How to Roast a Turkey

Hi, I’m Scott Cutaneo for Howdini. Today, we are going to be roasting a turkey. Here I have a brined turkey that has been brining for eight hours in salt water. We have to start with our ingredients; we have onion, celery, carrot, some thyme. We have some oil and butter mixture which we’re going to baste on top to start. Some salt and white pepper and out trussing string, which we’re going to tie to make sure the extremities of the turkey don’t fray away and burn.

So first, we’re going to take our roasting pan and add out onions. These are onions that are cut into two inch pieces. Normally, you would put a rack on the bottom of the turkey, I like to put different aromats, it will actually add flavor to the broth, which we add to the water to produce a great sauce or ‘jue’ as we call it. So here we’ll add our carrots and our celery, a little thyme. We’ve dried our turkey after the brining. So, we’re just going to take our dry brined turkey and place it atop the vegetables, which we’ve just added. Now we’re going to truss our turkey. We’re going to take our string and put it under the back and we’re going to crisscross and wrap around the legs. So we’re going to wrap it twice around the legs, and then we’re going to tie it under the neck. Now we’re going to tuck in the wings, again this keeps everything tight together to try and reproduce a more evenly cooked bird.

At this point we’re going to oil and butter, I have a 50% oil and butter mixture melted. We’re going to brush it on our turkey. This is going to allow the salt and the pepper that we add to afterward to adhere to the skin of the bird. It also helps in the moisture of the turkey, and ultimately that’s what we want, a more tender, tasty bird. And now I’m going to add my salt, and the white pepper. And I’d like to add two inches of water on the bottom, that will help all the flavor from the bird with the vegetables, make a great broth. This is a twelve to fourteen pound bird. I suggest three seventy-five your cooking pre-heated oven, for around three hours. So I’m going to open my oven, and I’m going to put my bird in.

So now we’re going to check our turkey, it’s been in the over for an hour and a half, we’re going to take it out and see how the cooking process has been going. Here we have a nice color, but we’re going to baste it to achieve a little bit more golden brown. So we’re just going to take some of the broth that has been pooling on the bottom from the stock of the turkey and the vegetables, and just pour it over top. It's very important not to baste your turkey that much. One, It looses the oven heat and two, it really has nothing to do with adding flavor to the meat. We just want to make sure the skin is golden brown. So we’ve achieved that, we’re going to put that back into the oven. So there you have it, we checked the turkey. We’ll check back another hour and a half. It should be finished.

I think the turkey is done. We’re going to check it. It’s been in the oven for three hours. We’re going to take, take its temperature. You always want to take the temperature on the back of the breast, let it sit in. Our goal is 165 F, we want to pull it sooner then that whether its turkey or any meat it’s just going to carry over, and we don’t want an overcooked bird. So we have around 155 F, our turkey is done. We’re going to put it on top of the stove, enjoy. I’m Scott Cutaneo for Howdini.