The Official Turkey of Dish Gracepoint Berkeley
>> Tuesday, November 18, 2008
My peer, Tim So, made some good turkeys in the past. He has a lot of experience on this topic. Whenever he cooks a bird, there are little (if any) leftovers and always compliments. Here's some tips he sent me:
How to make "not-nasty" turkey FAST.
1. COMPLETELY THAW YOUR TURKEY! You probably want to buy it at least 3 or 4 days before the day depending on weight. The turkeys at Safeway have convenient little notes indicating how much time it needs to be in the refrigerator to thoroughly thaw. If you are reading this and it's Saturday night or Sunday morning before TC then I would just buy a fresh turkey (0.97USD/lbs at Lucky's, I believe.) If you have a turkey that's "mostly" or "sort of" thawed put it in a water bath with water changes every time the water feels like ice water. If you're too environmentally conscious or lazy to keep changing the water, just leave it in the same water for longer.
2. Clean your oven (not absolutely necessary, but it will help keep the amount of smoke down.) Most modern ovens have a clean function that nukes everything into ashes so that all you have to do is wipe up the crispy critters the oven leaves behind.
3. Place one oven rack at the second to lowest position in your oven and remove the other rack (such that your turkey will be centered in the oven). Preheat your oven to 475 degrees.
4. Remove the giblets and neck from the turkey (these things taste great if you know how to cook them: I wouldn't throw them away.) Using kitchen shears, trim off the excess fat at the back of the turkey, including the spade shaped chunk-o-fat where the feathers come out of. Do the same at the front where the head was severed. If you know what you're doing, you can use these cut off chunks and giblets to make super-awesome-sauce gravy later. De-truss the legs if your turkey came trussed.
5. Rinse and thoroughly dry the outside skin of the turkey. You don't have to be as vigilant with the inner cavity, but you want to have the turkey as dry as possible for this next part.
6. Take oil of your choosing and rub the turkey all over, using about one tablespoon per 7-8 pounds. The turkey should be glistening but not dripping.
6. Make a mixture of salt and pepper, about 1 tablespoon each per 5 pounds. Add any additional seasonings you want your turkey skin to taste like, but making sure to add at least one aromatic herb (our house likes using Korean crushed red pepper flakes, ground Sichuan peppercorns, basil, oregano, rosemary, cayenne, thyme, garlic, or paprika. The flavor will likely not penetrate all that far, so it's not something to stress out over. If you follow my later directions on how to make gravy from the drippings, then your gravy is going to taste like whatever you add right now.)
7. Generously sprinkle your seasoning mixture from the previous step all over the turkey, trying to just do one pass per side of the turkey (top, bottom, and sides). Sprinkle some into the inner cavity as well. The whole turkey should have a thin crust of salt, pepper, and herb. Make sure all of the skin is covered, moving around the wings and legs if necessary to get at the "arm-pits" and such if you need to. If you'd like a thicker crust, rub the skin with softened butter instead of oil as this will allow more stuff to stick.
8. Put your turkey breast side down into your roasting pan (this allows the turkey breast to absorb the drippings from the tastier parts of the turkey). If yours is not big enough, make protruding wings out of aluminum foil so that drippings will slide back into the roasting pan. You don't want this stuff to hit your oven since it's going to smoke like nuts. Also, please be sure to use a roasting pan that has at least an extra 3 or 4 cups volumetric capacity to store drippings without overflowing onto your recently cleaned oven. Take the wing tips of the turkey and tuck them under the "arm-pits" of the turkey. OPTIONAL: Make little foil socks for your turkey legs if you want them to look nice later. Make them go up about an inch.
9. If your oven is preheated by now, put the turkey with the drumsticks closest to the back wall of the oven: they should be about an inch away from the wall with the turkey perfectly centered and facing you. THIS IS IMPORTANT! If this is physically impossible in your oven, then you will have to rotate the turkey half way through the next step I am going to describe. Either way, try to get the dark meat close to a wall of the oven with the breast in the center. This will allow the dark meat to be done simultaneously with the white meat, which would otherwise really require a separate cooking temp/time. This is the main reason people's turkeys come out so nasty: the white meat is done much earlier than the dark if it's all cooked at the same temperature. Putting the dark meat close to an oven wall actually makes it cook at a higher temperature.
10. Cook turkey according to Tim's Turkey Time Table:
8-14 lbs. 45 minutes
15-20 lbs. 60-90 minutes
20+ lbs. 90 minutes
Please use a linear interpolation function to figure out how much time to leave your turkey in the oven. If you have the time, I would just check anything 15 lbs. or bigger at 1 hour no matter how long I think it's going to take.
If you couldn't get your turkey symmetric with the neck part facing you, then you'll have to rotate your turkey 180 degrees half way through cooking.
Try not to open the oven door during this period.
11. Take the turkey out and check the temperature in 4 locations: the inner thigh near the joint to the body and the breast near the center of the bird for both left and right sides of each. Hopefully the breast should be somewhere in the 140-150 range and the thighs will be in the 150-160 range. If not, stick it back in the oven with the coldest part close to the rear wall.
You may run into the following situations:
PROBLEM: Dark meat temp OK, white meat too cold
SOLUTION: Dark meat is too close to the rear wall: scootch up an inch or two and see if you can get both the white and dark meat in the sweet spot after another 5 or 10 minutes in the oven. If it's not working, just go to the next step as soon as the white meat temp is in the 140 zone. Dark meat can tolerate overcooking a lot better than you can tolerate salmonella.
PROBLEM: Dark meat too cold, White meat OK
SOLUTION: Try to put the drumsticks closer to the rear wall, but not touching. Just go ahead and go to the next step though. If the temperature of the dark meat is off by more than 20 degrees when the white meat is ok, try putting some ice packs on the chicken breast for 15 minutes before returning the bird to the oven.
12. It's time to flip the turkey, which isn't as easy as it might sound. Get a cutting board or lay out a large piece of aluminum foil big enough for the turkey to come out onto. Get two long, sturdy things (tongs, spatulae, spoons, etc.) and insert both into the cavity: one from the neck area and the other from the rear. Remove the turkey from your roaster onto this surface and flip it so that the breast side is up now. If the roaster looks dry and burnt, put it on your stove top on high and add water, scraping up the burnt junk. Baste the turkey breast with the oils and drippings from the bottom of the roasting pan. Put the turkey back into the roaster, breast side up.
13. Put the turkey back in the oven with the drumsticks still facing the rear oven wall if possible. Check on the internal temperature every 10 minutes until it hits 155 in the breast. If the skin looks like it's burning, loosely cover the area with an aluminum foil tent. Once you hit 155 in the breast, take the turkey out of the oven. If you're paranoid, you may also want to check the thighs again, which should be about 10 degrees higher. It's going to be very difficult to get the dark meat and white meat done simultaneously if you were not able to follow the directions about putting drumsticks close to the rear oven wall, but that's okay: if the thighs are not sufficiently hot even when the breast hits 155, I think the best option is to cut the thighs off and return them to the oven for a little while longer. Otherwise, you're going to get the classic "nice dark meat nasty white meat" turkey that we all don't like eating. Alternatively, if you have a blowtorch or other way of localized heating, try to cook the dark meat without harming the white.
**Don't just stick the whole turkey in for the sake of what will ultimately amount to something like 2 bites of undercooked turkey at the center of the thigh! Otherwise you'll have 1% of just right turkey and 99% gross turkey.**
14. Almost done, but don't slip up yet! Let the turkey sit for at least 20 minutes before you even think about cutting it up! If you cut it fresh out of the oven, you'll see lots of piping hot steam issuing forth from your cut. That's your visible cue that your turkey is drying out before your very eyes!
15. OPTION: Super-awesome-sauce-gravy making! Take the turkey out of the roaster and put it on a cutting board/large flat, foiled surface. Coarsely chop up the heart and gizzard of the turkey. Add a bit of water or cooking wine to your roaster, scraping up all the burnt on and brown junk until you get a brown sludge. Put the skin and fat chunks in the small pot and fry them until you render about 1/4 cup of fat. Discard the skin and stuff (or eat them if you're brave!). Stir fry the heart and gizzard chunks until just done and turn down the heat. Add 1/3 cup of flour and fry into a roux. Then add the brown sludge from the roaster and bring to a boil, adding water if necessary. Simmer for 20-30 minutes while your turkey is cooling. If you were gangster, you could have been boiling the turkey neck separately and using the resulting broth in place of water to thin out your sauce, but I forgot to mention that earlier. If you want to serve the liver, slice it into very thin slices and stir fry them until just done in some of the rendered turkey fat. You should eat these on the side with some crackers.
16. Carve the turkey. Start by removing the thighs by chopping away at the connecting tendons/ligaments near the hip ball joint. As you rotate the leg quarter, they will become apparent. A few quick slices and the ball should eventually pop out. If you like, do the same to the drumstick/thigh interface to separate them. Remove the wings using a similar method. To carve the breast, insert a fork along the center line of the breast. Starting from the outside edge of the breast, make cuts parallel to the axis of symmetry for the bird, about 1/4" thick until your knife ends up near your fork. Repeat with the other side of the turkey. The rest of the meat is easier to get to with your hands. Eat the dark meat by itself and the white meat with the gravy, though if you did everything right the white meat should be so juicy you won't need the gravy!
++++How to make a not only "not-nasty turkey", but one that I actually prefer eating to many kinds of chicken dishes++++
Do this the night before:
-Make sure your turkey is defrosted the night before. Prepare the turkey up through step 4.
-Make an injection paste consisting of 1 cup plain yogurt (with fat), 0.25 cup soy sauce, and .25 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons salt. You may need to boil the salt and sugar into the soy sauce before combining this with the yogurt if you think your syringe can't handle the grain size of your sugar or salt. Additionally, you may add whatever seasonings you want so long as you can dissolve it into the solution: solid seasonings tend to not distribute all that well. If the mixture is too thick such that it won't inject, dilute the mixture with milk, not water.
-Inject the turkey until it's completely saturated: do one injection point for each thigh and drumstick and two for each breast. For the thighs, I like to come in from the cavity to preserve the skin's appearance. If you can manage, you can do the same with the breast if you're careful and go into the neck area through the rib cage. You'll see the turkey expanding with each injection: I stop injecting stuff when it looks like the turkey is about to explode. You know you've reached saturation point when injection at one location causes the solution to spurt out another hole (yes, this IS that awesome.) Pour the 1/2 of the remainder of the solution into the bottom of whatever container the turkey is in and put the last of the remaining solution into the bird's cavity and store the turkey breast side down.
OPTION: I don't necessarily approve of this, but I've read you can substitute clarified butter or heavy cream for up to 3/4 of the yogurt and the same thing happens. Plus, you get massive fattage.
-You need at least 8 hours for the yogurt to works it's stuff on the meat. The next day, continue cooking the bird as I have described from step 5 onward.
Note to briners: If you have the resources to brine the bird and know what I'm talking about, you could also omit the soy sauce, salt and sugar and only inject yogurt. Then brine the bird as normal and cook according to the directions. If you have no idea what I'm talking about don't worry about it.
-If you want to do stuffing with this turkey, cook the stuffing separately. Put the stuffing in the bird after step 12 and continue with the rest of the directions.
Option: Spicy honey glazed Turkey
-make a honey glaze made out of 1 cup honey and .5 cup Korean crushed red pepper flakes (or make a whatever glaze by adding whatever to honey). After step 12 and while the turkey is out of the roaster, paint the whole turkey with the glaze before returning it to the roaster. Continue to coat the skin every 10 minutes when you check the temperature.
Option: Butterflied Turkey: Even FASTER cooking time
-With the breast side down, take a pair of kitchen shears and cut out the spine of the turkey. Using a pairing knife, cut a V shape following the contours of the white cartilaginous structure closer to the neck area separating the two breasts. Smack the structure with a hammer or something heavy (or ask Joe Hwang to do a round house kick to it.) Run your fingers along the underside contours of the piece and it should pop out with a little effort. Turn the turkey breast side up and press down on the breasts until the wishbone cracks and the ribs are spread out flat. Follow the directions for cooking as written, but start checking the temperature 20 minutes earlier than what I said before. I think a 15 pound turkey could cook in an hour using this method. This also allows a whole turkey to be cooked on a grill, but I wouldn't recommend that without the yogurt injection or brine or both.
Option: Putting junk in the cavity
-If you put very strong-smelling stuff in the cavity, it will make your turkey smell like that, but you could do the just as well by chopping it up and putting that stuff directly on the skin/under the skin. I personally think that putting random stuff in the turkey cavity doesn't do anything and it makes it more difficult to flip over. But if you're going to put something in there, as I mentioned, it's really only aromatics that work (celery, garlic, onion, shallot, various peppers/chiles, herbs). Putting fruit in the cavity generally doesn't do anything since the fruit flavors are so delicate that the intense roasting process destroys them. All you end up with is a little extra water floating around in the oven and some strange caramel brown fruity things leaking out of the turkey when finished. If you're concerned with moistness, put a tray of water in the oven at the same time: it's cheaper and you can refill it if it runs out.
Option: Turkey of Doom
-After step 12, lay strips of bacon in layers over the breast, alternating direction with each layer. This will deep fry the breast in pork fat. You'll also get a little helmet of bacon to eat along with your turkey. If you combine this with the clarified butter injection, you are awesome.
Most importantly, make sure Jesus is your Lord and Savior! A nasty turkey isn't so bad in light of eternity.
How to make "not-nasty" turkey FAST.
1. COMPLETELY THAW YOUR TURKEY! You probably want to buy it at least 3 or 4 days before the day depending on weight. The turkeys at Safeway have convenient little notes indicating how much time it needs to be in the refrigerator to thoroughly thaw. If you are reading this and it's Saturday night or Sunday morning before TC then I would just buy a fresh turkey (0.97USD/lbs at Lucky's, I believe.) If you have a turkey that's "mostly" or "sort of" thawed put it in a water bath with water changes every time the water feels like ice water. If you're too environmentally conscious or lazy to keep changing the water, just leave it in the same water for longer.
2. Clean your oven (not absolutely necessary, but it will help keep the amount of smoke down.) Most modern ovens have a clean function that nukes everything into ashes so that all you have to do is wipe up the crispy critters the oven leaves behind.
3. Place one oven rack at the second to lowest position in your oven and remove the other rack (such that your turkey will be centered in the oven). Preheat your oven to 475 degrees.
4. Remove the giblets and neck from the turkey (these things taste great if you know how to cook them: I wouldn't throw them away.) Using kitchen shears, trim off the excess fat at the back of the turkey, including the spade shaped chunk-o-fat where the feathers come out of. Do the same at the front where the head was severed. If you know what you're doing, you can use these cut off chunks and giblets to make super-awesome-sauce gravy later. De-truss the legs if your turkey came trussed.
5. Rinse and thoroughly dry the outside skin of the turkey. You don't have to be as vigilant with the inner cavity, but you want to have the turkey as dry as possible for this next part.
6. Take oil of your choosing and rub the turkey all over, using about one tablespoon per 7-8 pounds. The turkey should be glistening but not dripping.
6. Make a mixture of salt and pepper, about 1 tablespoon each per 5 pounds. Add any additional seasonings you want your turkey skin to taste like, but making sure to add at least one aromatic herb (our house likes using Korean crushed red pepper flakes, ground Sichuan peppercorns, basil, oregano, rosemary, cayenne, thyme, garlic, or paprika. The flavor will likely not penetrate all that far, so it's not something to stress out over. If you follow my later directions on how to make gravy from the drippings, then your gravy is going to taste like whatever you add right now.)
7. Generously sprinkle your seasoning mixture from the previous step all over the turkey, trying to just do one pass per side of the turkey (top, bottom, and sides). Sprinkle some into the inner cavity as well. The whole turkey should have a thin crust of salt, pepper, and herb. Make sure all of the skin is covered, moving around the wings and legs if necessary to get at the "arm-pits" and such if you need to. If you'd like a thicker crust, rub the skin with softened butter instead of oil as this will allow more stuff to stick.
8. Put your turkey breast side down into your roasting pan (this allows the turkey breast to absorb the drippings from the tastier parts of the turkey). If yours is not big enough, make protruding wings out of aluminum foil so that drippings will slide back into the roasting pan. You don't want this stuff to hit your oven since it's going to smoke like nuts. Also, please be sure to use a roasting pan that has at least an extra 3 or 4 cups volumetric capacity to store drippings without overflowing onto your recently cleaned oven. Take the wing tips of the turkey and tuck them under the "arm-pits" of the turkey. OPTIONAL: Make little foil socks for your turkey legs if you want them to look nice later. Make them go up about an inch.
9. If your oven is preheated by now, put the turkey with the drumsticks closest to the back wall of the oven: they should be about an inch away from the wall with the turkey perfectly centered and facing you. THIS IS IMPORTANT! If this is physically impossible in your oven, then you will have to rotate the turkey half way through the next step I am going to describe. Either way, try to get the dark meat close to a wall of the oven with the breast in the center. This will allow the dark meat to be done simultaneously with the white meat, which would otherwise really require a separate cooking temp/time. This is the main reason people's turkeys come out so nasty: the white meat is done much earlier than the dark if it's all cooked at the same temperature. Putting the dark meat close to an oven wall actually makes it cook at a higher temperature.
10. Cook turkey according to Tim's Turkey Time Table:
8-14 lbs. 45 minutes
15-20 lbs. 60-90 minutes
20+ lbs. 90 minutes
Please use a linear interpolation function to figure out how much time to leave your turkey in the oven. If you have the time, I would just check anything 15 lbs. or bigger at 1 hour no matter how long I think it's going to take.
If you couldn't get your turkey symmetric with the neck part facing you, then you'll have to rotate your turkey 180 degrees half way through cooking.
Try not to open the oven door during this period.
11. Take the turkey out and check the temperature in 4 locations: the inner thigh near the joint to the body and the breast near the center of the bird for both left and right sides of each. Hopefully the breast should be somewhere in the 140-150 range and the thighs will be in the 150-160 range. If not, stick it back in the oven with the coldest part close to the rear wall.
You may run into the following situations:
PROBLEM: Dark meat temp OK, white meat too cold
SOLUTION: Dark meat is too close to the rear wall: scootch up an inch or two and see if you can get both the white and dark meat in the sweet spot after another 5 or 10 minutes in the oven. If it's not working, just go to the next step as soon as the white meat temp is in the 140 zone. Dark meat can tolerate overcooking a lot better than you can tolerate salmonella.
PROBLEM: Dark meat too cold, White meat OK
SOLUTION: Try to put the drumsticks closer to the rear wall, but not touching. Just go ahead and go to the next step though. If the temperature of the dark meat is off by more than 20 degrees when the white meat is ok, try putting some ice packs on the chicken breast for 15 minutes before returning the bird to the oven.
12. It's time to flip the turkey, which isn't as easy as it might sound. Get a cutting board or lay out a large piece of aluminum foil big enough for the turkey to come out onto. Get two long, sturdy things (tongs, spatulae, spoons, etc.) and insert both into the cavity: one from the neck area and the other from the rear. Remove the turkey from your roaster onto this surface and flip it so that the breast side is up now. If the roaster looks dry and burnt, put it on your stove top on high and add water, scraping up the burnt junk. Baste the turkey breast with the oils and drippings from the bottom of the roasting pan. Put the turkey back into the roaster, breast side up.
13. Put the turkey back in the oven with the drumsticks still facing the rear oven wall if possible. Check on the internal temperature every 10 minutes until it hits 155 in the breast. If the skin looks like it's burning, loosely cover the area with an aluminum foil tent. Once you hit 155 in the breast, take the turkey out of the oven. If you're paranoid, you may also want to check the thighs again, which should be about 10 degrees higher. It's going to be very difficult to get the dark meat and white meat done simultaneously if you were not able to follow the directions about putting drumsticks close to the rear oven wall, but that's okay: if the thighs are not sufficiently hot even when the breast hits 155, I think the best option is to cut the thighs off and return them to the oven for a little while longer. Otherwise, you're going to get the classic "nice dark meat nasty white meat" turkey that we all don't like eating. Alternatively, if you have a blowtorch or other way of localized heating, try to cook the dark meat without harming the white.
**Don't just stick the whole turkey in for the sake of what will ultimately amount to something like 2 bites of undercooked turkey at the center of the thigh! Otherwise you'll have 1% of just right turkey and 99% gross turkey.**
14. Almost done, but don't slip up yet! Let the turkey sit for at least 20 minutes before you even think about cutting it up! If you cut it fresh out of the oven, you'll see lots of piping hot steam issuing forth from your cut. That's your visible cue that your turkey is drying out before your very eyes!
15. OPTION: Super-awesome-sauce-gravy making! Take the turkey out of the roaster and put it on a cutting board/large flat, foiled surface. Coarsely chop up the heart and gizzard of the turkey. Add a bit of water or cooking wine to your roaster, scraping up all the burnt on and brown junk until you get a brown sludge. Put the skin and fat chunks in the small pot and fry them until you render about 1/4 cup of fat. Discard the skin and stuff (or eat them if you're brave!). Stir fry the heart and gizzard chunks until just done and turn down the heat. Add 1/3 cup of flour and fry into a roux. Then add the brown sludge from the roaster and bring to a boil, adding water if necessary. Simmer for 20-30 minutes while your turkey is cooling. If you were gangster, you could have been boiling the turkey neck separately and using the resulting broth in place of water to thin out your sauce, but I forgot to mention that earlier. If you want to serve the liver, slice it into very thin slices and stir fry them until just done in some of the rendered turkey fat. You should eat these on the side with some crackers.
16. Carve the turkey. Start by removing the thighs by chopping away at the connecting tendons/ligaments near the hip ball joint. As you rotate the leg quarter, they will become apparent. A few quick slices and the ball should eventually pop out. If you like, do the same to the drumstick/thigh interface to separate them. Remove the wings using a similar method. To carve the breast, insert a fork along the center line of the breast. Starting from the outside edge of the breast, make cuts parallel to the axis of symmetry for the bird, about 1/4" thick until your knife ends up near your fork. Repeat with the other side of the turkey. The rest of the meat is easier to get to with your hands. Eat the dark meat by itself and the white meat with the gravy, though if you did everything right the white meat should be so juicy you won't need the gravy!
++++How to make a not only "not-nasty turkey", but one that I actually prefer eating to many kinds of chicken dishes++++
Do this the night before:
-Make sure your turkey is defrosted the night before. Prepare the turkey up through step 4.
-Make an injection paste consisting of 1 cup plain yogurt (with fat), 0.25 cup soy sauce, and .25 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons salt. You may need to boil the salt and sugar into the soy sauce before combining this with the yogurt if you think your syringe can't handle the grain size of your sugar or salt. Additionally, you may add whatever seasonings you want so long as you can dissolve it into the solution: solid seasonings tend to not distribute all that well. If the mixture is too thick such that it won't inject, dilute the mixture with milk, not water.
-Inject the turkey until it's completely saturated: do one injection point for each thigh and drumstick and two for each breast. For the thighs, I like to come in from the cavity to preserve the skin's appearance. If you can manage, you can do the same with the breast if you're careful and go into the neck area through the rib cage. You'll see the turkey expanding with each injection: I stop injecting stuff when it looks like the turkey is about to explode. You know you've reached saturation point when injection at one location causes the solution to spurt out another hole (yes, this IS that awesome.) Pour the 1/2 of the remainder of the solution into the bottom of whatever container the turkey is in and put the last of the remaining solution into the bird's cavity and store the turkey breast side down.
OPTION: I don't necessarily approve of this, but I've read you can substitute clarified butter or heavy cream for up to 3/4 of the yogurt and the same thing happens. Plus, you get massive fattage.
-You need at least 8 hours for the yogurt to works it's stuff on the meat. The next day, continue cooking the bird as I have described from step 5 onward.
Note to briners: If you have the resources to brine the bird and know what I'm talking about, you could also omit the soy sauce, salt and sugar and only inject yogurt. Then brine the bird as normal and cook according to the directions. If you have no idea what I'm talking about don't worry about it.
-If you want to do stuffing with this turkey, cook the stuffing separately. Put the stuffing in the bird after step 12 and continue with the rest of the directions.
Option: Spicy honey glazed Turkey
-make a honey glaze made out of 1 cup honey and .5 cup Korean crushed red pepper flakes (or make a whatever glaze by adding whatever to honey). After step 12 and while the turkey is out of the roaster, paint the whole turkey with the glaze before returning it to the roaster. Continue to coat the skin every 10 minutes when you check the temperature.
Option: Butterflied Turkey: Even FASTER cooking time
-With the breast side down, take a pair of kitchen shears and cut out the spine of the turkey. Using a pairing knife, cut a V shape following the contours of the white cartilaginous structure closer to the neck area separating the two breasts. Smack the structure with a hammer or something heavy (or ask Joe Hwang to do a round house kick to it.) Run your fingers along the underside contours of the piece and it should pop out with a little effort. Turn the turkey breast side up and press down on the breasts until the wishbone cracks and the ribs are spread out flat. Follow the directions for cooking as written, but start checking the temperature 20 minutes earlier than what I said before. I think a 15 pound turkey could cook in an hour using this method. This also allows a whole turkey to be cooked on a grill, but I wouldn't recommend that without the yogurt injection or brine or both.
Option: Putting junk in the cavity
-If you put very strong-smelling stuff in the cavity, it will make your turkey smell like that, but you could do the just as well by chopping it up and putting that stuff directly on the skin/under the skin. I personally think that putting random stuff in the turkey cavity doesn't do anything and it makes it more difficult to flip over. But if you're going to put something in there, as I mentioned, it's really only aromatics that work (celery, garlic, onion, shallot, various peppers/chiles, herbs). Putting fruit in the cavity generally doesn't do anything since the fruit flavors are so delicate that the intense roasting process destroys them. All you end up with is a little extra water floating around in the oven and some strange caramel brown fruity things leaking out of the turkey when finished. If you're concerned with moistness, put a tray of water in the oven at the same time: it's cheaper and you can refill it if it runs out.
Option: Turkey of Doom
-After step 12, lay strips of bacon in layers over the breast, alternating direction with each layer. This will deep fry the breast in pork fat. You'll also get a little helmet of bacon to eat along with your turkey. If you combine this with the clarified butter injection, you are awesome.
Most importantly, make sure Jesus is your Lord and Savior! A nasty turkey isn't so bad in light of eternity.
13 comments:
wow tim, here in Taiwan, we recently heard this story of when you described yourself as "crazy" to a prospective employer and got hired, so I have this mental image of you as I read your turkey instruction, which caused me to laugh out loud a couple times at my cubicle at work. but anyway, i want to thank you for this great post. the taiwan oven we are using is much much smaller, so i don't think i can do the drumstick-closet-to-the-back-with-the-bird-PERFECTLY-symmetrical-to-me placement method, so i am trying to figure out how i can rotate the bird 1/2 way through 180 degree without opening the door of the oven... hmmm... :D anyway, i hope we can have not nasty turkey here... but really, thanks for the post,it's very very clear except for the part when you seem to have to abuse your bird with some kind of martial art technique combined with psychic ability to feel the chi of the bird or something... so we think we will forego that here... thanks again, happy thanksgiving!! :)
this is an awesome post. i was totally engrossed until the devastating gravy part, or was it the part about being gangster... =D thanks Tim! and thanks kaitlyn for the equally awesome comment! from gracepoint berkeley to gracepoint hsinchu - everyone wants to cook that perfect turkey (or "not nasty" turkey, according to this post)...
My favorite part of the recipe:
"Please use a linear interpolation function to figure out how much time to leave your turkey in the oven."
YOU ROCK!
thanks for sharing your recipe!
Wow, this is truly an amazing turkey recipe - can't wait to try it one day (since I'm doing ham this year). I tried the upside-down-turkey method, but didn't bother to flip it back to the right side because (a) it was too hard/heavy (b) it was going to be carved without being displayed anyway. But I'll try this with a smaller turkey. Yum! P.S. Where do you get the syringe to inject the turkey anyways?
My favorite part of the recipe is that you have the proper perspective in this recipe - to make sure that Jesus is your Lord and Savior. Maybe if you eat too much of the Turkey of Doom, you might have to meet him sooner than expected...
Wow...reading this recipe gives me a headache. I'm glad our house isn't doing a turkey this year (and extra-grateful for those who are!)
Step 13 makes me wonder 1) what a blow torch looks like and 2) who at GFC actually has one.
I'm going to try to cook one of these next week with my sister for our family Thanksgiving dinner! In the meantime, we'll see how your recipe holds up in the GC oven this Sunday...
Actually, we have a blowtorch at Sable Pointe, where many '06 Gracepoint brothers live. We actually use it every now and then.
This was the best turkey I ever had, but I really feel like the most important step is temperature control. Watching the internal temperature to yield the equivalent to a medium/medium well rather than well done makes all the difference. Just think about the difference between a medium steak and a well done steak.
Just don't let the bird go over 165F
I second Conrad's analysis of the linear interpolation as his favorite part of the recipe. Reading all of this makes me want to make a turkey of my own, but alas, I think my cousins have that figured out. And I would like to point out to Sue that us here at GFC-MIT (all three of us) are also very interested in that perfect turkey. And loads of fattiness. And a bacon helmet.
awesome!
turkey of doom...sounds delicious
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