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Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

Two new ways to cook turkey.

24 December 2009 | 13:29 - By Phil Lees

 With thousands of years of experience behind us, there are still new ways to overcook a large North American fowl.


With Christmas forthcoming, it is one of the only times of the year that many people consider cooking a whole turkey. If you celebrate Christmas, it may have occurred to you. 

The problem is that they’re a poorly proportioned bird to be cooking whole. The thighs are too big and to cook them through, the breast dries out. The easiest solution to this problem is to simply cut the turkey into separate pieces and then cook it but the cultural norm is to cook the bird whole and carve it at the table like in a Norman Rockwell painting, surrounded by a cornucopia of food and rosy cheeked cherubim. 

Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten’s proposed solution to this was that an entirely separate food should be adopted in place of the turkey and that society should give up on the bird. His suggested replacement was fettucine carbonara. Others have not been so quick to forsake the whole bird. Here are two possible solutions:

The bionic turkey.

Dave Arnold from The French Culinary Institute in New York invented  a new method  to cook turkey this year which he calls “the bionic turkey”.This is well beyond the means of the average cook – it requires a circulator – a piece of equipment found in fancier kitchens that circulates a liquid at a constant and exact temperature. This allows for extreme levels of control over the cooking process: meats that cook at 64oC can be cooked at a constant 64oC, eggs can be poached to varying levels of doneness. If you’re keen, you can fashion one yourself from a large slow cooker and a temperature controller.

It also requires you to bone the turkey (no small feat for the occasional turkey cook) then form a new skeleton for it from aluminium tubing, through which to circulate hot oil. This is much easier to write in a sentence than it is to do.

The turkey then cooks from both outside and inside. The results:
I was happy with the results. The family enjoyed the bird. Super moist but not watery. Tender. The taste of the herbs, duckfat and butter came through. Next year, I might increase the temperature a half a degree to make the breast meat look a little more conventional. There were also a couple of blood vessels that didn’t lose their red color. That didn’t bother me too much. Folks around the dinner table kept asking me if it had been “worth it.”

”Did you like it?” I asked.

”Yes.”

Then I guess it was worth it.
The deep-fried turkey.

That thousands of people deep fry a turkey without setting themselves on fire is a minor miracle. There are plenty of cautionary turkey-frying clips on Youtube, but not nearly enough to dissuade the American masses. You’ll need a very large pot, litres of oil, and a heat source that is hot enough to get the oil up to 180oC where it can catch fire. Loop a piece of heavy wire through the turkey for ease of lifting, then lower it into the hot oil. Cook for about 20 minutes and out comes a perfectly cooked turkey, if you’ve avoided a fiery death in the intervening minutes.

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