If you’ve read the first two posts in this series, you know that just about every turkey gracing our tables at Thanksgiving is a broad breasted white breed bird. You also know that the breed was genetically engineered for a high ratio of breast to dark meat, and to grow from chick to mature bird in 4-5 short months. And lastly, you know that as desirable as those attributes are for producers, the trade-off is a bird that is nearly impossible to avoid overcooking, and one that offers little to no flavor…attributes which are not desirable for consumers.
I’ve tried everything in the book over the past few years to make the most out of my broad breasted white turkeys. In the process, I have found that there are a couple of things that work to improve the flavor and moistness of my Thanksgiving bird. There is only so much you can do with a bird that is genetically engineered to be tasteless, thank you Big Agra. But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer through dry and tasteless turkey this Thanksgiving.
Here are my best tips to improve this year’s Thanksgiving experience:
1. Don’t overspend on the turkey. Buy the cheapest store brand frozen bird you can find. They are all the same, with one exception. If you are fortunate enough to be able to put your hands on a Jaindl Farms turkey, sold at Wegmans as a store brand Grand Champion turkey, do it. Any turkey that is good enough to serve at the White House is good enough for my table, and worth every penny.
2. Spend most of your time on the sides. Since almost nothing you can do to the turkey will add flavor to your Thanksgiving dinner, focus on what will…the side dishes, especially a quality gravy recipe. That's the one thing that can rescue an otherwise mostly dry and tasteless piece of turkey.
3. Brine it. Broad breasted white breed turkeys have so much breast meat, by the time you get the deepest recesses of your bird heated to a USDA approved 165 degrees, the rest of the turkey is hopelessly overcooked. Brining is the only way to build in extra moisture which makes the bird more forgiving of overcooking.
4. Don’t bother basting. It is a waste of time. It bathes the skin and then cooks off. None of the juice makes it into the muscle tissue which is where it needs to be to make the turkey juicier, and it makes it harder to get that perfectly golden, crispy skin.
5. Injections…again, don’t bother. Marinades and fat solutions from injections don’t get into the internal muscle fibers of your turkey. It sits either under the skin or in the spaces between muscle fibers. As soon as you expose the turkey to heat, these injected solutions render out and all the flavor they contain drips into the bottom of your pan rather than getting drawn into the inside of the muscle tissue.
6. Duck fat is your friend. If you want prefectly golden-brown crispy skin, coat the turkey with duck fat and preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Start your turkey at that temperature and then dial it back to 325 degrees after 30 minutes. Your skin will crisp up perfectly, and you won't dry the bird out any more than if you started it at 325 degrees.
7. You can cheat on the temp...but only a little. Turkeys spend most of their lives walking around in their own bacteria infested feces. You don’t want to make your family sick, so err on the side of caution when it comes to your turkey temp. While the USDA recommends cooking turkey to an internal temperature of 165 degrees for white meat and 185 degrees for dark meat, it is safe to pull your turkey from the oven when the breast meat registers 155 degrees. Let it rest for 30 minutes before carving and you’ll do two things. First, moisture pulled out of the muscle tissue during the roasting will work its way back into the muscle fibers as the turkey rests. Second, heat from the exterior of the bird will radiate inward and continue to cook the bird from the outside in. If you pull your turkey from the oven when the internal temperature reads 155 degrees, after a 30-minute rest the internal temperature will have reached 165 degrees.
8. Ignore the pop-up timer. Turkey pop-up timers are calibrated to pop up at temperatures between 180-185 degrees, but they are placed shallow in the top of the breast. If you wait for your pop-up timer to pop before you pull the turkey, it is probably overcooked in some spots and under cooked in others. Invest in a high-quality oven-safe constant read thermometer, and cross-check with a portable instant read thermometer. When the bird hits 155-160 degrees, pull it out of the oven and let it rest for 30 minutes.
9. Think outside of the box. As in the cookbox. Consider using a smoker or sous vide cooker for your Thanksgiving turkey rather than a conventional oven or roaster. If you don’t own the equipment or lack experience with either cooking method, perhaps best to cook your turkey the conventional way in the oven until you gain the requisite experience. But if you know your way around a smoker or sous vide cooker, both are great ways to imbue flavor in your turkey in ways conventional roasting can't. And it is really hard to over cook a turkey either in a smoker or a sous vide cooker. It can be done, but you almost have to want to overcook it.
10. DON’T DON’T DON’T deep fry your turkey. This is perhaps the single most common cause of house fires and serious burns at Thanksgiving.
More About Brining
The best thing you can do for your broad breasted white turkey is to brine it in your fridge for 12-18 hours after it is fully thawed and before you cook it. There are two approaches when it comes to brining…dry and wet. The dry brine approach involves applying a salt rub to the turkey and letting it sit in the fridge for 12-18 hours. The theory behind dry brining is that the salt draws moisture out of the turkey, and that moisture dissolves the salt rub which is then drawn back into the turkey muscle fibers. Dry brining is preferred by folks who like more turkey flavor…you are using moisture that already exists in the bird rather than adding liquid in the form of a wet brine solution, so you aren’t diluting the flavor that naturally exists. At least that’s the theory.
The other approach is wet brining…creating a salt-water solution by dissolving 1 ¼ cups of Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt into a gallon of water, and then immersing your turkey in the brine solution in your fridge for 12-18 hours. You can scale the amount of brine solution up or down using the same ratio of salt to water as necessary to cover your bird.
When it comes to brining turkey, size matters. As in the size of the salt flakes. The brand of kosher salt you use is sort of important since kosher salt comes in different flake sizes. If you measure your salt by weight that isn’t a problem, but if you measure it by volume as I do, it is critical. David's is a popular kosher salt in grocery stores in my area, but David's kosher salt comes with flake sizes on par with table salt…which means small. One cup of David's kosher salt is the equivalent of nearly two cups of Diamond Crystal salt, the latter being the gold standard for professional chefs. At the same time, brining is not like baking…you don’t have to be precise with your measurements. A weak brine, or a strong brine, will both do the trick. The main thing is not to use table salt…it contains iodine and other additives that will leave your turkey with an odd, metallic after-taste.
I’ve tried both wet and dry brine, and I prefer the wet brine. Broad breasted white turkeys have little flavor to begin with, so I don’t find that wet brining dilutes it. Turkeys naturally retain extra water during the processing that occurs after slaughter when they are immersed in a cold water bath to inhibit the spread of bacteria. You’ll see how much water is retained on the turkey label, generally between 4-8%. Wet brining will replace that tasteless water with a solution that at least brings some flavor to your turkey.
Some people prefer the convenience of a pre-brined turkey. I am opposed to pre-brined turkeys because you end up paying 10-40% more and all you get is salt water. You can make your own brining solution for a few pennies, so don’t bother with spending more for a pre-brined bird. The exception is if you are Jewish and keep kosher. Kosher turkeys are by definition pre-brined, but they are also twice the cost of a non-kosher turkey. I've tried cooking up a kosher turkey and found it cooks the same as any other pre-brined bird.
There are loads of creative brining recipes out there, but in truth the only things that get into the meat during brining are salt and water. Any herbs or aromatics are made up of molecules that are too big to make it past the tissue barrier to the inside of the turkey’s muscle through osmosis, which is how the salt gets into the bird. A brine with lots of herbs, spices and fruit will make the skin, and your kitchen, smell good when it cooks, and there’s something to be said for that. But it won’t make your turkey taste any better.
The Myth of Fresh Never Frozen
A turkey sold as fresh, never frozen is marked up 2-3 times over the price of a turkey sold as frozen. But the dirty little secret Big Agra doesn’t want you to know is that all turkeys are frozen at some point. That is one deception I'm actually OK with. Thanksgiving turkeys are slaughtered beginning in October and it can take 4-6 weeks for them to make it from the slaughterhouse to your holiday table. Freezing is the only way to keep the bacteria that infests turkeys from spreading during that time.
The USDA allows turkeys to be sold as "fresh, never frozen" if the internal temperature of the bird doesn’t fall below 0 degrees F. I guarantee you, a turkey stored at 0 degrees F will be rock solid frozen. I have no problem with the practice, but I do take exception to charging more for it when "fresh, never frozen" turkeys spend most of their time before they reach your kitchen in a frozen state. Of course, if you don’t have enough room in your fridge to store a 20-pound turkey for the 4-5 days it will take to thaw, then by all means spend the extra money it costs for a "fresh, never frozen" bird that has been frozen, but thawed for your convenience.
Cooking Outside the Box (aka the Oven)
Cooking outside the box refers to cooking your turkey in a smoker, or a sous vide cooker. My son Rob is big into using his smoker for cooking meat, including poultry. I don’t own a smoker and have never cooked anything in one, but I know if I wanted to try it Rob would be there for me. The smoker community is like that…there are loads of online fora where smoker afficionados are eager to share their hints, tips, and experiences.
Cooking your turkey sous vide is a little more challenging. Like using a smoker, sous vide cooking requires special equipment, and you have to know a bit about temperature vs time cooking to make sure your turkey is cooked safe but not overcooked. The good news is that the science isn’t particularly hard, and the equipment gets less expensive every year.
If you are interested in cooking turkey sous vide, I recommend you search You Tube for “How to Sous Vide a Turkey with Michael Voltaggio.” Michael and Bryan Voltaggio are sibling professional chefs and Top Chef alumni with restaurants in California (Michael) and Maryland (Bryan). Michael shares his tips on cooking turkey sous vide, and in a head head taste test with Bryan’s brined and conventionally roasted turkey, Michael’s sous vide bird came out on top.
There are several advantages to cooking a Thanksgiving turkey sous vide as the Voltaggios share, but it does require a few extra steps. First, you have to break the turkey down into components…breasts, legs, and thighs. You seal each cut into a sous vide bag separately, and cook them separately to get the ideal finished temperature for each component…165 degrees for white meat and 185 degrees for dark. Also, because the sous vide bag is vacuum sealed, any aromatics you add to the bag are forced by the vacuum into the turkey muscle tissue in ways brining and injections or marinades can’t.
Sous vide cooking is also very forgiving. If you don’t pull the turkey as soon as it is done, you haven’t ruined Thanksgiving. The turkey sits happily cooked in its sous vide bag at whatever temperature you set the water for…nothing bad happens as long as you use the minimal cook time for your selected temperature. You wouldn’t want to leave it for several hours past the recommended cook time or the meat will get mushy and mealy, but missing the mark by 15-30 minutes won’t matter.
The are a few downsides of cooking your turkey sous vide. The method is so gentle, it leaves the skin pale and flaccid rather than brown and crispy. That’s what makes it work for retaining moisture and flavor in you turkey, but if you like crispy skin you’ll need to add an extra step. Peel the skin off before you bag up the parts, lay it out on an oven sheet and roast it up in your oven under the broiler setting a few minutes before serving. You can the replace the skin on top of your perfectly cooked sous vide parts and get the best of both words. Personally I don’t bother…I’m not a fan of skin.
The other downside to cooking turkey sous vide is that you lose the presentation impact of a whole turkey on a platter with crispy golden-brown skin in the middle of your Thanksgiving table. You have to break the bird down to fit the parts into sous vide bags. For my palate, I’d rather serve sous vide cooked parts. The impact of a whole bird presentation fades really quick once you bite into the overcooked, dry and tasteless broad breasted white cooked in a conventional oven.
Invest in the Sides
Turkey is a staple of Thanksgiving dinners because of tradition, not because it brings flavor to the occasion. There isn’t much you can do about that, but you can add flavor to the meal with the side dishes. Stuffing or dressing is one dish where you can really get creative, as is a good homemade gravy. Both will liven up the otherwise bland flavor profile of turkey. One of Janet’s family Thanksgiving traditions is to serve sauerkraut with the turkey. Now that’s creative, though sauerkraut isn’t in my Thanksgiving wheelhouse. Each family has their own traditions, and when it comes to Thanksgiving it is a good time to indulge those traditions.
Tradition!
Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about tradition. Flavors and textures matter less than your family traditions. Who cares if the turkey is a bit dry so long as it is presented the same as your family has always presented it? Which in Janet's case means with a side of sauerkraut (ick). After all, isn't that what gravy is for?
Happy Thanksgiving!
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