The Daily - Talking Turkey: A Holiday Special Edition

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Being tasked with the turkey on Thanksgiving can be a high-pressure, high-stakes job. Two Times writers share what they’ve learned.Kim Severson takes listeners on a journey through some of the turkey-cooking gimmicks that have been recommended to Americans over the decades, and J. Kenji López-Alt talks about his foolproof method for roasting a bird.Guest: Kim Severson, a food correspondent for The New York Times; and J. Kenji López-Alt, a food columnist for The Times. Background reading: From brining to bagging to clothing the bird in cotton, every year brings a fresh cooking trick that promises perfection. Here are the oddest and most memorable.The secret to great Thanksgiving turkey is already in your fridge, according to J. Kenji López-Alt. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Today, a special Thanksgiving episode of The Daily. Have you come across turkey in your research? About the high stakes quest to cook the perfect turkey. Two food writers at the Times, Kim Severson. Cooking a turkey can be one of the most pain in the ass exercises in the American kitchen. And J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. So the mayo, you know, that one is all about getting the skin sort of flavorful and dark brown and sort of extra crispy.

On the hard-fought lessons that they've learned. It's Wednesday, November 23rd. First, Kim Severson. So why is turkey such a vexing culinary challenge? Okay, first of all, it is a giant bird. Most people don't even know how to roast a chicken, and this is like five times the size of a chicken. Second of all, you only do it once a year.

So even if you made a killer turkey last year, you've probably forgotten what you did and you have to start from scratch. The other issue is that turkey is notorious for needing the white meat to be cooked at a different temperature than the dark meat, but it's all one bird and it can take hours. So inevitably, you either have that kind of gross, chickeny, raw thigh, or you have breast meat that essentially turns to sawdust when you try to cut it. And you have to imagine that screwing up the turkey gives all of your in-laws and all of your friends who don't like you a great opportunity to come down on you. So there is an incredible amount of pressure on the person who's cooking the turkey.

And it has spawned essentially a turkey panic industry. Remember, Harry, it's Marion's first holiday turkey, not a word if it's dry. Remember, Harry, it's Marion's first holiday turkey. Not a word if it's dry. There are gizmos and gadgets and methods and advice and media that have been built playing off of turkey fear. It's her first turkey. It won't be juicy. It's an entire turkey fear industrial complex.

I've been a food writer for a very, very long time, about 112 years. We have some young people on our staff, some new young people, and they're like, I think my mom used to put it in a bag. Did you guys ever remember that? I'm like, look, kid, bag's been around a long time. So that got me thinking about all the ways Americans have been told to prepare turkey over the years. And listen, I'm not proud. I've been responsible for some of these. I can own it. I can own it. And I guess to make myself feel better, I decided to make amends by reporting out every trick, trend, and gimmick I could find.

So let's start with the first Thanksgiving, or at least as close as I could get. Hello. My goodness. Nice to see you. You too. If you want to know anything about how people cooked during that period, you call up Lenny Sorensen. Have you come across turkey in your research? People used turkey.

They ate turkey. They ate turkey. They enjoyed turkey. She's a culinary historian who focuses on the lives of Black cooks, particularly in the early 1800s and the colonial period. So turkey was common, and it was eaten. And it would have been both wild turkeys and domestic turkeys. Those Plymouth colonists were roasting them in front of a fire on a spit. Yes. A spit takes skill to know how to use.

Somebody that's really watching it all the time, this is why you have spellions in a kitchen, because that's, you know, you assign a person. That's your job. Okay. Noted. Don't do this alone. Yes.

Lenny is an expert in particular on cookbooks of the early 1800s, one of which was written by Mary Randolph, who wrote The Virginia Housewife in 1824. And it was considered for a long time, really one of the most significant cookbooks of the 19th century. She's talking about, you know, you're going to have it a distance from a good hot fire. So one of the big issues in the early days, particularly the colonial days and into the 1800s, was how far to keep the turkey from the open flame. You know, 18 inches from the fire is that far, which means you got to have a hell of a nice hot fire.

12 inches, 18 inches. Very, very intense debate. Begin to baste as soon as the fowl is hot. Mary Randolph gives us another tip in her cookbook. You start by rubbing the turkey with cold lard. The idea, I guess, is that it will crisp the skin better. It makes the froth stronger than basting it with the hot out of the dripping pan and makes the turkey rise better, which I have a feeling she means crisp. So hot tip from the 1800s, rub the turkey with cold lard. Okie doke, darling. You take care. Bye-bye.

But the era of turkey tricks and gimmicks really heated up in the 20th century. It kind of rose on a wave of food science, food media, and of course, a food industry that really wanted to sell us a lot of stuff. Think it's written in stone that roasting a turkey requires all your attention? Balderdash. Shenandoah self-basting turkey doesn't make you a slave to your kitchen. Okay, first up, the roasting bag. So around the 1910s or so, cooking in paper bags became a thing. But it was a fad. It faded pretty quickly.

But then the idea of cooking in a bag came roaring back in the 1960s when the roasting bag was invented. And this was a plastic bag. So you would just shove everything into this bag, close it up and bake it. No muss, no fuss. Couple problems. Number one, the turkey skin was always kind of flabby and bland and pale. And number two, you had no drippings for gravy. Oh, and number three, they also were prone to exploding. And number three, they also were prone to exploding. Now we come to one of my favorite and most useless turkey gadgets, the pop-up timer. It's that plastic gizmo that's stuck into the breast of millions of supermarket turkeys.

They came up with it in the 60s. The idea was a compound inside the timer would melt at a certain temperature and pop up. That temperature would assure that the turkey had reached 165 degrees, which is the governmental standard for killing bacteria. It's a solution that doesn't solve the problem. So whenever I want a really good take on stupid ideas from the food industry, I call up Laura Shapiro. She's a culinary historian. People have always wondered when the turkey was done. And there are all kinds of homemade methods

for figuring that out. You jiggle this, you prick that. It is a problem. The solution is not that little plastic thing springing up because as often as not, it doesn't work right. It's too early. It's too late. And she also said it just adds to that idea that cooking a turkey is really hard and there's no way we can do it unless we have some magic gizmo from the food industry to help us. You know, the more problems that they can claim that they're solving,

the more they can charge for the product. So they're always going to find problems. The numbers of people who are just putting a turkey in the oven and praying, basically, I think that is still the traditional mainstream way to deal with turkey. Next up, we head to the great state of Louisiana, which is responsible for two of America's very distinct turkey cooking innovations. One of them is the deep fried turkey. So I called up my old friend Judy Walker, who was the food editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a long time. Well, I'm glad I'm not having to write another turkey story. Right? And she walked me through the origins of the deep fried turkey recipe that they first ran in 1984. And the recipe did say, go to a horse supply store and buy a syringe to do the injection of the turkey. So the idea for the deep fried turkey came from a bunch of Cajuns who were

sitting around looking at their setup to boil crawfish and crabs. It's a propane hub with a big pot on top of it. They had the equipment. One thing led to another. They filled the whole thing up with oil and started dropping turkeys in. It was real popular. It was one of the most requested recipes. And then what happened? So a couple of years later, all the food editors in the country met in New Orleans for their annual convention. And of course, they watched a demo of a deep fried turkey. For all the food editors who were thrilled to have a new something or other to write about for Thanksgiving. So they took it home and told their readers about it. And before you know it, everybody was frying turkey. Judy included. I hired a caterer though, because I was scared of

doing, you know, 10 gallons of boiling peanut oil. Right. And the caterer followed the recipe and tied up the turkey with a nylon rope, which promptly melted in half. This is not a recipe without its dangers. You could catch your house on fire, and if you use a frozen turkey, it might explode. Which brings us to Butterball. So the Butterball company was responsible for a lot of innovations when it comes to Thanksgiving turkey. To millions of women, Butterball is much more than a turkey. It was the first company to start injecting its turkeys with brine and then sending them to the supermarket.

It's a promise of tenderness, juiciness, and flavor that comes from careful selection, preparation, and deep basting. But I think its most enduring achievement and truly one of America's best marketing gimmicks is the Butterball Turkey Talk Line. Thank you for calling the Butterball Turkey Talk Line. All turkey experts are assisting other callers. So this was invented by a Chicago ad man in 1981 who was tasked with selling more turkeys by Butterball. For pre-recorded information on thawing a turkey, press or say one. He put six home economists in a room with telephones

and had them dispense Thanksgiving cooking advice. They fielded 10,000 calls that first year, and the Butterball talk line has been going strong ever since. Stuffing a turkey, press or say two. This year, they think they'll probably get 100,000 people reaching out either through phone or text, chat, email, Amazon Alexa. Just say Alexa, enable Butterball. So I gave Nicole Johnson a call who's been answering phones at the Turkey Talk Line for more than 20 years. We open every year, November 1st, all of November. And our last

day is December 24th, Christmas Eve. So it's a whirlwind. It's eight weeks of a lot of adrenaline. So before the talk line opens, all the advisors go to Butterball University and study the latest techniques for making turkey. The talk line evolves over the times. We try to stay on top of the trends. We try to predict what our callers might be asking us.

This year in particular, they studied how to make a turkey using an air fryer. So the air fryer is awesome. Okay, but seriously, can you put a turkey in an air fryer? A whole turkey, no. But if you have a bone-in breast or a boneless breast, we've done it here in the test kitchen because we know people are going to call on it and it can be done. They had also studied whether you could make a turkey in a microwave oven, which is really a pain in the ass. It takes a lot of time and a lot of tending. But she said in a pinch, it can be done. Yes. I love that.

The motto of Butterball. That is our motto. Absolutely. And the number one question every year, how to thaw a turkey, which takes about five days in the refrigerator. So if you have a frozen turkey, I'm sorry. Next up, the method that redefined the term turkey dressing. One of the most enduring methods of making a turkey involves soaking cheesecloth in butter and wine or stock and draping it over the turkey. Martha Stewart made this a big thing in the 1990s, although cooks had been doing it

for centuries. In 2021, she turned it up a notch and decided if you didn't have any cheesecloth... Make sure you go into your husband's clean t-shirt drawer. Yes. And you get a t-shirt like that, and you soak that in the butter and white wine. Oh my gosh. You could use a clean white t-shirt drawer. Yes. And you get a t-shirt like that and you soak that in the butter and white wine. Oh my gosh. You could use a clean white t-shirt. And then you drape that over the bird. But the t-shirt's lost forever, right Martha? Lost forever. Okay. Your husband might get mad at you. You cooking tomorrow? And finally, we get to the salt years, and I take some responsibility for this one. So for a while, we all decided the solution was wet brining, and I sadly was one of the people who helped make it popular.

This was probably the most awkward way to prepare a turkey ever suggested. Basically, you put your turkey in a saltwater bath. So not only do you have to make gallons of brine, you have to find something that can hold all those gallons of brine and your turkey. Either you clean out a cooler or maybe you do triple plastic garbage bags. And once you get it all set up, you got to keep it cold for two days. This is insanity. But some people still wet brine. Some people still soak their cheesecloth in butter. Some people even like that pop-up turkey timer. Once you start cooking a turkey a certain way, it can be hard to change. Well, you know what I think it is? It's an expression of your own individuality. It's sort of like how you dress or what music you listen to, right?

So I called Chris Kimball, who runs Milk Street, and has probably tested more turkeys than anyone I know. People define themselves by whether they're braisers, roasters, fryers, barbecuers. I mean, like everybody's identifying with their tribe, your turkey tribe. So maybe we should just all just give up. Maybe this is the year to just make things easy. I mean, the world is complex enough, right? So what if we just took our turkeys and put them in a 325 degree oven and cooked them till they were done? I mean, maybe they would be a little dry.

So what? As my good pal, Doc Willoughby, the food writer, always says, that's why God invented gravy. That's why God invented gravy. After the break, what if your gravy just isn't that good? And what if you're not ready to give up the quest to cook the perfect turkey? We'll be right back. So, Kenji Lopez-Alt, welcome to The Daily. Thank you. And, of course, happy Thanksgiving. This must be like Christmas for you, except it's Thanksgiving. But you know what I mean. Like, this is your day. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, for sure. So, we are talking to you because you are a best-selling cookbook author and because you're not just a cooking expert, you're an expert in the science of cooking.

And you have come up with what's been called a foolproof recipe for cooking turkey that is more elevated than the we-have-given-it-all-up 325 version that Kim Severson left us with in a state of desperation. And that's the recipe we want to talk to you about, this solution in theory to our problem. So tell us about this recipe. Just give us the very top line of what this is. Well, I hesitate to call it elevated, but it certainly, it solves some of the problems that people typically have with roasting turkeys. But the top line is that it's a spatchcocked, dry-brined, mayo-rubbed turkey. Which, okay, sounds amazing, but also sounds potentially complicated. Let's start with that first word, spatchcocking, which I know a little bit about,

but which is a quite intimidating cooking term. Well, spatchcocking, essentially, you're cutting the backbone out of the turkey, kind of splaying it out to get it ready for roasting or grilling. Okay. And you can do this yourself at home with like some hefty poultry shears, or you can ask the butcher to do it. Yeah. That definitely sounds like something you want to ask somebody else to do. Someone with a big knife. And why do it? Right, so the problem with turkey is that it's very difficult to get the light meat

and the dark meat to finish at the same time. So by the time your dark meat is tender, your light meat is generally dried out. Right. So spatchcocking solves that essentially by flattening out the bird and splaying its legs out. So what thatcocking solves that essentially by flattening out the bird and splaying its legs out. So what that means is that the legs actually cook faster than the breast does. So by the time the legs are done, the breast isn't overcooked. So it solves that problem.

It also cuts your cooking time down pretty significantly. So from about two to two and a half hours for a 10 to 14 pound bird, it'll cut that down to around 80 to 90 minutes. Okay. And I just want to be clear about what we're talking about visually, because the turkey of our imagination, the turkey of my youth, perhaps your youth, is this just giant ball of meat that, you know, in its heft is so elegant and wonderful. What you're suggesting is quite literally butchering that ball of meat in such a way so that it lies flat in a pan, right? So it's fundamentally different. And you're saying that that is necessary to solve this giant kind of cooking even problem. Well, I wouldn't say it's necessary. It is a trade-off, right? So the trade-off is,

do you want the ease and foolproofness and the juiciness you get from using this technique? Or do you prefer having the sort of the big visual of the centerpiece turkey? And I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to that question. I definitely don't want to try and tell people that their traditions are wrong if they want to have that big centerpiece turkey. You know, my in-laws do that, and I don't tell them not to cook it that way. Okay, so let's talk about the second component of this recipe, which is a dry brine. So dry brining, essentially, once your turkey is spatchcocked and you have it laying on a sheet tray, you're going to take salt. So a good amount of salt. So I think of it as like

if you've ever seen a snow flurry on a New England parking lot, you know, like a good amount of salt. So I think of it as like, if you've ever seen a snow flurry on a New England parking lot, you know, like a good amount of salt, but not so much that you couldn't drive over it. You sprinkle that on the turkey. I mean, you want to get it kind of on every surface and rub it in. And if you really want sort of the most benefit from it, you're also going to want to take a teaspoon or two of salt and rub it between the skin and the meat on each breast. And then once you've done that, you're going to take your turkey,

leave it uncovered, and then just put it in the fridge for at least overnight and up to two nights before you roast it. Okay, and what does this accomplish for the turkey? So it accomplishes the same thing as a traditional wet brine does, which is when you would take your turkey

and sort of dunk it in a bucket full of salt water. Right, which is, of course, very inconvenient, as Kim told us. Yes, yes, it is very inconvenient. Dry brining, I find much easier. So the salt initially is going to draw some of the moisture out from the turkey, you know, through osmosis. And then what's going to happen is that salt is going to dissolve

in that liquid and form a really sort of hyper-concentrated brine that coats the surface of the turkey. And so turkey meat, when it comes in contact with a saltwater brine like that, some of the turkey. And so turkey meat, when it comes in contact with a saltwater brine like that, some of the muscle proteins are going to start to dissolve. And what that means is that as the turkey cooks, those proteins that would normally squeeze the muscle fibrils and kind of squeeze juices out of the turkey, they're not going to squeeze as hard. Which means that moisture is going to stay in the turkey rather than get squirted out. Exactly, exactly. It's a really good step for foolproofing if you want extra juicy meat.

Got it. Okay, so spatchcocking gets us a pretty long way towards our foolproof turkey. The dry brine gets us even further. And then we've got this grocery store staple of mayo. Yeah. Tell us what we're supposed to do with mayo, why we're supposed to be using mayo on a turkey. Yeah. So the mayo, you know, that one is all about the skin and getting the skin sort of flavorful and nice and dark brown and sort of extra crispy. Although the mayo, you can't tell the mayo is on there once it's done roasting. You seem self-conscious about your mayo.

I know, you know, some people get a certain way around mayo. People have strong feelings about mayo. It's a staple. Right. The reason I'm using mayo in this case is that, so first of all, I find it's very hard to get an herb butter to just the right texture that you can kind of rub it over the turkey. So it's either ends up kind of greasy and slops around. Because the temperature is always a little off, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Or it's too cold and it's hard to spread. Whereas mayo stays spreadable straight from the fridge out at room temperature. So you're taking your mayonnaise and you're blending a bunch of herbs, garlic, lemon zest, whatever flavors you want, honestly.

But you're blending them into that mayo and then you're rubbing the turkey with the mayo before you roast it. In the same way that you would rub it with, say, like an herb butter or an herb oil. Right. It's kind of easy to spread no matter what. So it's really easy to get a nice even layer. So while butter and oil will tend to kind of drip off and fall off the tray, the mayo will kind of stay in place.

And so the other advantage mayo has over butter or plain oil is that there's protein in it. Those proteins do double duty kind of getting everything to stick in place and then also helping with browning. You know, I think the mayo step is probably the most cosmetic of all the steps, but it's like the necktie for the foolproof turkey. Got it. So from everything you're saying, this is going to be delicious, but it is not a dead simple recipe. It involves some steps. It involves some time. It's not a, you know, shove it in at 325 baby level of simplicity. And people have friends and family over, they've got kids running around. To those who heard this conversation and think to themselves, like, that is a whole lot of complicated. Is it worth it? What do you say? You know, it really depends on your situation. I think one of the advantages of spatchcocking is that it actually is, I think, once you're used to it, easier and faster. And I say that as someone with two little kids and a large family that comes over on Thanksgiving. So for me, you know, that ease and efficiency is something that's appealing to me. But on the other hand, it's like, if you don't feel like a spatchcock turkey has a place in your Thanksgiving kitchen or table, there's no reason to get out of my kitchen, right? No, I hear you saying, much like Kim did, that there's no wrong way to do this

and we shouldn't kill ourselves with expectations. Yeah. I mean, honestly, at the end of the day, I think you have to be kind to yourself when you're learning how to cook. And, you know, for Thanksgiving, especially, it's like, if you got people to come over and share a turkey with you, then, you know, by the time you're all sitting down at the table, the turkey's already kind of done its job, whether it's a little dry or a little overcooked. Who cares at that point, you know? Mm-hmm. Well, thank you very much, Kenji, for this.

Thank you. Informative, delicious-sounding conversation. This is our first ever Thanksgiving Daily episode. This will be the first podcast I've been on that my wife will listen to. Thank you to her. And we appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

In a major legal defeat for Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has ruled that his tax returns must be turned over to a House committee run by Democrats, which has been seeking the documents since 2019. Trump had argued that the committee was not legally entitled to the documents and had hoped he could delay turning them over until after the midterms, when Democrats were widely expected to lose control of the House. But with the court's ruling, the documents are likely to be given to the committee before the chamber switches control from Democrats to Republicans in January. And, intense rescue operations are underway in Indonesia, where a magnitude 5.6 earthquake has killed at least 268 people and injured more than 1, thousand in the country's most populated province.

The quake inflicted broad devastation, uprooting thousands of homes from their foundations and engulfing an entire village in a landslide. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antolini and edited by Wendy Dorr and was engineered by Corey Schreppel. Thank you. Carlos Prieto, Sophia Milan, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexi Diao, Mary Wilson, and Alex Stern. Special thanks to Sam Dolmick, Paula Schumann, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Cliff Levy, Dave Shaw, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Des Ibequa, Wendy Doerr, Elizabeth Davis-Moore, That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.