Thanksgiving Meal

[garylkoh]

For Thanksgiving, here are a couple of recipes.

Among my friends, my turkey is "legendary". I've roasted a turkey a year since 1985 on 4 continents and haven't missed a year..... yet. Before coming to the US, it was always a Christmas turkey, but now, it's my Thanksgiving turkey.

Roast turkey is always dry and tasteless - don't believe it. It's all in the technique. I haven't seen all of what I do in the cookbooks.... so here goes.

When I lived in Singapore, I couldn't get fresh turkeys, but they are easily available here. I don't use a pre-brined bird, and I don't brine it. Yet, the breast meat is always moist and flavorful. Here's how I do it.

1) The stuffing provides moisture from the inside out.
2) Cover almost all the exposed skin with fat, fat bacon.
3) Seal the whole turkey in foil to almost steam-cook it.

Make sure the turkey is well de-frosted if not using a fresh bird. Even if you buy a fresh bird, a lot of the time it's partially frozen due to transport, storage, etc. So, turn the temperature on the refrigerator up a bit the night before Thanksgiving to make sure that the bird is well de-frosted.

Morning of Thanksgiving - while everybody else is asleep, take the bird out, wash it, remove the giblets and put away, and thoroughly dry it inside and out. Leave it on the kitchen counter. You want the bird to start cooking from room temperature. This year, we got a free-range, organic bird from the Local Market.

The main event:
16lb turkey
2lb bacon (the cheap fatty version)
2lb butter (well softened in the microwave 45 seconds)

Prepare the stuffing:

1lb sausage meat (pork with sage this year)
1/2lb duck liver pate
1/2lb bacon
2 green apples (granny smith preferred) cored and diced
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup cream
1 oz dried porcini mushrooms (soaked in a little hot water)
1/2 cup sultanas
1/2 cup pine nuts toasted till fragrant but not burnt
8 oz bag of artisan dried bread crumbs

Dice the bacon, and fry in a large frying pan with a little oil until it's crispy and all the oil has rendered out. Into a large mixing bowl, empty out the bag of bread crumbs (or stuffing mix if you will). Take the fried bacon out and throw on top of the bread crumbs. Add the duck liver pate (diced into 1/2 inch cubes). Mix it up.

Cook the sausage meat in the bacon oil, breaking it up, adding butter if needed. When cooked, tip everything into the bread crumbs/bacon. Use the 1/2 cup of stock and 1/2 cup of cream to de-glaze the pan, scraping off the yummy frond and pour into the mixing bowl. Mix it up.

Add the diced apples, the soaked porcini mushrooms (and the soaking water but being careful to leave the dirt behind), the sultanas, and pine nuts. Mix everything up real good with your hands, and stuff into the turkey. There are actually two cavities - the abdominal cavity, and the cavity in front of the breast under the neck skin. The stuffing distributes about 3:1 among these two cavities.

Tie the legs together to hold the stuffing in. Fold the neck skin down so as to hold the front stuffing in.

Pre-heat the oven to 350 deg.

Tear off about 6 sheets of wide heavy-duty aluminum foil each about 4ft long. Get a large roasting pan, and lay them across like an * star. Press the middle down. Generously spread butter on the bottom of the pan (top layer of foil) and place the turkey on the butter.

Spread about 1lb of butter all over the turkey. Cover as much of the surface of the turkey as you can with the bacon. The breast can also benefit from 2 layers of bacon.

After that's done, you want to use the long strips of aluminum foil to seal the bird in - but "tented" so that the foil is not tight on the skin/bacon. In order to do this, you make folds to join the edges of the foil together. With a bit of practice, it's quite easy. Overlap about 1/2 inch of two pieces of foil, and crumple them together so as to form almost an air/water tight seam. When you do this, the turkey is inside a large aluminum-foil bubble in the roasting pan.

For a 16lb stuffed turkey, it will roast like this untouched for the next 4 1/2 hours. You'll have time to prepare the other dishes (more later)

Open the oven, take the turkey out and tear off the aluminum foil (be careful of the hot steam). If you got the aluminum foil sealed right, you'll find the turkey sitting in a large pool of liquid. With a baster, baste the turkey well. Suck up 3/4 of the liquid into a saucepan, put the giblets in, and set the liquid to slowly boil and reduce (this will be your gravy). I usually add one piece of Chinese dried orange skin, a stick of cinnamon, 2 cloves and one petal of a star anise to flavor the gravy.

Put the turkey (now uncovered) back in the oven and turn the temperature up to 375 deg. After half an hour, take it out and baste it very well. If there is too much liquid, use the baster to suck it up and into your gravy pan (still reducing). You don't want the turkey to be sitting in a pool of gravy, so most of it is sucked up.

You will want to baste 4 times (30 mins x 2 hours) and then in the final hour, turn the temperature up to 400deg F, baste every 15 minutes to crisp up and brown the bacon and skin.

By the time it's done, there won't be any turkey skin, the bacon will have integrated into the skin and you get a lovely crispy crust. Total roasting time of a 16lb bird with 3lbs of stuffing is 6 1/2 to 7 hours (about 30% longer than most recipes).

Let the bird rest for at least 20 minutes after cooking before carving or you'll undo everything and end up with a dry breast. Even the dark meat should be fall-off-the-bone tender.

In the 4 1/2 hours while the bird is roasting, you can make candied yams (next recipe).

 

[amirm]

Here I am, after 25 years of following my wife's recipe and getting ready to brine our turkey for the first time ever and you say that is not best! What's wrong with you Gary?

This is the recipe we are trying: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe-Tools/Print/Recipe.aspx?RecipeID=54614&origin=detail&&Servings=15

Of course, breaking tradition is a tough thing in our household. So to keep galactic peace, we bought two turkeys. We are doing one the above way, and the traditional method that usually comes out way too dry.

I don't have as many tricks as Gary has but do have one he can't match. It is called a wood fired Pizza Oven! Yeh Baby . That is where the brined Turkey will go. Cooking just like the Pilgrims did.

Will post pictures and feedback if it goes well. For now, follow Gary's advice.

 

[garylkoh]

Amir, if you waited till today to brine your turkey, it is too late. You needed to start Monday.

Let us know how the one in the Pizza Oven goes

I'll post pictures too.

 

[amirm]

The Recipe I am following says even a few hours is OK. We will see. Did not have the option of doing it earlier as we are going to our Vacation house for it and lugging a soaking Turkey in the car was not in the cards. The Recipe I posted says to do it overnight which is what we are doing.

 

[garylkoh]

Hmmm..... I just looked at that recipe you linked and it seems wrong to me.

Brining depends on two principles to work properly - diffusion and osmosis. When brining a turkey, the law of diffusion states that when there is greater concentration of salt and sugar outside the flesh (in the brine) than inside the flesh, the salt and sugar will naturally flow into the flesh. Where there is also a greater concentration of water outside the flesh than inside, by osmosis, water will flow into the cells of the meat. Once inside the cells, the water and the salt (and to a lesser extent the sugar) will cause the protein molecules to unravel (denature). As the individual protein molecules unravel, they will more likely to interact and form a sticky matrix that keeps the water in the cell.

When exposed to heat, this matrix forms a gel that hence forms a barrier keeping the water from leaking out of the meat as it cooks. In order for the brining to work properly, the water, salt and sugar must penetrate deep into the meat. If you don't brine long enough, the surface gets brined, and then the liquid leaks more. I thought that it takes 4 hours to penetrate 1 inch - and hence for a large turkey, 8 hours is not enough.

May be I'm wrong.

I also understand that for brining to work, you need sugar as well as salt. In that brine formula, there's no sugar..... may be there is in the vegetable stock?

 

[amirm]

I don't know Gary. I am just blindly following 545 people who gave it 5 stars out of 5 stars. I will tell you tomorrow if I am just as much an idiot as the rest of them.

Seriously, based on what I have read, the amount of salt determines bringing time. If one doubles the salt, the brining time is cut in half. If too much time goes by, the meat can get too salty.

On sugar, it is definitely optional as many recipes don't have it and the classic one is just water and salt.

Anyway, wish me luck . This is the first time I am brining the turkey and using the pizza oven to cook it!

Thank heavens we have the insurance policy of another bird cooked the standard way.

 

[garylkoh]

Good luck! Thank the heavens for insurance

When I brine a cornish hen, I'll let it dry after brining so that the skin will crisp. You might want to do the same with the brined turkey.

 

[carolkoh]

My Thanksgiving meal was with friends at the Heathman Hotel's Trellis Restaurant before I flew off to Europe on vacation. Soo... where are the pictures? How did your turkeys turn out, Amir?

 

[mep]

Yeah Carol, where are the pictures? And yeah Amir, how did your turkeys turn out?

 

[amirm]

Ah, I forgot about this .

Pictures are below. As gorgeous and juicy as the bird was, it did not cook in time in the Pizza oven so the back up one was devoured. The issue is that I usually bake in the oven after making Pizza. With the dome at nearly 1000 degrees then, the oven maintains 400+ temps for 20+ hours. This time I did not make Pizza and just raised the temps up to 500 degrees. But as soon as I put the Turkey in there the temp dropped and the turkey just did not cook on the inside at the average temp that was probably in the 250 degree range. I let it cook 'till it was done and then took the picture below.

The juice was pouring out of it when I cut through the breast. So much so that I put out the Pizza fire with it!


Just joking. It was extremely moist.

We cut up the pieces later and made turkey soup with them and they had incredible flavor relative to the oven cooked method. In the first picture, you see the sweet potatoes that I roast in there that were to die for.

 

[garylkoh]

Here's mine - it was almost completely covered with bacon so that the flavor infuses when it went in the oven, but the the bacon shrinks when the bacon fat renders out.

Recipe was in post #1. It was an 18lb bird, plus about 4lbs of stuffing both in the body cavity as well as in the neck cavity (that's why it looks like a big bulge ahead of the wings). Almost half the stuffing went in the front where it ends up a bit dryer than the stuffing in the cavity. Both stuffings are mixed up for serving. The very wet stuffing inside the body cavity keeps the breast meat very moist.

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