Turkey burgers present something of a challenge to the smoker--how do you keep the smoke from overwhelming the meat's delicate flavour, and how do you keep the burgers from drying out?
Here's what I tried yesterday on my new Bradley 4-rack digital, and I'm happy to say the results were excellent.
Ingredients are simply ground turkey from Costco, 1 tbsp of Club House brand Italiano seasoning, 2 tbsp of fine bread crumbs for every 3/4 pound of ground turkey and one slice of onion for each burger patty.
A lot of purists like Bobby Flay object to bread crumbs in burgers, but a restaurateur friend of mine once said that if you mixed seasonings directly into ground meats, the seasonings get transformed by the proteins in the meat and lose their flavour--but if you mix the seasonings into the bread crumbs and then into the meat, the seasonings keep their flavour. I don't know whom to believe, but my friend's method works for me.
ANYWAY! Once I mixed the ground turkey, seasoning and bread crumbs and form them into 1/4 pound patties about an inch thick, I preheated the smoker for 250 F and loaded the smoke generator with alder (chosen so as to avoid too strong a smoke). Then I cut one slice of onion per patty and laid them on the smoker rack. Then I put a patty on each slice of onion. My idea was that the moisture in the onion would keep the meat from drying out. I also dusted the tops of the patties lightly with a standard rib rub I keep around for general purposes.
Then I smoked the patties for an hour. Both the patties and the onion were lightly smoked, and I built my burgers by putting the onion-and-patty combination directly into the bun.
I thought the results were great. The burgers were perfectly done and yet very moist. The smoked onion slices contributed to the smoke flavour too.
I wish I'd taken pictures. I should mention that although I preset the temperature for 250F, it generally was running lower than that, probably an average of 235 or so.
Anyway, I invite forum members to try this out.
Sounds good (even for turkey burgers) but really would like to see them :'(
Sounds great but like has been said on here many times before - no pictures never happened. ;D
To what internal temperature did you take your burgers?