Baking a Turkey

There are many ways to roast (or bake) a turkey and probably as many suggestions as there are cooks, but for completeness sake, I'll describe how we do it, too.

Buy a turkey-sized cooking bag. I was surprised to discover that many of my coworkers have just recently discovered the cooking bag, since we've nearly always done it that way since I can remember, and have not done it only intentionally, as a means of experimenting with rue roasting, grilling, and other techniques. (Real roasting calls for an uncovered meat, typically with skin on and frequently basted to avoid turning the outer meat into jerkey). We usually removed the bulk of the skin to reduce the fat content and sometimes add just a bit of butter or olive oil to help it keep from drying out.

A couple of tablespoons of flour in the bag - shake it around before putting in the thoroughly thawed turkey. I'm told this helps keep the bag from exploding. It seems to make the bag more manageable at least.

Add alcohol, spices, vegis (onion, celery, etc), or whatever you want to cook into mush with the turkey. We sometimes do onions, usually do about a half a cup of wine or quarter cup of bourbon, rum, or whiskey, or brandy, and a stack of herbs including: sage, rosemary, lemon pepper, garlic, basil, savory, marjoram. If I'm in a sweet mood I might add dried cranberry or diced apple and sweet pepper (a blend that includes red, white, and black pepper, clove, fennel seed, coriander, mace, cinnamon, allspice, maybe some other spices). If its really cold, I might go for some curry spices to warm the belly of the consumers, but usually not for Thanksgiving turkey.

Tie the bag closed and poke several times to keep bag from bursting when steam builds up.

Roasting typically takes about 1/2 hr per pound. Bag baking takes about 15 to 20 minutes per pound at 325 or 350 degrees.

It's possible and traditional to cook the turkey with stuffing in, but this both retains extra fat and about doubles the cooking time without adding much to the taste. The bag will retain plenty of liquid to be adding real turkey broth to the stove top stuffing. We also put the vegis and fruit in the stuffing more often than with the turkey.

All of the above applies to other birds, too, but for gamy birds like duck and goose, I'll put a whole apple or potatoe inside the bird to remove some of the gamy taste. Toss the apple or potato. It will taste quite horrible when cooking is done. Yeah, I found that one out the hard way, too. Ick.