The Word on the Bird: How to Cook the Best Turkey

"Thanksgiving, man. Not a good day to be my pants." ~ comedian Kevin James

With the exception of turkeys, almost everyone enjoys Thanksgiving. We get together, enjoy good food and wine and give thanks for the bounty of the past year. For many of us this year, bounty may be an overstatement, but we can still be thankful for family, friends and surviving in general.

Thanksgiving is also a time when countless men and women take on the awesome responsibility of cooking a turkey. Many are white-knuckled novices who scour the Internet, call Mom or tweet their BFFs in search of the vital cooking secrets, in order to avoid being humiliated and emotionally scarred for life. Their nightmare, and a common Thanksgiving Day reality, is an overcooked, tough, bone-dry turkey, or a perfectly browned but dangerously raw bird that has a good chance of poisoning everyone at the table.

Even for us old pros, cooking a turkey can be intimidating. You would think that after a few years, the task would become routine. Not. The problem is that every year, it seems, there's a new way to cook the damned thing.

In just the last decade or so there have been a dozen popular ways to cook turkeys. To name a few: slow cooking, speed cooking, steam roasting, rotisserie, cooking in a paper bag, smoking, grilling, deep frying and, recently, brining. I've used most of these techniques (with the exception of deep frying—too dangerous for me, especially after a few glasses of wine) and they've all worked just fine to one degree or another. There was one exception: When I brined the turkey, it tasted terrific, but the gravy produced from the drippings in the pan and the stuffing were intolerably salty.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here's the latest and I believe the greatest way to cook your holiday bird and wow your guests. I got the recipe from a Los Angeles Times food feature by Russ Parsons. He calls it the "Judy Bird," named after super San Francisco chef Judy Rodgers. Folks from around the world flock to Rodgers' Zuni Café for her famous roast chicken. One of the key elements to her delicious chickens is salting them thoroughly a day in advance. In the case of our turkey, it's salted thoroughly three days in advance.

To see if this technique would work, Parsons had the Los Angeles Times test kitchen cook birds using the Judy version, and three techniques they had successfully used in the past. The first was cooked in an old-fashioned roaster, the second cooked at high heat and the third cooked after being brined or soaked in a salt water bath for days.

Parsons was blown away with the results.

"I wish everyone who had ever told me that 'a turkey is a turkey' could have been there for the judging," he wrote. "These were remarkably different birds, and the clear winner was the dry-salted Judy Bird."

So I and about a zillion other readers tried the dry-salted technique and loved the results. The meat was firm, tender, juicy and delicious, and although there was a little residual salt in the stuffing and gravy, it wasn't over the top as it was with brining. Just use a little less salt in your stuffing if you're going to stuff the bird, and check the gravy before adding any salt, and you'll be fine.

Here's how the dry-salt technique works. The salt draws water in the meat to the surface but after a time it moves back into the meat. In effect, the bird is marinating in its own juices. The turkey will not be overly salty if you follow the recipe instructions on the amount of salt used.

Selecting the Bird

The type of turkey for this recipe depends upon your preferences and pocketbook. If you're into the "slow food" movement or just want to experience a noticeably richer taste than supermarket commercial brands, you may want to splurge on a heritage, heirloom or pasture-raised organic turkey. Most Uptown markets will have fresh turkeys available and pre-ordering is suggested.

Just one thought before you go out and order a heritage or other special turkey. In many taste tests, the store-bought commercial Butterball-type turkey bested the more expensive kind. This is simply because most of us were raised with that flavor and texture profile, and anything different is a bit off-putting. So if your wallet is fat and you want to be somewhat adventurous, give the pricier birds a try. If times are tough and you want Mom's turkey, go for the commercial version on sale everywhere.

And a word about fresh turkeys. Many years ago, I ordered my first fresh turkey from a mom-and-pop market in Ocean Beach. The day before Thanksgiving when I picked up the turkey, I discovered to my chagrin that the bird was frozen as hard as permafrosted bowling ball. I was incensed with this turkey of a turkey and demanded my money back.

The store owner protested, assuring me that all of his "fresh" turkeys are frozen. "Nonsense," I said. Seeing that I wasn't going to budge, the agitated proprietor gave me my money back and muttered something about all of my teeth falling out except for the one with the toothache.

The point of all of this is that the OB market guy was right. And I naively thought that a fresh turkey would be fresh-plucked and pan ready. It seems that fresh doesn't mean dink when it comes to the temperature of the bird when you get it from the market. It only means that it was not chilled below 26 degrees F. If the turkey is labeled hard-chilled, refrigerated, deep-chilled or not previously frozen it means that it has been chilled from zero degrees to 25 degrees. And if it says frozen then it has been maintained below zero degrees.