The Pre-Turkey Warmup...

[liralen]

We roasted our turkey on Saturday, and I think it's the best $4 turkey I've ever had. It'd gotten a decent, gradual thawing in the fridge all week, and I did something to it that I've always done with my roast chickens but had never thought to do with a turkey before...

I roasted it sitting on its breast for the first two-thirds of the time. I did 45 minute at 400, then 1 1/2 hours at 250. The legs and thighs and back can take the high heat and I wanted them more cooked than the breast. Also, with the breast side down, the breast got all the juices, drippings, and fat that was coming off the rest of the bird, so it was being internally basted automatically. I only opened the oven to swap sides halfway through the first part of the roasting. For the second part, I just flipped the bird (carefully, with much struggling with two and then four big wads of paper towels), and upped the heat back to 400 and stuck an instant read thermometer into the thickest part of the breast meat and set it for 165 degrees.

When the alarm went off, I left it in for another ten minutes and then took it out onto a cutting board and let it rest for nearly half an hour while finishing the external stuffing, green bean cassarole, and gravy. The bird was perfectly browned on top, the thighs were at 179 while the breast was at 167, and perfectly done. Yeah, this wasn't the full Thanksgiving feast; just the parts we liked and would eat moderately of. It was probably the first time I actually wanted breast meat, as it turned out succulent, juicy, and marvelously tender. This on a sixteen pound bird, it's unusual when it's that huge to have all of it be that good. So we now have dinners tucked away into the freezer, some leftovers for cassaroles, soup, sandwiches, and at least another dinner in the fridge.

Last Sunday I made fifteen dozen cookies and only ate one. Hee. It's for the Longmont Home Tour, which has a bunch of volunteers decorate three local, historical houses, and take folks on tours through the homes. They have cookies at the reception and also have a bake sale and food sale. I was able to pack up one four-person turkey dinner for the frozen dinners sale. I also baked both oatmeal and molassas spice cookies that could be used at the reception and for the bake sale.

I've always admired good spice cookies, as they're hard to find. They need to have a good balance of spices, not too cloying, not too overwhelming, but they also need to be chewy, have that bite of molassas, and just crisp on the edges. I finally found a recipe after my own heart in The Best Recipe and I made a couple batches of them. It was fun to run my stand mixer in production mode, and just go at it. Two batches at a time. Jet had fun mixing things, and eating raw dough. He refused the finished cookies, though, which amused me.

I also bought the beginner's kit from Mumm's. It arrived last week, and I started a jar of the simplest thing, ever, the alfafa sprouts. I also did a jar of mung beans, which has to be kept completely dark. The alfalfa surprised the heck out of me by the sheer growth in volume in just four days. We now have crunchy, crisp sprouts for turkey sandwiches. Jet also eats them by the handful, straight out of the jar. I imagine that he may, someday, like growing them himself and eating them because he grew them. We'll see.

The mung beans are different than the commercially available mung bean sprouts. Not quite as fat a root. I'll have to see if I need to do something like pile weight on them, somehow. Still, they should be tasty enough in a pad thai, and better than having sprouts that just go to mush in the fridge.

Comments

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

OK, now you've got me thinking about my (24 pound!!!!!) turkey. Last year I did 1/3 breast down, 2/3 breast up, all at the same heat; it turned out pretty well, but the breast meat was somewhat dry. Not out of line, mind you, just a little dry. I like the higher heat idea; help me o wise liralen adopt your cooking method for a turkey half again the size!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Hee. Hm. My old recipe had me cooking it for about fifteen minutes a pound, with something of a sliding scale on size. A three to four pound chicken does just fine in an hour, usually, and I only spend 15 minutes at 450 instead of 400, about a quarter of the time. My old estimate would have been four hours for the sixteen pound turkey. I actually guesstimated it, as I knew that the higher heat would cook it faster, but I had no idea exactly how much faster. It turned out to be three and a quarter hours with almost two hours at high heat. Which is about a twenty percent reduction. I don't think that the high heat should be applied for much more than the two hours, all together, as it affects mostly the surface and skin crackle appeal and what you're looking for is more cooking of the internals, so it might not be a proportional reduction, but it also might be proportional because a bigger turkey does have a larger surface area, but the surface to mass ratio is probably smaller, too. Hm.

So 24 pound, by my old estimates would be about 6 hours.

If it's a simple scalar, then that's just 45 minutes off, and it would be about five hours total, and you'd probably want a full hour at 400, then 3:15 at 250, and the finishing, breast size up hour to hour and a half at 400.

If it's proportional, then that'd be a reduction of 20% or 72 minutes, or a total time of about 4 hrs and 45 minutes, which would mean 1 hour high, 2:45 low and then the last hour to hour and a half at high.

That's a difference of half an hour in the middle for the two methods and being the more conservative type, I'd go for at least three hours at the low temp, then. Probably with a swap of side to side in the middle of the time for each of the stages. One other thing to note is that I basically took the thawed turkey directly from the fridge to the sink for a quick water rinse and dry and then into the roaster on a rack into the oven, no 'warming to room temperature' that I would do with a beef roast, as the poultry products I wonder about room temperature bacteria. Also, I didn't stuff, at all. I find stuffing to be problematic so far as 'safe temps' go, i.e. getting it out of the 40-140 degree danger zone is always hard.

So that's my seat-of-the-pants estimate and gut feel about the bigger bird. *grin*

Good luck!

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yeah, one other thing is that during the high heat phases, I made sure that the dripping pan had plenty of liquid in it, as turkey fat has a smoke point that is much lower than 400 degrees. No need to fill the kitchen with smoke. I just put a cup or two of water into it to begin with and when I'd flipped it, I just made sure there were plenty of drippings already in it. I think for the latter part I would have added chicken broth if I'd had to add something, as it would help with the flavor of the drippings for the gravy.

[mallen.livejournal.com]

Wow! That's a great idea for chicken and turkey. Thanks for the tip. :)

[aynjel.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, that turkey sounds fantastic!!