To have an enlightened conversation about Thanksgiving turkey, you first have to admit the simple fact that turkey is delicious. It’s hip to dismiss the bird as dry and bland, but that's just propaganda. And you know it's propaganda, because if turkey was really that bad, we'd have replaced it with prime rib a long, long time ago.
No, turkey is actually sort of boss. And as long as you treat it with the bare minimum of love, you'll be treated to meat that would make any chicken jealous.
But for some cooks (read: me), the bare minimum doesn’t cut it anymore. Yes, Icouldthrow the bird in the oven, grab a beer, and watch some football. But this year, I wanted to see how I could get the bird as obscenely succulent and transgressively delicious as possible.
To do that, there was no getting around chopping that bird up. As you've no doubt heard a thousand times, white and dark meat are ideally cooked to different temperatures (even if people disagree about what those temperatures are). It's also important to recognize that each part of the turkey has its own unique character, and the only way of unlocking those is to break the turkey down into breasts, thighs, legs, wings, and—not to be forgotten—the back, and find the best cooking method for each.
这些真理会免费的你。因为当你discard the notion that turkey has to stay whole, you are suddenly faced with nearly limitless options. But I quickly realized that I not only wanted to find the best way to cook each part, but also have the turkey still taste like Thanksgiving should. That meant no pâtés, no mousses, and no other techniques that completely reconfigure the meat. Nobody wants that nonsense on Thanksgiving. What they want is turkey. The best turkey. And as I found out early in my testing, to get that, you need to do a lot of coddling.
First: salt
The most important thing every self-respecting turkey needs is salt. And I'm not talking about a little sprinkle before it cooks. No, like any good relationship, salt and turkey need time to get to know each other. Otherwise, no matter how carefully you cook each part, the meat will taste slightly tough. (If you know someone who hates turkey, this is probably why.)
Salt can be introduced to the bird either with a brine or by sprinkling on a salty dry rub and letting it rest in the fridge for a night. Brining has its merits, and if juiciness is your pinnacle of pleasure, then don't let me stop you. But I've always found brined birds to taste a bit water-logged. Plus, it's a huge pain. Who has room for an enormous bucket of raw poultry in their fridge on the night before Thanksgiving?
Salting, on the other hand, requires no buckets, is easy to do, and results in meat that tastes, well, more like juicy, tender turkey.
In short, you can skip everything else in this article. But if you skip the salting, you may as well skip Thanksgiving altogether.
The wings
What if the most neglected and discarded part of turkey could be transformed into the most absurdly decadent? That was my thought when considering cooking methods for poor, overlooked turkey wing. Naturally, I first thought of fried chicken wings. So I heated up a pot of oil, tossed the turkey wings in, and waited until they were golden-brown and crisp. But while the skin was indeed gloriously-hued and crunchy, the stringy meat required serious chomping to get through. Not exactly what I was looking for.
Wanting that golden skin, but hoping to solve the meat problem, I looked to another oil-filled technique, one with a much gentler hand: confit. By replacing a hard fry with a long bath in a slowly simmering dish of fat, the wing and drumette turned into one of the most delectable hunks of meat on the table.
The process starts with a salty rubdown, along with some other flavorful herbs, and a rest for at least 12 hours. Then the wings are washed, dried, slipped into some oil in a baking dish and cooked in a very low oven until tender. You can serve them as is, but, really, you should give them a quick sauté in a hot skillet to crisp up the skin—a quick extra step that takes the wings from a 10 to an 11.
Legs and thighs
I initially flirted with a number of cooking techniques for legs and thighs. But you know what? Legs and thighs are always the best part of most roast turkeys anyway, so why mess with success? Sure, braised turkey legs can be delicious, but something about it feels sacrilegious in the Thanksgiving context. Honestly, if you can't grab a turkey leg by the hand and act like a king of some debaucherous medieval banquet, you failed Thanksgiving.
Plus, since we don't have the finicky breasts to worry about, you can really lay on the heat. I'm talking about a sweat-inducing 500 degrees, a heat that imparts a deep roasted aroma into the meat, not to mention a stunning skin.
The only problem: Anything besides salt (such as herbs and peppercorns) burns instantly in an oven that hot. How else to add flavor?
进一步加强那些烤香味,和结束p with an even more gorgeously hued skin, I hit upon the idea of basting the meat. Butter works fine, but it still has loads of water. So I decided instead to use ghee, that ubiquitous Indian cooking fat made by slowly reducing butter until the excess water evaporates and the milk proteins begin to caramelize, releasing nutty, roasted aromas.
I loved the results so much, by the end of my turkey experiments, ghee found its way into just about everything. You might as well by a few pounds of butter and start reducing it right now.
The breast
Remember when I said a turkey loves to be coddled? That’s most true when it comes to the breasts. To come out juicy, they need to be cooked as precisely and delicately as possible. And there's really no better way to do that than a sous vide machine—a machine that that can nail temperatures down to the tenth of a degree. So, uh, put a precision cooker on your holiday wish list. (I convinced my editor to send me anAnova.)
As to what temperature you want to zero in on, that's debatable. If you follow the USDA claim, breasts need to be cooked until 165° F until perfectly safe. If you take my advice, you'll lower that number by a good 25 degrees. I realize that might sound reckless and absurd, but trust me here—turkey breast, much like chicken breast, tastes infinitely better at much lower temperature temperatures, between 140° F and 142° F.
Once again, salting helps, and this time you can add flavorings while the meat cooks. I added a sprig of rosemary, a sage leaf, and, of course, a couple tablespoons of ghee.
The only issue with sous vide turkey is the skin. Because no matter what you do, it'll end up pale and limp, which goes against just about everything Thanksgiving stands for. Luckily, it's an easy fix. Dry the skin as much as possible with paper towels, heat some oil in a large skillet over high heat, and cook carefully until brown. Better yet, sauté the breast in ghee. (Have I mentioned you'll want to make a lot of ghee?)
The back
A turkey back is mostly skin, bones, and cartilage, but it still has a vital, if sometimes overlooked, purpose: stock. Normally, the back cooks with the rest of the bird, so people have to use other stock, usually store-bought, to fulfill their gravy needs. But with everything cut up, that back is at your disposal.
This comes in very handy when it's gravy time. You didn't think I'd skip on that, did you? Gravy is the sauce that makes each disparate turkey part somehow sing the same song. Of course, the goal with gravy is to prevent it from tasting like glue. Fortunately, that's easy to do.
When it comes to chicken stock, I long agoconverted to the pressure cooker, which allows for a more concentrated and intense stock in a fraction of the time. So I figured turkey would play well. It definitely did—though you do need to roast the turkey back in the oven first, to help amplify the meaty flavors.
The only addition is a little trick from England's famed chef, Heston Blumenthal, who likes to sprinkle his raw chicken parts with milk powder. This sounds insane, but genuinely increases the meatiness of the resulting stock.
When it's time to whip up your gravy, you'll have a huge helping of homemade stock, most of which you can save for another purpose. You won't have much turkey grease, but, luckily, you can use butter to make a roux. Or—need I even say it?—dip into your ghee reserves.
Real (turkey) talk
Maybe I'm the only person crazy enough to do all this for a Thanksgiving turkey. But I'm not so crazy to think that you'll do it, too. That's fine. There are still key points you can take away from my testing. The salt thing. The cook-it-in-parts thing. The ghee thing.
And finally, the family thing, which I haven't even gotten to yet, so here goes: Following any of these preparations will keep you in the kitchen for a while—hours, in some cases. That means that when Thursday comes, you'll be preoccupied with the turkey while your family is munching on appetizers and yelling football-themed obscenities at the TV. If you consider Thanksgiving a holiday for connecting for family, this could be a bad thing. But for those of us who think that Thanksgiving is solely about the bird (ahem), it's not such a terrible thing at all.
