Your favorite Italian is now American. Furthermore, while we’ve been cooking a Thanksgiving dinner since about 2008, only this time have we managed to make everything (that we cared about) from scratch. To mark this dual occasion, here is the all-in-one, easily printable recipe you’ve been looking for. Don’t miss the very cool turkey facts at the bottom!
Turkey
NB: Guest recipe by Mama He. I have never cooked a turkey in my life because I have the best woman. She does the turkey and I do the fixings and the desserts. This is the way.
Necessary:
12 lbs turkey (adjust amounts accordingly)
1 herb bundle (typically sage, thyme, rosemary, and whole garlic)
1 bottle lemon juice (those little yellow bottlets with a green cap, 4-5 oz)
1 cup dry white wine (e.g. Pinot Grigio)
2.5 teaspoons salt
black pepper to taste
3 tbsp butter
turkey pan
Two days before. Start defrosting the turkey (if frozen).
The day before. Modern US turkeys have a big breast, and breast meat can get really dry. So it’s all about the marinade. Some buy a brined turkey and some like to make their own marinade. Mama He instructs you to rub the turkey inside and out with a number of substances, in this order:
- Water, to clean
- Lemon juice, to clean even more and tenderize
At this point, poke many tiny holes with a toothpick to let the flavorings in - Wine
- Salt
- Pepper
Finally, stuff the herbs into the turkey, enough to fill the turkey’s cavity. Place the turkey in its pan, cover the pan with cling wrap, and let soak overnight in the refrigerator.
Same day. Turn the turkey belly-down in the pan. Paint the turkey with half of the melted butter. Bake at 180 C (350 F) for about 4 hours, until the skin under the armpit (wingpit?) looks crispy. Half way through, turn belly up and paint the belly side with the other half of the melted butter. You can turn up the heat in the last 5 minutes for extra crispy skin.
Notes:
1) Unless you are on a student visa, or live in a microapartment in New York, I strongly recommend investing $20-30 and getting a real pro one. My main issue with one-use turkey pans is that when you carve the turkey it’s easy to poke a hole in the bottom. If you live in a microapartment in New York, my suggestion is that you get a rotisserie to cook the turkey for you on a spit.
Cranberry sauce
Minimum ingredients:
12 oz cranberries[1]
7 oz brown sugar
2 cups water
Start the night before. Put the water and brown sugar into a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Add the cranberries. Let boil until some of the cranberries fall apart and some are still whole, roughly 10 minutes.[2] Remove from heat and let cool. You may refrigerate, but bring to room temperature before serving.
You can make this fancy. For instance, you could make cranberry sauce with candied oranges. The candied oranges or other similar additions should be added to the boiling sauce in the final minute.
Notes:
1) Cranberries are sold in 12 oz packets, but this recipe yields a lot of sauce. You could probably halve the amounts and still be OK.
2) If you overcook cranberries, the legend says that there will be too much pectin in the water and when the sauce cools down it will be too thick (jam-like, I suppose). That doesn’t sound like a terrible thing to me, but in practice it’s never happened. Others say the cranberries could “get bitter.” This makes a bit more sense because with extreme overcooking you’d have basically cranberry jam with cranberry skins in it, and the skins wouldn’t be pleasant.
Giblet gravy
Ingredients:
Turkey giblets
Celery
Carrots
Onion
Garlic
Olive oil for frying
Thyme and bay leaves (or any other herbs to your liking)
Mustard (optional)
Start early on the same day. Get a smallish saucepan. Clean the giblets. Cut them in thin slices, removing all the fibrous parts, then fry them in olive oil with celery, carrot, onion, and garlic (a “soffritto”). When the onion turns gold and the giblets look done on the outside, add the water and herbs. Boil for several hours to extract all the juices.
Strain the resulting broth. Blend or mince (to taste) the giblets and soffritto veggies, after manually removing the garlic. Set everything aside.
After the turkey’s done, use the pan drippings and flour in 1.5:1 proportions to make a roux (you could do 1:1, but it could be challenging to add that much flour).[1] Put the drippings in a wide pan,[2] then add the flour gradually while mixing continuously in a figure eight. When the flour is incorporated, add the giblets and soffritto veggies. Let it all brown for a short while, always mixing. Once the whole has a creamy consistency, add the broth and reduce on low fire until the gravy has the desired consistency. Optionally mix in two teaspoons mustard at the end.
Notes:
1) Making a roux is an unbelievably useful skill. While you could simply follow the instructions above and get something decent, it’s worth it to do your own research right now and experiment. Once you know how to make a roux, you can attempt a large number of recipes that previously seemed intimidating. (“That’s it? Just flour and butter? What took me so long?” you wonder, as your guest stares uneasily at the dark magic bubbling in your pan.) For instance, you can make bechamel; and bechamel is needed for proper lasagna; etc. For this reason, I’m not going to go into the usual “but how exactly do you do that” detail here, but I reserve the right to write the ultimate roux post in the future.
2) The wider the pan, the better. The widest pan is the turkey pan and ideally you would leave the drippings in there and add flour. However, that means you have to find another place for the turkey itself, which means you have to own a turkey plate, and it’s a slippery slope. You also have to get rid of a large amount of drippings. I find it easier to just take a ladle of drippings out of the turkey pan.
FAQ
- How big of a turkey should I get? We typically do ~1.8 lbs or ~800g bird per person. Leftovers make for great turkey sandwiches through the weekend and guests can take home.
- How much money are we talking about? You can buy a turkey for less than $2/lb (e.g. CostCo).
- What’s the weight of a typical turkey? If you have to ask, you can’t afford one.
- Why is there no recipe for stuffing? Ew.
Cold turkey facts
- Do not be confused: “Turkey” indicates the bird, whereas “Turkey” indicates the country.
- Turkeys are big chickens. Chickens are dinosaurs. Yet, turkeys are, like, small dinosaurs.
- There are flocks of wild turkeys roaming around Massachusetts towns and no one told me until I came to live here. That’s your best shot at getting a sense of what a flock of velociraptors would look like in real life.
- The “inductivist turkey” is an illustration of the problem with inductive reasoning. The turkey gets fed by the farmer every day at sunrise, but tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The original story by Bertrand Russell was about a chicken, who could have used “more refined views as to the uniformity of nature,” but a turkey is how it went down in popular (?) culture.
