Send It To Sleep In The Saltwater
Irradiated by LabRat
We’ve all been at Thanksgiving’s grimmest scene: at the table, gazing upon the majestic turkey that granny or an equivalent clan elder has produced and carved, and hoping to be the first one passed a plate so that you can pounce on the dark meat- because the white meat, alas, is as dry as the Gobi desert and about as flavorful and appealing as its sands.
This need not be, and I will tell you the single best way you can prevent it- certainly much more effective than mucking your oven about basting the outside while the interior slowly surrenders its precious bodily fluids.
To a large extent, this is not actually Granny’s fault; when she learned to cook, turkeys were large but normally proportioned birds. Nowadays the demand for breast meat on poultry has encouraged breeders to produce birds with more and more breast, to the point that the resulting animal is very nearly spherical and somewhat alarming to regard while alive. This is not an optimal shape for roasting. An optimal shape for roasting looks like, well, a roast; wider than it is tall, uniformly shaped, and composed of muscle tissue that has uniform requirements for cooking until done. A turkey, meanwhile, has a large interior cavity that is not filled with muscle tissue, limbs, and a gigantic muscular structure on one end that has different requirements than the smaller and differently shaped ones on the other. While the thighs at the bottom of the oven finish cooking, the gigantic breast at the peak of Mount Bird overcooks.
While there are assorted ways to cope with these fundamental problems, the easiest way to prevent the breast from turning into a re-enactment of a mummy movie is to brine the turkey.
While immersing the bird in salt water for a day or a day and a half doesn’t necessarily strike a cook as intuitive, it actually helps immensely. In a solution of 3%-5% salt, two things happen: for one, the muscle fibers are disrupted and loosen, so the cells’ overall capacity to hold liquid rises. For two, osmosis happens and the muscle cells suck up the salt and the water alike- and hang onto it. As a bonus, they’ll also suck up other molecules that happen to be in the liquid- like aromatic herbs and other seasonings added to the brine for flavor. As an even better bonus, due to the way the liquid seeps in, even if you don’t have time to do a properly long brine the meat on the outside of the bird most likely to suffer overcooking gets its benefits first. Water will still be lost at the same rate during cooking, but the meat will have sucked up so much additional moisture that the overall loss will have been effectively cut in half.
So, if you are in charge of the turkey for your family’s Thanksgiving affairs, mix up a solution of brine (we use Alton Brown’s, hail the Good Eater), and dunk your turkey in it the night or afternoon before you plan to cook the bird. Watch the white meat fly off the platter as fast if not faster than the dark- and enjoy your family’s adulation as Conqueror of the Roast Beast.
November 24th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Another trick I learned from my grandfather… Slather the raw bird with butter (no, that’s not enough use *lots*, and then shove it into a paper grocery bag (if you can still find one these days!). Staple it shut, marking the spot of the pop-up timer (if you need to know where it is). Put the whole thing in a roasting pan, and cook normally. The flash point of the paper bag is around 450, and if you cook the bird at 350, or even 400, you have a comfortable safety margin.
The bag will help retain moisture, and as a bonus, will also soak up some of the grease from the drippings.
November 24th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I’ve also used the paper bag trick and it works. I’ve taught that to my daughters too! Having said that, I’m smoking a turkey tomorrow am, and I’ve asked the folks to soak it in brine and seasonings until I get there in the morning. I’ve never tried that to smoke one, so this is gonna be interesting…
November 24th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Also, per AB, yank out that popup timer. It’s useless. Get a real probe thermometer and put it in the big part of the thigh.
(If you don’t watch Good Eats, start. It’s Julia Child meets Mr. Wizard.)
November 24th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
I wish my mother would do this. Unfortunately, she’s so sensitive to the taste of salt that she refuses to do it, fearing it will by too salty.
Luckily, this year she’s cooking a big chicken instead of a turkey, as there will only be three of us (bro and sis can’t make it). So maybe it won’t be so dry.
November 24th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
When we cook bird or ham in the oven, we use renyold’s bags. They’re easy, cook the food faster, self baste (sorta), preserve moisture, and it’s hard to overcook the food.
That said, I prefer to deep fry the gobbler. Prep time, with marinade injection, takes longer. Cook time is 3 minutes/pound, really. And it’s the best way to keep the bird moist. AB, the food god (hoo hah hah), has instructions for his turkey derrick online. It’s safer than hand-dipping the turkey in boiling oil, and kinda fun to construct too.
None of this, of course, precludes the use of a brine. We brine first, then immerse the bird in boiling peanut oil.
November 25th, 2010 at 1:35 am
Another good trick is one pioneered by Harold McGee(unsurprisingly) - using an icepack to cool the white meat - just lay some bags of ice over the breast of the bird. It works, because dark meat finishes at a higher temperature than white meat does. So if the white meat is colder than the darkmeat is, it finishs at the same time.
One thing to be aware of - you probably won’t be able to make gravy from the turkey if you brine, because it will probably be too salty.
November 25th, 2010 at 8:16 am
I have bird #3 finally in the oven. Rarely have I had dry breast.
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 25th, 2010 at 8:18 am
…That’s #3 for this Holiday. Probably 35-40 birds total over the years. The oven bag is the trick to a moist bird.
November 25th, 2010 at 10:26 am
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 25th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
We brine chickens, turkeys, pork roasts, some beef, thick chops, & more- salt (lots), sugar, and spices always including a dried hot chile or two crumbled, bay leaf same, juniper berries with the pork. Works WELL. Ask if you want details.
Today: free range oak- fed pork (a fresh ham) from a friend’s quail plantation in Florida. We got a LOT- will still maybe have some in January…
November 25th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I’ve been using Monsieur Brown’s honey brine for years now. My wife has never viewed Thanksgiving turkey as anything more than a protein to be administered. When I started using the brine, she actually looked forward to the bird.
We fried our gobbler this year after a soak in the honey brine, and my father was eating the skin like pork rinds. I think we have a winner as it took less than an hour to cook and was very moist.
Granted, we like our honey in this house, so your miles may vary.
November 26th, 2010 at 6:31 am
Butterfly the sucker brine it cook it, maybe an hour hour and one half at the most, done to perfection
November 26th, 2010 at 10:23 am
We’ve always done a foil-wrapped turkey and have never had a dry bird. Bonus: when you wrap the bird in foil, you can cook it at high temps without fear, and that means you don’t have to get up at some ungodly hour to babysit the oven. Three to three & a half hours of cook time, tops. Even if you like a midday meal instead of an evening one, that still lets you rise in a leisurely manner on Thanksgiving morning.