Hot Off The Grill !

[MadtownPacker]

Yeah, baking is for soft stuff that you want to solidify, like cakes and cookies. Apples and potatoes, you could probably do either one. But it all depends on your oven, too. In lower end ovens, bake and roast settings do exactly the same thing. With better ovens, roasting will give you a nicer brown crust. If you have a roast convection setting, use that for the turkey.

Further my culinary education. How does a baked ham work? This is why I love my smoker and grill!

[Zool]

That is sad. Tamales are how we make sure we have something to unwrap on Christmas Day!

Hectors mom made me a dozen assorted every Christmas. I miss them so much.

[hoosier]

Further my culinary education. How does a baked ham work? This is why I love my smoker and grill!

As a rule of thumb, the more it tokes the less it works

[3irty1]

Most important thing you can do to respect the turkey that died for you is to sharpen your knife and watch a youtube video or something on how to carve if you're not comfortable with it. I can lube an overcooked bird in gravy but bad carving turns a holiday into a corpse mutilation.

I consider ideal to be 160F which means pulling the bird from the fryer/oven/smoker at 153-155 depending on your Turkey's thermal mass. The center will continue to cook on the counter for a while. Those thermometers with the flexible probe that can monitor the bird the whole time makes this fool proof.

Those two things done well put any Turkey in the 99th percentile IMO. I'll be using brine this year because I'm doing a wild bird but for your typical 6 month old farm raised butterball I honestly can't tell the difference. I just thaw it early, salt the cavity, dry off the outside, and smear with room temp butter+salt+pepper just to let the skin get about a day worth of cure.

[Radagast]

Most important thing you can do to respect the turkey that died for you is to sharpen your knife and watch a youtube video or something on how to carve if you're not comfortable with it. I can lube an overcooked bird in gravy but bad carving turns a holiday into a corpse mutilation.

I consider ideal to be 160F which means pulling the bird from the fryer/oven/smoker at 153-155 depending on your Turkey's thermal mass. The center will continue to cook on the counter for a while. Those thermometers with the flexible probe that can monitor the bird the whole time makes this fool proof.

Those two things done well put any Turkey in the 99th percentile IMO. I'll be using brine this year because I'm doing a wild bird but for your typical 6 month old farm raised butterball I honestly can't tell the difference. I just thaw it early, salt the cavity, dry off the outside, and smear with room temp butter+salt+pepper just to let the skin get about a day worth of cure.

I agree, carving a Turkey is an important part of serving a Turkey. However professional chefs and health professionals all agree that undercooking a Turkey can be unsafe. Butterball and all others agree that a Turkey is not fully cooked until a meat thermometer inserted deep into the breast area reads 165 degrees F. Basting and other methods can ensure a moist bird.

Your welcome to do as you please, but I would hate for your feast to make anyone ill.

[MadtownPacker]

As a rule of thumb, the more it tokes the less it works

Hah! Cooking humor, this tread truly has it all!

[3irty1]

I agree, carving a Turkey is an important part of serving a Turkey. However professional chefs and health professionals all agree that undercooking a Turkey can be unsafe. Butterball and all others agree that a Turkey is not fully cooked until a meat thermometer inserted deep into the breast area reads 165 degrees F. Basting and other methods can ensure a moist bird.

Your welcome to do as you please, but I would hate for your feast to make anyone ill.

Well I was a professional and I can assure you that 165 F is no more pasteurized than 160 F is when it comes to roasting a Turkey. In cooking we are concerned with safety while at Butterball they are concerned with liability. The latter is determined by lawyers. As cooks we want to play it safe, as lawyers they want to play it lawsuit-proof which means simple instructions with endless room for error.

Pasteurization is not just a function of temperature but also of time. Here's a table from the USDA which is not the kind of thing lawyers would allow on a butterball label:

Lawyers like the numbers in excess of 165 because at this temperature pasteurization is more or less instantaneous and removes the variable of time altogether. As cooks we have to look at this table and wonder how could you ever serve a Turkey that was not safe? A bird needs to be at my suggested temperature of 160F for less than 30 seconds to be safe. Even at an internal temp of 150 degrees it takes only 3.7 minutes to pasteurize our bird and no matter what we do, how poorly calibrated our thermometer is or how fast our watch is, we can guarantee our cooking times and temperatures will far exceed this.

[hoosier]

Biggest turkey challenge for me is uneven cooking. It's probably the size of the bird (>23lb.) that is the biggest contributing factor, but I regularly have birds come out with perfectly done breasts and some lingering sushi-level doneness in the dark meat areas. I usually just carve it and then throw the underdone stuff back in the oven to finish it off, but it would be nice to have an evenly cooked experience once in a while.

[3irty1]

Biggest turkey challenge for me is uneven cooking. It's probably the size of the bird (>23lb.) that is the biggest contributing factor, but I regularly have birds come out with perfectly done breasts and some lingering sushi-level doneness in the dark meat areas. I usually just carve it and then throw the underdone stuff back in the oven to finish it off, but it would be nice to have an evenly cooked experience once in a while.

It might not be uneven cooking, the dark stuff needs more time to look right. This is a modern problem of the Turkey industrial complex. Whatever Ivan Drago tubes and hormones it takes for a Turkey to be 20+ lbs at 5 or 6 months old doesn't change the fact that this bird has unappetizing pink joints of a baby even when cooked to temp. In my job I used to have to carve turkeys table side and so this was not acceptable even if entirely cosmetic. To mitigate it I found 18lbs to be about the right size so that the thighs would look right by the time that the breasts were done. On a big boy you could try foiling the breasts or even stuffing the cavity with a bag of ice to give the thighs a head start. If you don't care about carving table side then ya, lop off the tits and put the rest back in the oven. You can make a better platter that way anyhow.

[Radagast]

Biggest turkey challenge for me is uneven cooking. It's probably the size of the bird (>23lb.) that is the biggest contributing factor, but I regularly have birds come out with perfectly done breasts and some lingering sushi-level doneness in the dark meat areas. I usually just carve it and then throw the underdone stuff back in the oven to finish it off, but it would be nice to have an evenly cooked experience once in a while.

A few questions, no harm intended.

1. Is your salted and peppered bird placed on some kind of a rack or does it rest on the bottom of the roasting pan? Elevating an inch above the bottom of the roasting pan allows for juices/drippings to turn to steam and fill the tightly covered pan with hot moisture.

2. Is your roasting pan covered with a fitted lid or a tightly made tent of aluminum foil? This allows for the juices/drippings to help steam the bird as well as the roasting heat. Placing additional broth in the bottom of the roasting pan can help with this and helps to provide fluids to baiste the bird with. A Turkey baster (looks like a big eye dropper) comes in handy and they are not that expensive to buy.

3. Is your bird placed breast up in your roasting pan. This allows for easier basting and elevates that portion of the bird

4. To complete the process, most remove the lid/foil, spread a little butter/oil on the birds skin and Brown the bird fr 10 or so minutes. Delivering a more crispy skin rather than a less pleasing skin color.

5. Allow the bird to rest and cool down before carving. Place whole bird on a large platter as drippings/broth are used to make gravy with!

I've tried to cover all of the bases, but any additional ideas/tips are certainly welcome.

The idea is to help each other succeed and I wish you all the best of good luck.

[Zool]

Biggest turkey challenge for me is uneven cooking. It's probably the size of the bird (>23lb.) that is the biggest contributing factor, but I regularly have birds come out with perfectly done breasts and some lingering sushi-level doneness in the dark meat areas. I usually just carve it and then throw the underdone stuff back in the oven to finish it off, but it would be nice to have an evenly cooked experience once in a while.

Spatchcocking resolves this issue for me. Doing a brine helps everything cook faster also.

[hoosier]

It might not be uneven cooking, the dark stuff needs more time to look right. This is a modern problem of the Turkey industrial complex. Whatever Ivan Drago tubes and hormones it takes for a Turkey to be 20+ lbs at 5 or 6 months old doesn't change the fact that this bird has unappetizing pink joints of a baby even when cooked to temp. In my job I used to have to carve turkeys table side and so this was not acceptable even if entirely cosmetic. To mitigate it I found 18lbs to be about the right size so that the thighs would look right by the time that the breasts were done. On a big boy you could try foiling the breasts or even stuffing the cavity with a bag of ice to give the thighs a head start. If you don't care about carving table side then ya, lop off the tits and put the rest back in the oven. You can make a better platter that way anyhow.

For my taste it would be nice if the "white meat popsicle" that is the modern turkey were really just all white meat. But I carve em in the kitchen, so nobody is scandalized by the thought of having a bit of e coli with their drumstick. I'm going to try downsizing this year, maybe do two of the smaller variety with the added bonus of additional leftovers.

[hoosier]

Spatchcocking resolves this issue for me. Doing a brine helps everything cook faster also.

You spatchcock a 20 lb turkey????

[Zool]

You spatchcock a 20 lb turkey????

Damn straight! Good poultry sheers are worth every penny.

[hoosier]

A few questions, no harm intended.

1. Is your salted and peppered bird placed on some kind of a rack or does it rest on the bottom of the roasting pan? Elevating an inch above the bottom of the roasting pan allows for juices/drippings to turn to steam and fill the tightly covered pan with hot moisture.

2. Is your roasting pan covered with a fitted lid or a tightly made tent of aluminum foil? This allows for the juices/drippings to help steam the bird as well as the roasting heat. Placing additional broth in the bottom of the roasting pan can help with this and helps to provide fluids to baiste the bird with. A Turkey baster (looks like a big eye dropper) comes in handy and they are not that expensive to buy.

3. Is your bird placed breast up in your roasting pan. This allows for easier basting and elevates that portion of the bird

4. To complete the process, most remove the lid/foil, spread a little butter/oil on the birds skin and Brown the bird fr 10 or so minutes. Delivering a more crispy skin rather than a less pleasing skin color.

5. Allow the bird to rest and cool down before carving. Place whole bird on a large platter as drippings/broth are used to make gravy with!

I've tried to cover all of the bases, but any additional ideas/tips are certainly welcome.

The idea is to help each other succeed and I wish you all the best of good luck.

Because heat rises, breast up will tend to exacerbate unevenness. I start it off breast down then flip it so the breast skin gets nice and brown. I've tried cooking in a turkey cooker with a fitting lid but had a hard time moderating the temp. Turkey ended up dry AND pasty looking, the worst of both worlds. I'm sure there are better turkey cookers out there that can do the job right, but not worth the effort for once a year.