Being a 'Furriner', someone who has moved here from another country, I have always been fascinated by the idea of eating turkey, and not in a good way. It's a large, mostly flavorless bird that is very difficult to cook well. It's size makes it hard to season (salt stays on the outside only) and hard to cook (the bigger the object, the harder it is to cook it evenly without drying out the outer parts). The fact that it is a bird makes it especially harder because the breasts are going to cook about twice as fast as the legs and thighs.
Turkeys on the farm...
So what you get at the end of a day of slaving over the stove is a extra dry meat that only survives the day by being covered in gravy and cranberry sauce. Not a bad solution, but I believe there has got to be a better way.
Looks tasty? It's probably drier than ritz cracker in the desert.
So last night I tried a few things to test some theories out. We bought two turkeys. One smaller (~16 pounds) and one larger (22 pounds). We brined the large one overnight, and covered the smaller one with a salt and olive oil marinade over night.
I cooked both turkeys at 500 degrees for 90 minutes, then turned it down to 400 degrees. I took the smaller one out after 2 hours, and the larger one out after 2 hours and 30 minutes.
(btw, one of the great fallacies of cooking turkey is that you need to cook at 350 degrees for 5 hours. Crank your oven as high as it can go, throw the turkey in, and turn the temp down when it gets to the right amount of brown-ness. Your turkey will be cooked in 2 hours and 30 minutes MAX! And it will not be a dried out carcass with meat that tastes like chalk.)
Conclusions were interesting:
1. I could have taken the turkeys out 30 minutes earlier. The thighs might not have been cooked through, but the breast meat would have been much, much better, and I could have cooked the thigh meat some more separately.
2. The brined turkey tasted juicier. It could have been because it was bigger and held it's juice better, but I think the brine really did help.
3. The brined turkey and the salted turkey were about even in flavor. So the marinade worked as well as the brine in getting the seasoning through the turkey.
Bottomline: Brine your turkey. It will make the meat juicier and well seasoned throughout.
Put the brining bag in the roasting pan to keep it stable in the fridge
Recipe for Brine:
- Buy a brining bag. Put your turkey in the bag and fill with water to cover the turkey. In a separate bowl, mix a cup of salt with two tablespoons of ground pepper, a few sticks of rosemary and four tablespoons of dried Herbs de Provence (mixture you can buy in the store). Add water to the bowl to dissolve the salt and add to the brining liquid. Taste the liquid to make sure it's salty. Imagine tasting gravy. How salty should your gravy be? That's how salty your brining liquid should be. When in doubt, add more salt. Finally, chop up a head of garlic and throw it in the brine. Leave overnight in the fridge.
Recipe for marinade:
- if you don't have a brining bag, try the marinade option. It works well, just not as good as brining. In a bowl, mix half a cup of salt with half a cup of olive oil. Add two tablespoons of the Herbs de Provence to the mixture and 1 tablespoon of ground pepper. Chop up 6 cloves of garlic and mix with the marinade. Rub the marinade all over the turkey, including the cavity. Let it sit overnight in the fridge. Before cooking, wash the marinade off the turkey.
Any other opinions/ideas out there? Let me know! I have made it my lifelong mission to figure out the best way to cook this damned bird. If I'm going to have to eat it, I'm going to find a way to make it taste good.
