It was Black Friday, 2021, the day after Thanksgiving. The rigid COVID restrictions we suffered through for most of the previous 18 months were being relaxed, and people could once again shop Black Friday bargains in person rather than virtually. While most shoppers hit the malls, I was at Wegmans, in search of a bargain prime rib of beef for the upcoming Christmas holiday.
In years past, the Wegmans butcher counter held a post-Thanksgiving sale for locally sourced, fresh prime rib roasts that they stocked up on for Thanksgiving but didn't sell. The mark down was usually half price, and I loved to take advantage of the sale to pick up a half price prime rib. I’d throw it in my freezer and pull it out for our family Christmas Eve dinner.
Not so for 2021. As a result of COVID driven local supply chain shortages, Wegmans switched from sourcing their beef from local farms to using one of the biggest national meat packing plants in the country. Local beef was sold fresh. The national packing plant beef came pre-cut, vacuum sealed, and frozen solid. The store thawed what they needed to meet demand and kept the rest in the freezer. Rather than going on sale as with the fresh, locally source beef, the packing plant beef just went back in the freezer after the Thanksgiving demand passed. A few weeks later, when the demand for prime rib roasts for Christmas and New Years feasts ticked up, stores pulled their rib roasts out of the freezer, marked them up even more than at Thanksgiving, and sold them for customers' Christmas and New Year's feasts.
I struck out on prime rib, but I found a display case full of fresh turkeys marked down more than 50%. The display case was full of 20-pound fresh turkeys selling for $13.50. I bought three. I had no idea what I was going to do with them…just that I couldn’t let the deal pass me by.
The sign on the turkey display case said “Limit 1 per customer” but considering the number of turkeys in the case I thought I might be able to get them to relax that. I asked the butcher who was roaming the meat department if I could take two. He gave me a sort of sad and resigned look and said “Mister you can buy them all if you want. In fact, please do. We over ordered this year and whatever doesn’t sell by the end of the day gets tossed.” I should have bought them all, but I limited myself to three, mostly because four wouldn’t fit into my cart. I tried.
These turkeys were Wegmans store brand Grand Champion birds, which I would later find out meant they came from nearby Jaindl Farms in Lehigh Valley, PA. I wrote about that in my last post. Of all the broad breasted white turkeys I’ve ever cooked, Jaindl Farms produces the most flavorful birds. Which is not to say they had much taste to them...they don't. They were still broad breasted white turkeys, and the breed is genetically engineered to develop massive breasts in a ridiculously short period of time…4-5 months from egg to slaughterhouse. But the trade-off for those attributes was flavor. As in, the breed has none. And because the breasts are so big, by the time you get them to the USDA safe 165 degrees, the rest of the bird is hopelessly overcooked.
As I drove home pondering what I was going to with my three 20-pound turkeys, an idea popped into my head. For several years I had been buying our Thanksgiving turkeys from a local hobby farm to the tune of $75 for a 16-pound bird. I have to say year after year I wasn’t impressed. No matter what I did, I could not get those fresh, local turkeys to cook up moist and flavorful. It made me wonder whether I was wasting my money. How would a 20-pound store brand fresh turkey that I paid $13.50 for compare against the smaller but pricier $75 hobby farm bird? I decided to use my three bargain turkeys in a taste test to find out.
The first test would be a direct comparison of one fresh bird to another. With the taste of the hobby farm bird still fresh on my palate from the previous day’s Thanksgiving dinner, I cooked up one of the Wegmans bargain birds to compare against it.
The rest of my taste test would determine whether a fresh turkey was worth spending more for than a frozen bird. Fresh turkey prices out nearly double what you spend for a frozen bird, and I wanted to know whether there was enough of a difference in flavor and level of moisture to make it worth spending more for fresh. I tossed the other two turkeys in my freezer and planned to pull one out and cook it up 3 months later, and the other 6 months later.
The Taste Test Set-up
When I conduct a taste test I like to control for as many variables as possible. This test was intended to determine whether or not there was enough of a difference in the source of the turkey to warrant spending 3-4 times more for a local hobby farm raised bird than a generic grocery store bird. Both turkeys were the same breed…broad breasted white, the most commonly sold breed of turkey in this country by a huge margin. Both were “fresh, never frozen” and both were hormone and antibiotic free. From my last post you realize that all of that info means nothing…it’s just marketing. Neither turkey was sold as self-basting, neither had injected moisturizers, fat, butter, MSG, or any other flavoring agents. They were 100% turkey. There was one difference…the Wegmans turkey came with a pop-up timer, the hobby farmed turkey did not. I don’t use pop-up timers to determine when my turkeys are done, so that was inconsequential to the taste test.
To Brine or Not to Brine
I brined both turkeys using the same brine recipe and for the same duration. I’ll get into brining in my next post. I don’t stuff my turkeys, but I do put aromatics into the body cavity to enhance the flavors a bit. For both birds in this taste test, I used a couple of sprigs each of fresh rosemary, sage, and thyme, and added a sliced apple, orange and onion along with two cinnamon sticks. The steam generated as the turkey cooks will extract the aromatic flavors from the herbs and infuse the turkey meat with flavor from the inside out. At least that’s the theory. If I’m being honest, in reality it only contributes to the flavor of the bird a little…most of the flavor a brined turkey gets comes from the salt in the brine. The reason I bother to dress my turkeys is that it makes my kitchen smell like Thanksgiving, and that makes me happy.
I didn’t mess with fancy trussing for my turkeys…I tucked the wings under the body of both birds to keep them out of the way. The local hobby farm turkey’s legs were loose, so I used butcher’s twine to tie them together…the Wegmans bird had an oven safe silicon retainer holding the legs together which I left in place. I coated the skin of both birds with duck fat to enhance the browning and crisping, then sprinkled rubbed sage and a proprietary blend of poultry spices I got from a special source. Me. Mostly it was dried sage, thyme and rosemary with some paprika and powdered garlic.
Feel the Heat
I used the same roasting pan for both birds. It comes with an elevated rack to keep the bird out of the juices that render as it cooks. I did not baste…not necessary for brined turkeys. I preheated my oven to 450 degrees and cooked both birds at that temp for 30 minutes to crisp the skin. After 30 minutes, I reduced the heat to 325 degrees and left it there until the birds were done.
My hobby farm turkey at 16 pounds was ready to come out of the oven after 2 hours 30 minutes of cooking. The 20-pound Wegmans bird took 3 hours 25 minutes to cook. I used an oven safe constant read temperature probe that I stuck into the deepest part of the turkey’s thigh with the alarm set to 160 degrees for both birds. When the alarm went off, I used an instant read thermometer to spot check in the breast and thighs and when I got temps at or above 160 degrees all around (you can safely go as low as 155 deg), the turkeys came out of the oven. The turkeys’ temp continued to rise as they rested, and I gave both birds a 30-minute rest period. By the time they were ready to carve the lowest temperature was 165 degrees and some spots read as high as 185 degrees, which is a good range for ensuring safety while maximizing moistness.
And the Winner Is…
The hobby farm turkey was just OK. The Wegmans generic store brand turkey was better. By a lot. It was moister and had substantially more turkey flavor. Which is not to say it had much of any flavor, but the Wegmans bird had more than the hobby farm bird (which had none). Where I really noticed a difference between the two birds was when it came to the leftovers…the leftovers from the Wegmans bird retained more moisture and flavor than the hobby farm bird. That’s important to me since the best part of Thanksgiving dinner are the leftovers.
Turkey Taste Test Part 2
The next part of my turkey taste test was fresh vs frozen. I cooked up one of my bargain priced Wegmans turkeys the day after I bought them and tossed the other two in my freezer. It is a sub-zero freezer, and I did nothing to the packaging…tossed them in the freezer as they came to me from the grocery store.
I cooked one of the birds up in February, after three months in the freezer, and I cooked the other bird eight months after freezing. I cooked both birds exactly the same as the first. The turkey that spent three months in the freezer tasted exactly the same as the fresh bird, and was just as moist. By eight months in the freezer, I noticed a slight drop in moisture and reduction in flavor, but only slight. I would happily cook and serve either of those frozen birds for Thanksgiving rather than spend the extra to buy a fresh, never frozen turkey.
The Myth of Fresh Never Frozen.
One of the things I do when I conduct a taste test is research the heck out of all aspects of the article or dish I’m testing. That’s how I learned so much about the broad breasted white breed of turkey that I shared in my last article. The other aspect of this test was fresh vs frozen, and to fully understand the variables at play I dug into the definitions of what constitutes fresh vs frozen, and the processes for packaging both types of turkey.
I learned that “fresh, never frozen” is another meaningless label. All turkeys are frozen at some point between the slaughterhouse and the grocery store. The USDA allows turkeys to be sold as “fresh, never frozen” as long as the core temperature of the turkey never falls below 0 degrees F. I don’t know about you, but to me 0 degrees F is rock solid frozen regardless of how the USDA defines it. And the packaging is the same, whether a bird is designated for sale as fresh or destined for the freezer.
I’m actually OK with that. It takes several weeks to get a turkey from the slaughterhouse to your table, and with as much bacteria as turkeys are infested with, freezing them is the safest way to treat them. I would prefer the label to say “thawed for your convenience” which is more accurate than "fresh, never frozen” but now that I know the USDA’s definitions, I can figure it out. And my taste test established with modern processing and packing technology, there is no difference in quality between a turkey stored at or slight above 0 degrees F for a few weeks, and one stored below 0 degrees F for three months.
When my father served in the Army, and my mother purchased our Thanksgiving turkey from the commissary, those birds were several years old. Nowadays it isn’t cost effective for the poultry industry to store birds for more than a few weeks, which means even frozen turkeys are every bit as “fresh” as fresh, never frozen birds.
Conclusion
It really doesn’t matter whether you buy a national name brand turkey like Butterball or Jenny-O, or a generic store brand bird. They are all broad breasted white breed turkeys and that means they have no taste. And in order to cook the innermost regions of those massive breasts to a USDA safe 165 degrees F, you end up overcooking the rest of the bird rendering it dry as well as tasteless. There are advantages with purchasing locally raised turkeys, but you have to do your homework to make sure the local bird you are paying 3-4 times more for than a generic grocery store brand is worth it.
For my money, if I can get a Jaindl Farms turkey, I’ll pay extra. In spite of Wegmans post-COVID approach to sourcing their meat from national packing plants, they still sell Jaindl Farms turkeys under the Wegmans Grand Champion label. These are the same turkeys the White House serves for the national Thanksgiving dinner, and that’s good enough for me.
My next and final post in this series will address what you can do to make the broad breasted white turkey moist and flavorful, in spite of its genetic predisposition to the contrary.
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