That's A Lot Of Turkey
Dec. 20th, 2009 12:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deaneOn our most recent visit to the local Superstore our grocery bill cracked the $250 mark which entitles us to a special "gift". In the past we've gotten gift cards, grocery discounts, lawn equipment and clothing.
This time we got a frozen turkey. I'm guessing it's a seasonal thing.
The gift was supposed to be a turkey of 7kg or less. Either the recession has bitten into people's turkey-buying budgets or else the turkeys are responding well to global warming because there weren't any birds that small left and they ended up giving us an 8.4kg monster. (That's 18.5lbs to the Americans among you.)
As you might imagine, after spending $250 on groceries there was no room in either the fridge or the freezer for an 8+ kilo mutant turkey. Fortunately, we were going through a period of below-freezing weather at that time so we decided to leave the turkey outside, in the truck, while we tried to eat a hole big enough for it in the fridge. Unfortunately, the cold spell didn't last and by the time there was room in fridge the turkey had already experienced several days of temperatures ranging from just above freezing to as high as 9C.
An 8 kilo turkey should take about three days to thaw in the fridge. Thursday night, after transferring the turkey to the fridge, I looked at the hourly temperature data for our area, courtesy of the Environment Canada web-site, and guesstimated that the turkey had already experienced the equivalent of about two and a half days of fridge thawing. Another half day in the fridge and it should be ready to cook.
Apparently the truck makes a better freezer than I had thought because after stripping the turkey of its hermetic bio-hazard wrap the next day I found that it was still frozen in parts. The neck was still frozen to the rib cage and I had to work a bit to free it up.
Next came the hunt for the giblets. I felt around inside the icy cavern of the bird's chest for a couple of minutes, but to no avail. I managed to get a light in and have a look around, but still no sign of the giblets. There were two little fleshy bits at the bottom, but I thought the giblets came in a little bag. I gave the fleshy bits a tug but they seemed more firmly attached to the bird that just as a result of glaciation.
I set the turkey back down in the sink so that it and I could have some time to recover from what had been a rather brutal rectal examination. It was then that I spotted a bit of fabric that my exertions had dislodged from the bird's other end. I pulled on it and found myself with a small porous sack containing a pair of red lumps of organ meat. It makes a weird kind of sense, I suppose: if you're going to put the turkey's neck in its chest then of course its internal organs should go in its neck cavity.
I'd wasted enough time by that point that the turkey wasn't looking nearly so frosty as before, so after rinsing it out I plopped it into the roasting pan, which presented me with a new problem: the bird was larger than the pan. I could jam it into the pan, but then parts would dangle over the edges, ready to drip fat onto the hot oven element. To avoid that I laid a large sheet of foil under the pan to catch the drips, then popped it in the oven and hoped for the best.
The one other time that I've cooked a turkey (also a seasonal "gift" from the Superstore) I made up stuffing which I actually stuffed into the bird's body cavities in the traditional way. This time around I found on the net a recipe for stovetop stuffing1 which sounded pretty good. To be sure, it couldn't possibly be as good as stuffing which has spent hours inside the turkey, absorbing great gobs of melted fat, but in this age of multicore processors the idea of being able to make the stuffing in parallel with the cooking of the turkey rather than serially was just too alluring for me to pass up. As usual, dicing up the onions destroyed my vision for about an hour, but other than that the stuffing came together without incident.
By this time the bird had been cooking for about three hours. The breast had turned a beautiful golden brown and it was time to cover it up to prevent it from turning radioactive. I grabbed the roll of foil again, tugged on the leading edge and came away with a strip five centimeters wide. That wasn't going to be enough to save my turkey's deliciously bronzed skin. It would only give it tan lines. So I made an executive decision. The bits of the turkey which hung over the edge of the pan were also the ones most exposed to the heat. I figured that after three hours of cooking they'd probably given up about as much fat as they were going to. They might still ooze a few juices, but the oil content should be low enough so as not to present a fire hazard. Based on that logic I stole the sheet of foil out from under the pan and used it to cover the bird.
An hour later the grease fire started.
While my logic about the de-fatting of the overhanging bits had been sound, I'd neglected to fully consider the ramifications of stuffing an eight kilo turkey into roasting pan which was better suited to a two kilo cat2. Being filled as it was with turkey, there was little room in the pan for the escaping juices and, floating on top of those juices, the fat which had cooked out of the turkey. At the four hour mark the pan had reached and breached its capacity, sending a stream of fat over the lip and onto the hot element below, with no foil in place to stop it.
Fire briefly lit up the inside of the oven before being hidden behind a cloud of thick, grey smoke, which also began billowing out of the oven's vent and quickly filled the kitchen. Not being being an utter moron, I declined to pull open the oven door for a better look but instead turned off the element, opened up the windows and the front door and waited for the smoke to clear.
According to the charts an eight kilogram turkey should cook for four hours and 45 minutes. Mine had cooked for just four hours and had still been a bit on the frozen side when I'd started. The oven was cooling rapidly, as was the bird. Yet I still needed to do something about the fat and juices brimming the roasting pan. I quickly searched through the kitchen drawers for a turkey baster but came up empty handed. Either we didn't own one or the paramour had discovered some alternative use for it.3 The turkey was crammed in so tight that I couldn't even get a ladle in to scoop some of the juice out. I was going to have to labouriously spoon the juices out, a tablespoonful at a time, at least until the level was down far enough for me to carry the pan to the sink without splashing the kitchen with hot grease. That was going to take more time during which the turkey would cool further.
The question was, would the turkey need more cooking and, if so, how much? I whipped out the meat thermometer and jammed it first into the drumstick and then deep into the breast. Both places read 87C, well above the 82C required to ensure that I wouldn't kill myself or my loved ones. I stuck a fork in a couple more places and the juices ran clear, so I decided that despite its untimely end, the cooking phase was complete.
So after all of that, how did it turn out? Take a look for yourself:
Looks good, doesn't it? Tastes good, too.
The one other time that I cooked a turkey the paramour had one plateful and then decided to leave the rest for me because to the cook go the spoils, or something like that, and I ended up eating turkey for the next month. This time around I've made it clear to zir that while the thought is appreciated, that's one helluva lot of turkey and I'm going to need help with it.
Since that picture was taken I'm happy to say that the turkey has become a paraplegic and undergone a radical mastectomy.
The real surprise, though, was the stovetop stuffing. As I already mentioned I have a preference for stuffing which is cooked inside the bird. This stuff, however, was fantastic. I ended having stuffing for dessert and again as a late-night snack. Even better, there's still plenty of turkey stock left over for me to make more of it, this time without having to fight with an actual turkey.
While X-mas turkey has never been a tradition around here, I can see that X-mas stuffing is about to become one.
This time we got a frozen turkey. I'm guessing it's a seasonal thing.
The gift was supposed to be a turkey of 7kg or less. Either the recession has bitten into people's turkey-buying budgets or else the turkeys are responding well to global warming because there weren't any birds that small left and they ended up giving us an 8.4kg monster. (That's 18.5lbs to the Americans among you.)
As you might imagine, after spending $250 on groceries there was no room in either the fridge or the freezer for an 8+ kilo mutant turkey. Fortunately, we were going through a period of below-freezing weather at that time so we decided to leave the turkey outside, in the truck, while we tried to eat a hole big enough for it in the fridge. Unfortunately, the cold spell didn't last and by the time there was room in fridge the turkey had already experienced several days of temperatures ranging from just above freezing to as high as 9C.
An 8 kilo turkey should take about three days to thaw in the fridge. Thursday night, after transferring the turkey to the fridge, I looked at the hourly temperature data for our area, courtesy of the Environment Canada web-site, and guesstimated that the turkey had already experienced the equivalent of about two and a half days of fridge thawing. Another half day in the fridge and it should be ready to cook.
Apparently the truck makes a better freezer than I had thought because after stripping the turkey of its hermetic bio-hazard wrap the next day I found that it was still frozen in parts. The neck was still frozen to the rib cage and I had to work a bit to free it up.
Next came the hunt for the giblets. I felt around inside the icy cavern of the bird's chest for a couple of minutes, but to no avail. I managed to get a light in and have a look around, but still no sign of the giblets. There were two little fleshy bits at the bottom, but I thought the giblets came in a little bag. I gave the fleshy bits a tug but they seemed more firmly attached to the bird that just as a result of glaciation.
I set the turkey back down in the sink so that it and I could have some time to recover from what had been a rather brutal rectal examination. It was then that I spotted a bit of fabric that my exertions had dislodged from the bird's other end. I pulled on it and found myself with a small porous sack containing a pair of red lumps of organ meat. It makes a weird kind of sense, I suppose: if you're going to put the turkey's neck in its chest then of course its internal organs should go in its neck cavity.
I'd wasted enough time by that point that the turkey wasn't looking nearly so frosty as before, so after rinsing it out I plopped it into the roasting pan, which presented me with a new problem: the bird was larger than the pan. I could jam it into the pan, but then parts would dangle over the edges, ready to drip fat onto the hot oven element. To avoid that I laid a large sheet of foil under the pan to catch the drips, then popped it in the oven and hoped for the best.
The one other time that I've cooked a turkey (also a seasonal "gift" from the Superstore) I made up stuffing which I actually stuffed into the bird's body cavities in the traditional way. This time around I found on the net a recipe for stovetop stuffing1 which sounded pretty good. To be sure, it couldn't possibly be as good as stuffing which has spent hours inside the turkey, absorbing great gobs of melted fat, but in this age of multicore processors the idea of being able to make the stuffing in parallel with the cooking of the turkey rather than serially was just too alluring for me to pass up. As usual, dicing up the onions destroyed my vision for about an hour, but other than that the stuffing came together without incident.
By this time the bird had been cooking for about three hours. The breast had turned a beautiful golden brown and it was time to cover it up to prevent it from turning radioactive. I grabbed the roll of foil again, tugged on the leading edge and came away with a strip five centimeters wide. That wasn't going to be enough to save my turkey's deliciously bronzed skin. It would only give it tan lines. So I made an executive decision. The bits of the turkey which hung over the edge of the pan were also the ones most exposed to the heat. I figured that after three hours of cooking they'd probably given up about as much fat as they were going to. They might still ooze a few juices, but the oil content should be low enough so as not to present a fire hazard. Based on that logic I stole the sheet of foil out from under the pan and used it to cover the bird.
An hour later the grease fire started.
While my logic about the de-fatting of the overhanging bits had been sound, I'd neglected to fully consider the ramifications of stuffing an eight kilo turkey into roasting pan which was better suited to a two kilo cat2. Being filled as it was with turkey, there was little room in the pan for the escaping juices and, floating on top of those juices, the fat which had cooked out of the turkey. At the four hour mark the pan had reached and breached its capacity, sending a stream of fat over the lip and onto the hot element below, with no foil in place to stop it.
Fire briefly lit up the inside of the oven before being hidden behind a cloud of thick, grey smoke, which also began billowing out of the oven's vent and quickly filled the kitchen. Not being being an utter moron, I declined to pull open the oven door for a better look but instead turned off the element, opened up the windows and the front door and waited for the smoke to clear.
According to the charts an eight kilogram turkey should cook for four hours and 45 minutes. Mine had cooked for just four hours and had still been a bit on the frozen side when I'd started. The oven was cooling rapidly, as was the bird. Yet I still needed to do something about the fat and juices brimming the roasting pan. I quickly searched through the kitchen drawers for a turkey baster but came up empty handed. Either we didn't own one or the paramour had discovered some alternative use for it.3 The turkey was crammed in so tight that I couldn't even get a ladle in to scoop some of the juice out. I was going to have to labouriously spoon the juices out, a tablespoonful at a time, at least until the level was down far enough for me to carry the pan to the sink without splashing the kitchen with hot grease. That was going to take more time during which the turkey would cool further.
The question was, would the turkey need more cooking and, if so, how much? I whipped out the meat thermometer and jammed it first into the drumstick and then deep into the breast. Both places read 87C, well above the 82C required to ensure that I wouldn't kill myself or my loved ones. I stuck a fork in a couple more places and the juices ran clear, so I decided that despite its untimely end, the cooking phase was complete.
So after all of that, how did it turn out? Take a look for yourself:
Looks good, doesn't it? Tastes good, too.
The one other time that I cooked a turkey the paramour had one plateful and then decided to leave the rest for me because to the cook go the spoils, or something like that, and I ended up eating turkey for the next month. This time around I've made it clear to zir that while the thought is appreciated, that's one helluva lot of turkey and I'm going to need help with it.
Since that picture was taken I'm happy to say that the turkey has become a paraplegic and undergone a radical mastectomy.
The real surprise, though, was the stovetop stuffing. As I already mentioned I have a preference for stuffing which is cooked inside the bird. This stuff, however, was fantastic. I ended having stuffing for dessert and again as a late-night snack. Even better, there's still plenty of turkey stock left over for me to make more of it, this time without having to fight with an actual turkey.
While X-mas turkey has never been a tradition around here, I can see that X-mas stuffing is about to become one.
1 I made several alterations to the recipe, removing the walnuts, because I don't like them, adding garlic and leaving out sage because we didn't have any. If anyone makes up the recipe as given I'd appreciate knowing how it turns out.
2 Not that I've tried.
3 No, not that use. Eight cats are quite enough. Neither the paramour nor I have any desire to add a tiny human to the mix.
2 Not that I've tried.
3 No, not that use. Eight cats are quite enough. Neither the paramour nor I have any desire to add a tiny human to the mix.
