Turkey Week

Good morning everyone! As Thanksgiving approaches, many people ask how best to prepare the turkey. My favorite method is to 1. Debone the turkey 2. Brine the turkey 3.Roast the turkey.
Deboning the turkey is important for two reasons. 1. The white meat cooks a lot quicker than the dark meat . This means that the white meat dries out while the turkey legs and thighs are still cooking. 2. You can roast the turkey carcass and make your stock and stuffing ahead of time. To debone the turkey, I like to start off by seperating the legs first. Taking a nice sharp boning or chef's knife, cut through the layer of skin between the leg and breast. Pull on the leg and continue following the knife through the skin until you come to the leg joint. Cut around and finally through the joint (It should give easily) and repeat with the other leg. Next, locate the breast bone. Take your knife and slice slowly right down the bone and continue to slice further into the meat following the breast bone. Don't worry about going through the breast bone, it should hold fairly well. Keep slicing through the meat until there is no more to take off, I like to also take part of the wing bone (airliner) because it gives me something to hold on to while slicing.
Brining the turkey is done to ensure that the moisture in the bird stays intact through a wonderful process called osmosis. There are two ways to do this; 1. liquid brine and 2. dry rub. For poultry, I prefer the dry rub. Take some garlic, parsley, thryme, sage, rosemary, and salt and run it through a food processor. This takes a lot of salt! Add salt until the mixture pulls from the side; it should be green with no leafy herbs sticking out. Next lightly cover your turkey with the mixture (this is now a concentrated salt and tends to be very very potent) and let marinate for 12-24 hours. After it has marinated, rinse off the surface with water and then pat dry with a towel.
Preheat the oven at 400 degrees. Place your turkey breasts on a roasting pan and do the same with the legs in a seperate pan. Cover your turkey pieces with butter or oil and place in the oven to cook. The breasts should be done in about 1 hour and 15 minutes depending on the size. To check, place a thermometer inside the thickest part and wait until it reaches 160 degrees, remove the breasts from the oven when it reaches this temperature. Repeat with the legs, only pull them when they reach 165 degrees. The oil should help brown the meat and add flavor, if the meat gets too dark, lower the oven temperature. You now have the best turkey ever!!!!Please let us know how this turns out for you.