I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to find the formula for the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Each year I fall short…but for me, perfection is a pursuit, not an end point. And each year I learn something that I apply to the next year’s Thanksgiving turkey. This year the thing I learned has to do with labeling. Specifically, what the “Sell By” date stamped on a fresh turkey means. It wasn’t what I thought.
As a home cook responsible for our annual Thanksgiving feasts, I care about whether the turkey I roasted is juicy and flavorful, but the thing I care about most is that my food doesn’t make anyone sick. I have a perfect record. To include this year…nobody got sick.
Commercial poultry producers stack the tables against home cooks seeking to prepare a holiday meal without leaving guests with the horrible memory of turkey food poisoning. That’s why we cook our turkeys into a dry and tasteless desert of flavor.
One of the keys to success in cooking a Thanksgiving dinner that doesn’t make anyone sick is proper prep. When it comes to your turkey, that means respecting USDA recommendations. Even when they seem overly restrictive, because when it comes to turkey…they aren’t.
I’m generally cynical when it comes to manufacturers’ product dating. I consider it a Big Agra plot to get consumers to spend more money when we don’t have to. And it is. They use a variety of label terms like “Sell By,” “Use By” and “Freshest By” to confuse us. If you see a date on the label of something in your fridge, and that date is in the past, what do you do? Most people trash it. Sometimes that’s the right and safe thing to do, but usually it is just a way to get you to spend more money to replace the perfectly good item you just tossed out.
One of the reasons I’m so cynical when it comes to product dating stems from my time in the Army. I served in the Army back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and when I went into the field my meals consisted of C Rations. If you don’t know what those are, think canned spam and peaches. There was no “Use By” date on C Rations, just a “Packed On” date, designating when the cans were sealed and pasteurized. Every C Ration pack I took out into the field was canned during the Korean War, which put them about 30 years old when I consumed them. I ate them with gusto, not because of the taste, but because I was hungry after spending the day hauling a ruck sack on my back (mainly full of said C Rations), a protective mask and canteen on my hips, and an M-16 in my arms. Not once did I get sick.
Which brings me to the “Sell By” date on my Thanksgiving turkey. I picked up a Jaindl Farms bird, raised and slaughtered in the nearby Pennsylvania Lehigh Valley. I bought my Jaindl Farms turkey from Wegmans as a fresh, never frozen bird and it had a “Sell By” date on the label of December 3rd. When I got it home, I briefly considered tossing it in my freezer since I bought it nearly two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, but I didn’t. Instead, I trusted the “Sell By” date and put it in my fridge. If the store could sell a thawed turkey stored for a couple of weeks in their refrigerated display case, then I should be able to store it in my fridge for 12 days until I cooked it up for Thanksgiving. I was wrong.
After the turkey spent about a week in my fridge, I began to get a little concerned about it. No reason, other than all the articles I’ve read over the years that say it isn’t safe to keep a raw turkey in the fridge for more than 1-2 days. I decided to do some research, and what I found confirmed 1-2 days is the consensus for how long it is safe to keep a thawed, uncooked turkey in the fridge before cooking it, freezing it, or tossing it. Nothing I found could reconcile the difference between that guidance and the “Sell By” date on my 20-pound fresh turkey. But…knowing how much bacteria turkeys retain after processing I decided to err on the side of caution. I tossed that turkey in the trash and bought another, two days before Thanksgiving.
When I picked up the replacement turkey from Wegmans, another Jaindl Farms “fresh” bird, I went early in the morning to avoid the Thanksgiving crowds. I selected my bird and as I put it in the cart, I noticed it was partially frozen. I checked the rest of the Jaindl Farms “fresh” turkeys, and they were all either partially or completely frozen.
I arrived at the store not long after they opened and would have put the “fresh, never frozen” turkeys in the display case. They had obviously just come from the freezer since they were all in various stages of defrosting. That’s when I realized the “Sell By” date wasn’t intended for me…it was intended for Wegmans. It was the last date they could take a turkey out of the freezer, thaw it, and sell it as “fresh, never frozen” with the expectation that whoever bought it would cook it up within a day or two.
As I noted in a previous post, USDA labeling guidelines allow retailers to sell turkeys as fresh, so long as the bird’s core temperature didn’t dip below 0 degrees F. Grocery stores take delivery of fresh turkeys when they are still in a frozen state (but not below 0 degrees), and they store them in freezers. Each day they take some number of these turkeys out of the freezer and put them in a refrigerated storage area to thaw. Once thawed, they put them out in a display case for sale as “fresh, never frozen.” What they should label them as is “thawed for your convenience."
It is a deception, but a benign deception. Seafood departments do the same thing with “fresh” shrimp. The shrimp is shipped frozen on ice, and store employees thaw it before putting it on display as “fresh.” I don’t take exception to that practice, just to the practice of charging me more for “fresh”products that had previously been frozen.
In any event, I bought my replacement “fresh” turkey two days before Thanksgiving, brined it the day after I bought it, and cooked it up Thanksgiving morning. And nobody got sick. I’m glad I tossed the other turkey in the trash.
So how did my turkey turn out? Pretty much the same as any broad breasted white turkey I’ve cooked. After brining in my fridge for 24 hours I rinsed it well, dried it with paper towels, and then slathered duck fat all over the skin to get that beautiful crispy brown coating. I roasted it in the oven at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, turned down the oven temp to 300 degrees and slow roasted it for another 3 1/2 hours. When I took it out of the oven the pop-up timer still hadn’t popped up, but my super sensitive instant read thermometer read 155 degrees or higher at every point I checked (breasts, legs, thighs) so I knew it was safe to eat, and it was as moist as it was going to get.
It looked amazing, it was somewhat juicy, and it tasted bland like turkey does. But nobody got sick from eating it. I count that as a successful Thanksgiving
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