Roast Turkey
Roasting a turkeyWelcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a turkey!This year (2020) has been endless and horrible, but somehow we are finally approaching the winter holiday season. In the United States we’re nearing Thanksgiving, a feast day celebrated with family and friends. The traditional main course for Thanksgiving is turkey, but a lot of people don’t know how to roast a turkey without drying it out. Hopefully this episode will help you roast your turkey perfectly every time.As soon as turkeys start showing up in the stores in October I usually buy one and cook it for myself, because I love turkey. I always buy the very smallest one I can find, of course, because I am just one person and while I do have an astonishing capacity for eating turkey, I have my limits.Don’t forget you need to have something to cook a turkey in, because even a small one is too big for ordinary pans. You can buy those heavy-duty foil roasting pans, but while they make clean-up easy, they’re also not great. You have to put a pan under them because otherwise you can’t safely move the roasting pan once the turkey is in it, because heavy-duty or not, no aluminum foil can stand up to the weight of even a small turkey. But since the roasting pan is also bigger than a typical cookie sheet, it’s still really hard to move safely. If you have room to store it, though, you can usually find inexpensive steel roasting pans this time of year. I spent less than ten bucks for mine and I’ve had it five or six years now, so I figure it’s paid for itself.It doesn’t matter what brand of turkey you buy. They’re all pretty good. The cheaper ones sometimes have surprise bags of premade gravy tucked in the cavity, which you just paid for and they’re mostly water, but I can never feel too upset because it’s actually pretty good gravy.Unless you’re cooking for a huge crowd, you’ll probably want to get a smaller turkey. Thirteen pounds is actually on the small side, but you can usually find turkeys that are a bit under ten pounds when you have a big selection to choose from. If you get a turkey that small on sale, it can cost less than a four-pound chicken.So let’s assume you have acquired a frozen turkey and a roasting pan big enough to hold it. Four or five days before you plan to cook the turkey, put it in the fridge. It takes at least four days to thaw, or a day or two longer for bigger turkeys. If there’s even a slight chance you’ll forget to move it to the fridge from the freezer, put a reminder in your phone. Don’t thaw it on the counter, put it in the fridge to thaw.Okay, the big day has arrived. It’s time to cook that turkey. People sometimes say that you cook a turkey for 20 minutes per pound, but that’s actually too long. It’s more like 15 minutes per pound, maybe even a little less. For a small turkey, up to about eleven pounds in weight, you can count on it cooking in about two and a half hours or just a bit more at 350 degrees F. My 13-pound turkey needed more like three hours. So if you like to have Thanksgiving dinner early, remember you’re going to have to get that turkey in the oven early. You also need at least an hour to prepare before the turkey goes in the oven, and at least half an hour afterwards. That’s why your grandmother was always up at dawn on Thanksgiving.The first thing to do is clean out the sink. Wash any dishes sitting in it and give it a quick scrub or at least wipe it out with a sponge. Then set your roasting pan out so you can get to it easily. If it comes with a rack, you can use the rack. Otherwise, you’ll set the turkey directly on the bottom of the pan. I line my pan with foil because it’s a cheap pan with cheap nonstick coating, and despite my care over the years, the coating has started to peel off and I don’t want to accidentally eat any.