cutting board, surfers and sunbathers gawked at us from the towel, looking for all the world as if they had been forced to live in hell for the last few hours.
I prayed as I unwrapped the towel, and to my surprise, a brown, fully cooked, and steaming turkey sat in front of me. It was beautiful. Everyone gasped, and Kelly breathed a sigh of relief.
Okay, I’m lying. As I unwrapped it, a collective gasp did arise, but it was a gasp of horror. The turkey looked pale and pimply, like a fish dragged from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The wings were flung out to the side, and the drumsticks hung limp and listless, like bags of jelly, barely clinging to the carcass.
“Oooh, it’s better than I thought it was going to be,” I said, trying to maintain my composure.
Everyone fell silent as I picked up the knife and cut into it. The skin popped, and gelatin spewed over the table. Everyone screamed and jumped back. Everyone, that is, except Kelly. She just stared at me.
“Remove it now,” she said, in low, even tones.
I picked up our Christmas turkey. It hung over my hands and, as I dumped it into the cooler with a squishy thud, I thought I heard it scream. I shut the lid and dragged it out of the house.
When I came back in, the table had been cleaned and everyone was cheerfully passing side dishes around the table.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said to my wife. “I was stupid to think I could do this.”
“I forgive you,” she said, not for the first time in our marriage. “I just wish we had a main dish to go with this.”
My eyes lit up. “Be right back.”
A few minutes later, I stood at the table, proudly displaying what I had found. I held the box up high so everyone could see it.
“Would anyone like a big bowl of cereal?”
John O'Bryan Writes 