After many years, this is my current favorite method of preparing a holiday turkey. I find smaller turkeys better than larger ones. Two small ones for a large group are better than one large one. The plan of attack is to confit the legs and separately roast the breasts on the bone. So:
Get the turkey[s] a couple days early. Cut the legs off and section into thigh and drumstick. Cut the wings off. Cut the back off, leaving a nice breast roast. Put that in the fridge. Brown the leg pieces in a heavy pan on the stovetop in good fat with some salt and pepper. Pack them into a roasting dish with some crushed cloves of garlic and a bay leaf or two and cover with fat -- goose fat is best, or duck fat or even lard. Top up with butter if you have to. Almost-covered is ok, too. Put into a medium oven (I use 150C but anything between 120-160C will work fine) for a few hours, until very tender and almost falling off the bone. Pull out and let cool completely, in the fat, before covering and fridging the entire thing.
The backs and wings you can bake the same time as the legs, and use them to make turkey stock for gravy. Or just pick the meat off and eat it as a cook's treat. Or separate the wings into pieces and save them for the kids' table. Or confit them with the legs if you've got the room in the pan.
For the breast roast, cover with butter, adding a layer under the skin, too, if you're feeling ambitious, salt and pepper, and place in a pan on a rack in a hot oven -- 220C -- breast-side down for 45 minutes. Turn heat down to 200C, turn breast side up, drop some more butter on top, and cook until done. I pull it out when the coolest part of the breast is at 65C. Actually I don't wait even that long. If you're feeble and worried about eating pathogens from a dodgy bird you picked up in an alley somewhere, cook it to 70C. In any case, pull it out of the oven, loosely cover with foil, and rest it at least 30 minutes. This time is perfect to heat up stuffing or finish other dishes and such.
To serve, cut/pull the breasts off and vertically (or bias) slice them, thickly, so each slab has some skin and some middle bit in it.
For the legs, heat them in a very hot oven -- 220C or higher, on a rack. Should not take long, let them get warm and let the skin crisp up.
3 comments:
Sounds delicious.
Are there many alleys in the UK in which to source a "dodgy bird you picked up in an alley somewhere"? =)
My biologist wife insists that 160F is the temperature at which DNA denatures, cell walls break down, nearly viruses (except those with really tough encapsulated coatings, that can survive environmental extremes) are broken apart (I still have difficultly accepting a virus as "alive" when it is just a partial chain of self reassembling protein) and all bacteria are killed. For the "feeble", a target of 160F is a good "clean slate" of micro-biological death.
DDF corrected me... a virus is NOT just protein, it's messenger nucleic acids (RNA) that are surrounded with a formidable protein coating.
The birds still sound delicious. I wish I lived closer =)
Yeah, that's reasonable. The middle will continue to rise in temp after you pull it out, so if you pull it out at 70C, it will still hit 71C while you're resting yet won't be (too) overcooked.
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