The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [207]
When you remove it the turkey will be dead black. You will think, “My God! I have ruined it.” Be calm. Take a tweezer and pry loose the paste coating. It will come off readily. Beneath this burnt, harmless, now worthless shell the bird will be golden and dark brown, succulent, giddy-making with wild aromas, crisp and crunchable and crackling.
High-Temperature Turkey
[These instructions come from Barbara Kafka’s column, “An Opinionated Palate,” in the November 1991 Gourmet. Her method miraculously roasts a large turkey in under two hours. I have found it most successful with a fifteen-pound turkey, unstuffed and untrussed, in a roasting pan with shallow sides and an oven at 500 degrees. But a friend at Gourmet tells me that the method was successfully tested with various sizes and types of turkeys. Again, my own advice appears in brackets.]
The most important thing is to order an unfrozen, untreated bird. Start by removing the packet of innards from the turkey [and make a broth with the neck and gizzards plus some onion and garlic]. Put your oven rack at its lowest level and boost the bake-setting temperature as high as it will go. You might have some smoke in the kitchen, but you will be rewarded by the juiciest, most quickly roasted turkey—with the crispest skin—you have ever made.
I don’t use a rack in the roasting pan; the bottom skin is hardly worth bothering about. I don’t truss, either. Untrussed, both the white meat and the dark will be properly done at the same time.
Bring the turkey to room temperature. Remove any gobs of fat. Either stuff the cavity or just salt and pepper it and insert a couple of onions.… Fifteen-pound turkeys are about an ideal cooking size. If you have a very large family, I would suggest two smaller turkeys rather than one King Kong.
Slide the turkey, legs first, into the oven. After fifteen minutes move the turkey around with a wooden spatula so that it doesn’t stick. Repeat moving the bird around every twenty minutes. If the bird seems to be getting too dark before it is cooked, cover it with a tent of aluminum foil. Roast until the thigh joint near the backbone wiggles easily. Remove the turkey from the oven about ten minutes before it is fully cooked. [An instant meat thermometer makes this easier; a wobbly leg joint can sometimes mean overcooked meat. Figure on a temperature of 175 to 180 degrees in the thigh meat, measured deep between the leg and the body, and breast meat between 165 and 170 degrees; these are 5 degrees lower than the usual prescription.]
An unstuffed nine- to ten-pound turkey will take about an hour and fifteen minutes, a twelve-pound bird about five minutes more, a fifteen-pound bird will go up to just under two hours, and a twenty-pound bird takes three hours. If you are stuffing your turkey, add thirty minutes to whichever cooking time applies.
[I found that an unstuffed bird roasted much more evenly; in a stuffed fifteen-pound bird, the dark meat was not done by the time the breast was getting dry. And unlike the meat of a Thompson’s Turkey, the flesh of this fast-roasted bird was not imbued with the complex aromas within. Better to make some Thompson’s dressing on the side, moisten it with a little broth and cider, and bake at 325 degrees, tightly covered with foil, for two or three hours.]
November 1992
Pies from Paradise
A hundred pies ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, eating the filling out of yesterday’s apple pie, keeping track of the Miss Teen USA Pageant on TV, and waiting for the day’s first pie to come out of the oven.
This would be a pie from paradise, an apple pie like none other—for the luscious fruit would be tucked into the most daring and innovative piecrust of a generation, if not of all time. “Some are born great,” I murmured happily, playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, “some achieve greatness,