Every year in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the holiday conversation inevitably turns to one question regarding the annual feast: is turkey any good?
While debates and discussions about which side dishes are the best, it seems like the star of the show often gets overlooked, or worse, maligned and disparaged.
The most common complaint about the main course, year-after-year, is the bird coming out dry.
For a meal that can take days to prep and hours to cook, a turkey coming out bone-dry could ruin the holiday if not for the meal’s beloved sides.
But an experienced chef would tell you that turkey doesn’t have to be dry. In fact, it’s actually quite hard to make the meat dry and arid like the desert if you don’t overcook it.
And therein lies the problem.
In the 1960s, with Thanksgiving turkey becoming more and more a part of the holiday tradition, companies seeking to make cooking the big bird easier developed a new tool for inexperienced chefs: the pop-up timer.
You’ve probably seen the red dot poking out of the breast of a Thanksgiving turkey. They are meant to literally pop up from the meat to signal to the chef that the turkey has reached a safe temperature and the cooking is complete.
But is that really the best way to gauge your turkey’s doneness? In short, no.
In the interest of food safety, those buttons typically don’t pop until they reach a temperature of over 180 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Food and Drug Administration recommends that a turkey needs to register at 165 degrees internal temperature on an instant thermometer to be considered safe to eat.
And even that doesn’t tell the whole story.
A turkey can actually be safe to eat when the thermometer reaches a lower temperature, say 155 degrees Fahrenheit, provided it stays at that temperature for at least 90 seconds to kill any surviving bacteria. Carryover cooking, in which food continues to cook after being removed from the heat source, will also ensure you hit a safe temperature when the turkey is removed from the oven and allowed to rest.
In other words, by the time your in-turkey button “pops,” the bird has already been overcooked, and overcooking is the enemy of juiciness.
Instead of relying on the once-revolutionary technology of a pop-up thermometer, most experienced chefs recommend using an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the turkey.
Other strategies to ensure your Thanksgiving meal is packed with moisture include salting or submerging your turkey in a brine the day before cooking or cooking individual components of the bird separately. Food blogger/chef/scientist J. Kenji Lopez-Alt likes to cook white meat to 145 degrees and dark meat to 165.
This method also significantly reduces the amount of time the bird is in the oven, further ensuring your Thanksgiving main course is juicy, not dry, and gets its proper credit.
As for the pop-up timer, Lopez-Alt says, in no uncertain terms, “If I had my way, the world would be rid of it.”
