Sam Sifton is the founding editor of New York Times Cooking, author of the cookbook Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well, and a former New York Times restaurant critic. Every Thanksgiving, when he prepares multiple turkeys for 30-ish guests at his eastern Long Island home, he adds one more appellation to his impressive list of culinary credentials: He becomes, by his own admission, “that guy.”
“I’m an enthusiastic Thanksgiving cook, and I’m that guy who has a lot of different ovens going, who is cooking things that require outdoor space, and who probably has a fire extinguisher nearby,” Sam explained in a video interview. “I generally do a number of turkeys—I’ll roast a turkey, I’ll fry a turkey—and in my turkey repertoire, one of the pieces of sheet music I really like to play is smoked turkey.”
Given how glorious smoked turkey can taste, it’s easy to understand why. The New York Times Cooking recipe for smoked turkey states that smoking (also known as smoke-roasting or barbecuing) delivers “rich, evocative flavor” and “incomparable succulence.” Meanwhile, Sam’s personal review is perhaps even more of a rave. As he puts it, “I love that smoked bird, man.”
Notably, Sam—whose current job title is assistant managing editor of The New York Times—didn’t write that recipe, which calls for a charcoal grill or pellet smoker grill. In fact, he’s found that smoking a whole bird in such an appliance, while orchestrating an entire Thanksgiving feast, can be a headache. The main problem is that traditional smoking devices require too much babysitting.
In search of a more hands-off preparation, Sam got turned on to a small, nifty piece of equipment that many hardcore smoking enthusiasts have in their arsenals: a smoker tube. Specifically, the adjustable-length A-MAZE-N Stainless Steel Tube Smoker, which he has used to smoke turkeys on his outdoor gas grill for nearly a decade.
