thanksgiving turkey 101

Making a Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t have to be a difficult event—or a stressful one. Today, my job is to try to take the scary out of the turkey for you. Believe me, the method I will offer you is far more hands-off than something your mother or grandmother has practiced and I’ll explain why it might be better.

I won’t tell you that this is the only method of making a turkey—that’s akin to saying there’s only one way to fry an egg or roast a chicken. But this has been the method that has consistently worked best for me. Also, I find the science behind cooking to be incredibly fascinating. Ask me about latkes, and I’ll manage to talk about them for an hour-though you might be asleep.

My turkey method is adapted from Alton Brown. Years ago, while in college, I used to religiously watch his show, Good Eats. If you were the kind of person who always wanted to know what chemical reactions were taking place when you were cooking, this was a show for you. I don’t remember when I first came across his theories on cooking a turkey, but I found it to sate my curiosity and the best part — it totally worked for me. Since then, Brown’s treatise on Thanksgiving turkeys has appeared in a few places–and no wonder: Thanksgiving turkey is the cornerstone of the entire holiday meal.

Sam Sifton, in his latest book, Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well, states that the centerpiece of your meal is the turkey. It’s the whole point. And your goal as a chef is to get a moist, flavorful, nicely-browned bird to the table. I couldn’t agree more.

Consider the Turkey:
Turkeys tend to run on the dry side, so they need a little trickery to prevent them from emerging dry from your oven. Start with the best turkey you can find and afford—a quality turkey will yield a tastier roasted bird. If you can’t get a heritage breed, try to find an organic or free range one, or an antibiotic/hormone free turkey. A kosher turkey, if you prefer one, will already be seasoned (and pre-brined) so if you like to brine your turkey (recipe at the very bottom), it’ll save you a step. Because the turkey runs on the dry side, you will need to cook it in two stages: first, you will brown the skin and then you will cook the meat until the turkey is ready. By the way, that pop-up timer that a lot of turkeys come with? Throw it away—or don’t pay any attention to it. By the time that pop-up time pops, your turkey will be as dry as pressed wood chips, which aren’t appetizing at all.

Ideally, to get your turkey just right, you will invest in a probe thermometer (this one has served me well!) that will allow you to monitor the turkey temperature from the outside of the oven and keep that oven door closed. Opening the oven door, lowers the oven temperature and thus will increase your cooking time. As if they turkey doesn’t already take long enough.

Fresh vs Frozen:
I prefer to get fresh turkeys, but they can be a little hard to come by at times. A frozen turkey will serve you just fine – be sure to allow for adequate thawing time. You can thaw your turkey in the fridge if you have space, or you can stick it in a 5-gallon cooler and let it thaw in cold water and ice (place a large gallon-sized bag of water on top of the turkey) and keep switching the cold water and fresh ice every few hours to keep it cool and fresh.

To Brine Or Not To Brine:
I touched upon it a bit a few paragraphs above, but here’s more on the topic. Brining is a great technique: it makes the bird more flavorful and moist. However, for those of us who live in small apartments, brining poses a logistical issue – where do we find a container large enough to fit a large turkey and where do we store it in between the holidays or what else would we use it for? A good workaround on not brining yourself is to get a kosher turkey, which comes already, pre-brined (though go easier on seasoning your kosher turkey since it’ll already be saltier). You might find the pan drippings to be too salty to make the gravy (when you’re done cooking the bird). You can dilute those drippings with enough water, broth, and/or wine until it tastes right to you and reduce until your gravy is of the consistency acceptable to you. When you’re done brining (if you brine), rinse the turkey under cold, running water, and thoroughly pat it dry with paper towels.

If you choose not to brine and you don’t want to get a kosher turkey, here is how I have gone about seasoning the bird. Thoroughly pat the turkey dry with paper towels making sure to get in all the crevices. Liberally rub it with kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal) – start with about 2 tablespoons and see if it needs a bit more. Depending on the size of your turkey you might need more or less. But for a 4-pound chicken I use about 2 teaspoons. A 12-pound bird will need about 6 teaspoons, which works out to be 2 tablespoons. Place the turkey on a shallow baking pan and refrigerate it, uncovered, for 2 days. I realize this requires you to free up a lot of space in your refrigerator and this might not be an option. All, I say is that do the best you can. If you can rearrange your fridge contents for 2 days or buy fewer groceries those 2 days, you will be richly rewarded with a beautifully seasoned bird. Honestly, I can’t recommend it enough.

Two-Step Cooking:
In cooking the turkey, you want it to be beautifully browned, with gorgeous, crispy skin; and you want it to be moist and flavorful.

Alton Brown recommends that you first blast your turkey at 500 degrees F for 30 minutes to get the skin nicely browned. The reason you do that first is so that the fat doesn’t just melt away, through the slower-cooking process, and wind up at the bottom of the pan. Then you cover the breast with a breastplate made out of foil, and roast the turkey at 350 degrees until the internal breast temperature hits 161 degrees. Why 161 degrees F? We prefer our white meat at 161 degrees while our dark meat at 180 degrees. To get there, you need to cook the white meat slower than the dark meat, so they cook at the same time, but the white meat cooks at a lower temperature. To do that, you make a foil triangle (fold over a large foil piece), slightly oil/butter it, and then place it pointy side to the turkey opening (other corners on the sides of the turkey) oiled side down.

And that is it! No basting, no opening the oven door, no stuffing. You just let that turkey sit while you busy yourself with other dishes (or take a pre-Thanksgiving nap).

No Basting/No Stuffing:
Why no basting, you might wonder? After all, most recipes will tell you to baste. But according to Brown’s explanation (and it makes great sense here), basting is akin to dipping yourself in the pool while getting a suntan. You will burn faster that way because the water will act like a prism, and basting, in actuality, dries out your turkey, not to mention having to open the oven door, means letting the hot air out and the cold air in, which in turn lowers the temperature of the oven and slows down the overall cooking time.

Why no stuffing? Well, as the bird cooks, it gets drier and drier, but stuffing the turkey with stuffing, you slow down its cooking time and thus are running the risk of getting a much drier turkey on your plate. You can warm up the stuffing while the turkey waits to be carved-that’s a much better solution. You can put some aromatics in the turkey cavity: garlic, herbs, lemon, onion, etc, and they will perfume the turkey with their essence. But stuffing—hold off.

The Magic Number:
The temperature at which you pull your turkey out of the oven is 161 degrees F. Because by the time white meat is at that temperature, the dark meat will be around 180 degrees – which is ideal. The best and easiest way to get to that number is to use a probe thermometer, which consists of a probe that connects to a digital base through a few feet of insulated wire. The base will be magnetic so you can attach it to your oven and not worry about it until it starts to beep (the temperature you’ve set it to).

And that is it! The point here is that making a turkey a very manageable endeavor—and there’s no need to let the turkey intimidate you. I realize that I wrote an immensely long post on something I claim to be simple. I wanted this post to be thorough and cover a lot of ground on some potential questions that might arise from reading this. It was actually rather tricky to pull together—I kept feeling like I was skipping over important details. If there’s anything that I left unclear, please post a question in the comment section, and I’ll get right on it.

I hope that you all have a delicious, relaxing, and wonderful Thanksgiving. And I hope that if you’ve been previously afraid of roasting that turkey, that your fear is now long gone and in the past.