The Turkey Day Plans – The Turkey
November19
Here is a preview of some of the Thanksgiving Day recipes I’ll be whipping up for Sebastian’s family.
Roast Turkey
I know, it’s a given. However, I’ve never made a turkey before. However, I placed an order with our local meat market and will be getting a freshly killed locally raised 12lb turkey. No Butterballs here. But then I’m going to need to do something with it when it arrives. Hmmm… Al Gore’s Interwebz saved me – I hope. Here are the instructions I’m following for roasting a turkey.
- 1 turkey
- Juice of a lemon
- Salt and pepper
- Olive oil or melted butter
- 1/2 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
- Tops and bottoms of a bunch of celery
- 2 carrots
- Parsley
- Sprigs of fresh rosemary, thyme
- To start, if the turkey has been refrigerated, bring it to room temperature before cooking. Keep it in its plastic wrapping until you are ready to cook it. While in the refrigerator, and or while you are bringing it to room temp, have the bird resting in a pan, so that if the plastic covering leaks for any reason, you are confining the juices to the pan. If you get a frozen turkey, you will need to defrost it in the refrigerator for several days first. Allow approximately 5 hours of defrosting for every pound. So, if you have a 15 pound turkey, it will take about 75 hours to defrost it in the refrigerator, or around 3 days. Remove the neck and giblets (heart, gizzard, liver).
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
- Wash out the turkey with water. Pull out any remaining feather stubs in the turkey skin. Pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Lather the inside of the cavity with the juice of half a lemon. Take a small handful of salt and rub all over the inside of the turkey.
- For flavor, put in inside the turkey a half a yellow onion, peeled and quartered, a bunch of parsley, a couple of carrots, and some tops and bottoms of celery. You may need to cap the body cavity with some aluminum foil so that the stuffing doesn’t easily fall out. Close up the turkey cavity with either string (not nylon string!) or metal skewers. Make sure that the turkey’s legs are tied together, held close to the body, and tie a string around the turkey body to hold the wings in close. The neck cavity can be stuffed with parsley and tied closed with thin skewers and string.
- Rub either melted butter or olive oil all over the outside of the turkey. Sprinkle salt generously all over the outside of the turkey (or have had it soaking in salt-water brine before starting this process). Sprinkle pepper over the turkey.
- Place turkey BREAST DOWN on the bottom of a rack over a sturdy roasting pan big enough to catch all the drippings. … Cooking the turkey breast down means the skin over the breast will not get so brown. However, all of the juices from the cooking turkey will fall down into the breast while cooking. And the resulting bird will have the most succulent turkey breast imaginable. Add several sprigs of fresh (if possible) thyme and rosemary to the outside of the turkey.
- Put the turkey in the oven. Check the cooking directions on the turkey packaging. Gourmet turkeys often don’t take as long to cook. With the turkeys mom gets, she recommends cooking time of about 15 minutes for every pound. For the 15 lb turkey, start the cooking at 400 F for the first 1/2 hour. Then reduce the heat to 350 F for the next 2 hours. Then reduce the heat further to 225 F for the next hour to hour and a half. If you want the breast to be browned as well, you can turn over the bird for the last 15-20 minutes of cooking, at an oven temp of 300°F. (Oven must be at least 250°F for browning to occur.) Note that if you do this, you will have a higher risk of overcooking the turkey breast. … Start taking temperature readings with a meat thermometer, inserted deep into the thickest part of the turkey breast and thigh, a half hour before the turkey should be done. The dark meat in the thigh should be about 175 F. The white meat in the breast should be 160 F to 165 F. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, spear the breast with a knife. The turkey juices should be clear, not pink.
- Once you remove the turkey from the oven, let it rest for 15-20 minutes. Turn the turkey breast side up to carve it.
Related posts:
The key here is breast down. It doesn’t always look beautiful, but turkeys aren’t lovely animals anyway.
I usually soak my turkey in brine, crushed garlic, chopped leeks, sliced ginger and peppercorns for 2 days prior to roasting. This infuses all that flavor and water into the turkey and when you roast it covered with aluminum foil until the last 10 minutes (when you take off the foil and turn up the heat to brown), the turkey comes out full of flavor and moist.
Oh yeah, make sure your fridge is big enough to hold the bucket with the turkey and brine solution. Either that or use a 5-day cooler and top it off with ice after the turkey is in the brine bath, cover and let sit untouched for 2 days. On cooking day, take turkey out and get off anything that’s clinging to it. The organ meats pack can also be brined in the same solution and the gravy that’s to be made from that is thismuch betterer.
+1 on the brine. Adds a lot of flavor and makes the turkey very moist. The only problem I have ever had was getting the skin nice and crispy.
Chiming in on brine here. too.
I leave mine out in the garage, the bucket topped off with ice, for at least 24 hours.
If you get Food Network, the Good Eats guy, Alton Brown, does a real good show on it. Lots of tips and technique.
I have not brined a bird yet, but I’ve heard many good things. This year, I brine. I’ve done one in a turkey bag, it was moist past the point of goodness; you want roasted not braised. Learn from my mistakes…
The plan this year: (I have not done this yet, it may suck…) brine the bird, saute onions shallots and garlic in a bit of butter, add celery and parsley, and blend it together with a stick of butter. That goes under the skin. Soak another stick of butter into four slices of bread; that goes on the breast. Roast low and slow, the butter in the bread makes a self basting turkey. Pull the bread off, heat the oven, and crisp up the bird for a strong finish.
It sounds good; we’ll see.
But here’s the key point I’m clear on: Take the pan drippings, and if you have a gravy separator, great, if not use a turkey baster to draw off the fat from the top of the drippings. Cook the fat (mostly melted butter) and stir in an equal amount of flour to make a roux, then add the watery drippings to the mix. You’ve just made a wonderful gravy. If you like (and I do) you can cook the bagged organs in the pan first, then dice/puree them and throw them into the mix. Salt and pepper to taste, and you have just wrung every ounce of flavor out of your gravy.
I’ll try brining the organs, too. Good suggestion, OrangeNeck.
Oh, a few more points:
One, do not brine a “pre-basted” turkey; it’s already full of salt. Does not apply to you this year, but be aware.
Two, do not add salt to your rub if you brine. I will be using unsalted butter on my brined bird.
Three, again do not add salt to the gravy if you brine the bird, or at least not until the very very end.
Remember, cooking a turkey is like cooking a steak: Start with a good cut of meat, then don’t ruin it.