Turkey Day Late

So we ended up doing Thanksgiving a day late, since that's when company was able to come around.



This is the kind of photo you get of your Turkey while taking a picture as an almost-afterthought, and realizing your settings are all still weird from trying to take pictures of Halloween lights and pumpkins, so you shoot in auto holding the flash lid down.

It works.

The food was amaaaaazing.

Here's how I did my turkey:

Day before, I made a brine:

1.5 gallons water
1 cup salt
~2 cups brown sugar
2 tbsp dried Rosemary
1-2 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tbsp allspice berries
1-2 tbsp dried cloves
4-6 bay leaves
~5 sprigs of thyme, even better if you wander out in the snow, uncover your plant, and THEN pick the thyme.

All the measures above are estimates. I eyeball just about everything unless it's chemically relevant. I don't mess around with proportions in baking. Seasoning? Eh, throw it in! This was also for a 12.5 lb. turkey.

Chuck it all in a big stockpot, bring it to a boil. Remove from heat, and let cool. This took eons, so I tossed some ice in with it when I put the turkey in. Protip: remove the giblets.

I couldn't find brining bags, and was going to substitute with an oven bag, but in the moment, I decided it was actually favorable to rearrange my fridge, drop the bird in the stock pot, and shove the whole thing in there.

Leave the bird in the brine overnight, around 20-24 hours is ideal.


Turkey prep:

2 Potatoes
2 Onions
Carrots
2 sticks of Butter
Random herbs: parsley, thyme, sage, basil, oregano, etc.
Bulb of Garlic

Remove the birdy from the brew. Save 2-3 cups of the brine juice.
Rinse the bird off real good, inside and out to help purge it from being too salty on the surfaces, especially if you intend to eat the skin.

Pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Without this step, slathering the beast with herb butter gets even more ridiculous.

Cut up potatoes and one of the onions into chunks, and put a layer of them on the bottom of the roasting pan. I used baby carrots and tossed them in whole, if you have whole carrots chop them into reasonable chunks. Add the garlic, and you can do other sturdy veggies down there, like the vile celery if you're not a hater like me. These partially serve as a delicious baking rack to keep the bird off the bottom of the pan and drowning in its own juices, and partially to taste a-ma-zing later. Pour in a little of the reserved brine juice, just so you have some liquid down there, barely covering the bottom of the pan.

Smish together 1 stick of butter, 2 if you're decadent or have a giant bird, and some herbs. I used dried, parsley, basil, and thyme. I used probably 1 tbsp of parsley, less of the others. You are going to get butter all over your hands. I am clumsy, and there was herb butter all over the edges of my roasting pan, and I even dropped a blob on the floor.

The best tasting food is the messiest.

Start with the turkey breast side down, and butter up the underside of the bird, in between its legs and wings and whatever else you can reach. Place the turkey buttered (back) side down in the roasting pan on top of the veggie layer. Butter the top of the Turkey liberally. Coat all the surface area you can find, and even rub down the inside of the cavities.

Take the second chopped onion and push the chunks into the cavities at the neck and legs. This helps keep the turkey nice and moist from the inside, without really providing a stuffing that makes the bird take even longer to cook.

Cover with foil, and roast. I followed the directions on the turkey package, and did 325, expecting it to take 2.5-3 hours. It took longer.

When the turkey is getting closer, maybe around 140ish in the deepest parts, take off the foil cover, drizzle a little bit of the juices or some melted butter on the exposed bird, and let it finish cooking all the way uncovered to get the nice golden brown look. If your wing tips or other parts are getting too dark, you can make little foil covers for them. I do not seem to own a turkey baster, so I went with the melted butter route. You can repeat the drizzle if anything is looking too dry, but you don't want to wash it down constantly so that it'll have a chance to get golden.

I have an amazing family stuffing recipe, which I will not share or else I might have to kill you. Or come to your house and eat it up when you make it. I do not put the stuffing in the turkey. That raises your roasting time considerably, which sucks, and can make dry turkey.
I toss all my stuffing in a baking dish and slide it in for the last half hour+. You can also crank the oven heat up a bit, to 350 or 375ish to help push it over safe temp, and golden it up. Roll with whatever any additional sides you are tossing in require.

Turkey needs to get to 160 or above in the deepest thickest parts of the meat. Remove turkey, yoink it out of the pan. You may need to tilt it up to drain juices out of the cavity from the onions cooking down. Set it aside and cover well with foil. The turkey will continue cooking a bit from residual heat and stay moist. It should rest there for at least 15 minutes before carving. When I pulled my turkey out of the oven, its pop up thing was still down. When we were ready to carve, it had popped. Perfect! Carrying over the heat to finish roasting out of the oven is great because it won't overcook your meat. It's also great because it gives you time to harvest some sweet sweet wonderful turkey juices and make gravy.

Strain out the veggies from the roasting pan and keep the juices. The carrots and potatoes will have turned into little nuggets of flavor explosion, and make a great easy veggie side. Whisk the juices into a roux to make amazing gravy. Turn all the juices into gravy. You will not regret it.



MMMmmmmmmm.

I've been refining my turkey tactics for a few years, and I think this is definitely the best so far. Last year I decided I was too lazy to brine, but did the rest of the steps above and it was still good.

Protip: one year I followed Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe. His calls to put a red apple in the cavity; this basically provides the same function as my onion chunks. But here's the thing: the red apple leaked red-colored juices all over the place. It made the fully cooked turkey look raw. It was delicious, but unsettling. Perhaps peel the apple, or go with Team Onion.