I wrote in my last column of my ambivalence, verging on dismay, at having to choose between making my own turkey - which I assumed must necessarily be crappy - and doing the Torrisi turkey, which was deboned, injected, cooked for 20 hours in a CVAP oven, and just amazing as a result. I decided to make my own, and to my immense surprise and pride, it came out great!
I did have some help. As I always do, I took the time to brine the bird for a good 24 hours prior to cooking. But turkeys are big, and it’s hard to find something big enough to submerge a turkey in. I have a bathtub, but that wasn’t an option, now that I live with a woman. I might have used a big stryofoam cooler, but I didn’t plan ahead enough to get one. So I made a strong brine of mostly salt with some sugar, and but the bird in a double garbage bag. So haphazard were my preparations that I didn’t even have a twist tie to bind it up, so I just twisted in on itself, stuck it in the refrigerator, and hoped for the best. Meathead Goldwyn, my fellow edible-animal guru, penned a brilliant brining overview in The Huffington Post, and I took his advice on starting the turkey slow, to allow the brine to really get into the meat. I also heeded Marco Canora’s advice to cover the bird for the first half, which made me nervous. But both men were right, and I came out with the finest turkey I ever had - which isn’t saying much, but still.
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I will add that I hedged my bets somewhat. I crammed a ton of herb butter under the skin and on top of it too, covering the latter in addition with white pepper and smoked bourbon salt. (It really doesn’t matter what you put on a turkey skin though; it will always be the best part, and utterly irrelevant to the rest of the bird.) I didn’t make my own gravy; I knew I would screw it up, or at the very least stress myself and everybody else with a tense and frantic effort. So I went up the street and hit up Marco for some at Hearth. It was just perfect traditional brown gravy, butter and sapid, and I improved it only very slightly by mixing it a bunch of fresh thyme into it. I had so much of the stuff, you see - I put it in everything.
And, of course, I worked very hard on the side dishes. There were the Heston Blumenthal roasted potatoes, of course; I had to make those. And brussel sprouts, which I cooked, like everybody else, with an inordinate amount of bacon, as well as proscutitto, and three other kinds of cured pork I had lying around. We had a vegetarian coming over, so I hit up Andrew Carmellini’s timeless Urban Italian cookbook for a big spaghetti squash with walnuts and sage butter, and boy was that good! It was a lot of work, and I resented every second of it, but boy did it make that lady happy. I roasted up some chanterelles and hen of the woods mushrooms with butter and salt, and that was good too. And of course I made Stove-Top stuffing. What would Thanksgiving be without it? But the turkey sat at the center of it all, and taken with Marco’s gravy, Blumenthal’s potatoes, and the crushing low expectations we all have, the dinner turned out to be a wild success. That I pulled it off without using somebody else’s turkey made it meaningful as well as fun, and for that I really have to give thanks - to myself.