With another pagan holiday on the horizon, taste buds across the U.S. are tantalized by the thought of Mom’s old-fashioned roasted turkey. Children of all ages can’t wait to dig into piles of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and juicy breast of turkey. But most of us leave the table bitchin’ about the dry turkey meat and that the feathers would make a better meal. Well, take heart holiday turkey hounds! Your plate no longer needs to taste like a bowl of dust, where you drink yourself into a stupor just to wash down the stringy meat. Nope! Along with your mashed tators and canned cranberry sauce (please don’t ruin everyone’s holiday by making your own; serve it as God intended, from the can, in one slab, with can rib markings and all!), you can eat turkey so moist, you can paddle a canoe through it!
The secret, of course, is not deep-frying (for God’s sake!), or lowering the temperature to 325 degrees, but in the preparation before roasting, namely brining! If you remember your high school biology, you realize that brining is just osmosis disguised as a culinary term. The turkey skin is a semi-permeable membrane and by placing your bird into a salt water solution, your bird stays moist in the oven! Hey, what do you have to lose, except drinking gallons of spiked punch to choke down your food.
Below is a link to chef Alton Brown’s roast turkey recipe. A couple of tips, though . . . do not do the “set the oven to 500 degrees” thing, and set your thermometer to 150 to 155 degrees, instead of 161. Sit back and enjoy the best tasting fowl you’ve ever eaten. Happy Thanksgiving!
