hungryYou will need:
* A turkey. Duh. If you have no turkey, go away.
* Ginger ale.*
* Olive oil.
* Fresh garlic. I use pre-crushed, because I am lazy. You're welcome to play Alton Brown and crush your own. I won't stop you, but I may laugh at you while I sit back and do my nails.
* Honey.
* Brown sugar.
* Dry spices according to your specific taste. I use a mixture of sage, thyme, and rosemary. One of my cousins uses curry powder. It's all you.
* Salt and pepper.
* Something vegetable to shove into the turkey. More on this in a second.
* A roasting pan of some sort.
* A turkey baster.
* A meat brush.
* Foil.
* A way to get the turkey out of the roasting pan, because that sucker will be hot and heavy.
You will want:
* A turkey thermometer. Sexy, sexy little things that they are.
(*As far as ginger ale goes, I recommend Canada Dry. If your bird is between zero and sixteen pounds, you will need two liters. If your bird is between sixteen and twenty-five pounds, you will need four liters. If your bird is over twenty-five pounds, I am coming to your place for dinner. Add two liters if you are using one of those fancy-ass roasting pans where your turkey is on a rack and getting sort of steamed by the liquid evaporating beneath it, because those suckers use up your basting liquid like nobody's business.)
Assuming you're starting with a frozen turkey, you'll want to give it approximately twenty-four hours per four pounds of bird for thawing. Starting your cooking process with a frozen turkey is neither fun nor good. I recommend against it, having done it twice in recent memory, and it is annoying. The best way to confirm whether your turkey is fully thawed is to shove your (clean) hand up its ass, and feel the ribs. If everything in there is thawed, you're probably good to go. If not, you need to thaw your turkey some more. In an emergency, you can try to thaw your turkey with lukewarm water. Don't let the water get too hot, or you'll have boiled turkey. Not pleasant.
Set your oven to three hundred and fifty degrees. Get out a small bowl, the olive oil, garlic, brown sugar, honey, and dry spices. Here's where precise measurements begin to break down, because they simply can't be given: the size of turkeys varies too much. You want to put approximately one tablespoon of olive oil per four pounds of turkey into the bowl. It doesn't need to be precise, and it's best to err on the side of excess. Once the olive oil is in the bowl, add an equal volume of honey. With me so far? Good. Now, add one tablespoon of crushed or minced garlic per eight pounds of turkey to the mixture -- feel free to increase this if you're a garlic fiend.
Mix the contents of your bowl vigorously, and add dry spices to taste before mixing again. Once this is done, take your meat brush and brush the mixture onto the turkey, paying special attention to the top, wings, and legs. This is going to provide your sealant, and also make the turkey prettier. Yay. Continue brushing on the mixture until it's aaaaaaall gone.
Now we will prepare our inter-cavity stuffing. A note: I do not cook stuffed turkeys. Which is to say that while yes, I put things inside the turkey, they are vegetable things, meant to influence the final flavor, and not bready things. Fully stuffed turkeys take longer to cook, and I've never done one, so while you're quite, quite welcome to cook your turkey that way -- it is, after all, your turkey -- you'll need to look elsewhere for things to tell you how to do it. If you're happy cooking your stuffing outside your bird, what you'll want to do at this point is take whatever vegetables you feel appropriate, chop them coarsely, and shove them into the turkey, along with the giblets. You want to fill half the available space; no more.
(I generally combine one-third to one half of a leek, a small red onion, some garlic cloves, and a loose handful of pomegranate seeds. I am very strange. Feel free to put anything you like into your bird's butt, it's your bird, after all.)
Now that your turkey is sealed and stuffed, put it into the pan. Taking approximately one-quarter to one-half cup of brown sugar, sprinkle liberally over the top of the bird. This will caramelize during cooking, and add a second layer of sealant. Salt and pepper the turkey. Now, fill the bottom of your basting pan with ginger ale. If you're cooking in a standard turkey pan, the ginger ale should cover the bottom inch or so of the bird. If you're cooking in a rack-roaster, the ginger ale should fill the bottom two inches of the pan. Put the turkey into the oven. La.
You're going to want to watch things pretty closely for the first hour or so, because your goal is for the turkey to brown, not burn. Once the top of your turkey gets all pretty and caramelized, add a foil tent to the equation and walk away. Come back periodically and baste the sucker, but really, heat, chemical reactions, and all that lovely dead flesh will do your work for you. If your ginger ale level gets low -- and it will, especially with a rack-roaster; those suckers can use two full two liter bottles without breaking a sweat -- top it off, but don't add so much to a traditional pan that you wind up with a small turkey-based flood in your oven. Boiling meat-juice and ginger ale does not equal fun for the whole family.
If you have a turkey thermometer, you want the temperature at the meaty part of the thigh to be a hundred and eighty degrees. Otherwise, the following chart is a vague guide:
8 to 12 pounds, 2 3/4 to 3 hours
12 to 14 pounds, 3 to 3 3/4 hours
14 to 18 pounds, 3 3/4 to 4 1/4 hours
18 to 20 pounds, 4 1/4 to 4 1/2 hours
20 to 24 pounds, 4 1/2 to 5 hours
You may need to turn down the heat, depending on your oven and how hot it seems to be running. Once your turkey is done, remove it from the oven, but do not remove the foil; let it sit for twenty to thirty minutes in order to finish steaming.
Remove the foil, transfer the turkey to your cutting board, try not to burn your fingers, carve and serve! You will have the moistest turkey in the world. It will pretty much dissolve as you cut into it, and may just drop off the bones, like it has a tasty, tasty new form of ebola. Mmmmmmmm, filoviruslicious. Don't forget to invite me to dinner.
Yay, turkey.
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November 22 2008, 02:25:37 UTC 8 years ago
November 22 2008, 17:00:31 UTC 8 years ago