Love turkey--but it must be a quality bird and properly prepared.
Love turkey--but it must be a quality bird and properly prepared.
Facts matter...Feelings Can Lie
My father's a Big Green Egg fanatic, and he used that for the turkey this year. It took eight hours, and he did nothing but scrutinize the recipe and pat himself on the back the entire meal, but the meat was outstanding.
"Sapiens dicit: 'Ignoscere divinum est, sed noli pretium plenum pro pizza sero allata solvere.'" - Michelangelo
If you hate it, you are doing it wrong....
Just a Hairy Special Snowflake supply clerk with no field experience, shooting an Asymetric carbine as a Try Hard. Snarky and easily butt hurt. Favorite animal is the Cape Buffalo....likely indicative of a personality disorder.
"If I had a grandpa, he would look like Delbert Belton".
While I generally can't get truly excited about turkey, I will tell you that I enjoyed the most perfectly prepared turkey on Thanksgiving day.
Tender, moist, and flavorful, through and through. Truly end all, be all.
Yeah, I got turned on and I admit it.
I've had terrible turkey before and hated it, but my mom was good at it and my wife is also very good at it, so most of my experiences have been quite good.
But then last year we had a turducken, and then a turkey breast-cranberry sauce-stuffing log. So I'm open to it being done different ways.
If we can get up to the cabin around Christmas my wife would like to do a wood-fired oven turkey. Given her track record I think it would be very good.
This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff
I feel sorry for all of you who hate turkey because it doesn't taste good, is too much effort, is too easy to screw up, ect.
I don't feel sorry that you're missing out on a good meal, I feel sorry that you're too bone headed and myopic to admit you're doing it wrong.
Seriously.
Neither I nor my girlfriend are chefs by any stretch of the imagination, and we still cooked an awesome turkey last year (the first time we hosted thanksgiving, to boot). Its really not that hard, and it didn't take any onerous amount of effort. With all the modern cooking equipment available, it's not the bird's fault that you fucked up a thousand year old meal.
ETA: I will say that there isn't anything wrong with a good ham for a holiday dinner. When I was a kid and we had huge 25 person thanksgivings, we'd usually have a ham along with a turkey for those who wanted it. For xmas we'll choose between ham and turkey depending on what we're feeling a particular year.
Last edited by TGS; 11-28-2015 at 07:30 PM.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
I hate turkey as well, always have. The only way it has ever been tolerable to me is when I was younger my dad would inject it with Cajun seasoning and deep fry, but then I liked it solely for the fact that the seasoning covered up everything else about the turkey.
Turkey was requested this year so we tried a brine of sea salt, black pepper, orange slices and more orange zest, red onion, thyme, maple syrup and garlic, 18 hours and baked at 250° until internal temp reached 145°, then cranked the oven to 475° for about 15 minutes to crisp things up. I was skeptical of the orange but overall as a turkey hater it was edible, everybody else loved it.
I brined salmon in brown sugar, sea salt, black pepper and smoked salmon it over oak and basted with maple syrup and black pepper every hour.
Also got a duck in the fridge which I would have much preferred to have, probably going to do this to it tomorrow.
I like turkey a lot more when there isn't a lot of it. A six pound breast with Ina's herb rub (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/i...st-recipe.html) does fine for as many people as I'd ever care to have over and provides sandwich-optimized leftovers.
The best traditional holiday roast for me is Easter lamb (abetted by it being the end of Lent). The worst is definitely Christmas goose -- I've suffered through that in Europe twice, it's like eating lip balm.
Ignore Alien Orders
Cajun fried.
I have had good turkey and bad turkey. Like everyone else said, you have to find a good cook to make it all worth while.
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“A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.” - Shane