#030: Ritual Bird Sacrifice
Yesterday, I cooked an entire Thanksgiving meal for friends, even though actual Thanksgiving is about 3 weeks out in the US. I did so in order to make myself a sandwich.
I was watching Binging with Babish’s episode on the Friends Moistmaker sandwich a while ago, and thought that the Moistmaker sounded like a Good Idea. Also, I figured cooking an entire turkey might make for a nice new experience.
Getting an entire turkey is fairly straightforward (make sure you preorder it), until you actually hold one in your hands. You will be surprised how large and heavy it is. This will continue to pose problems. Since the best way to get a great roasted turkey is to butterfly it, you’ll need to apply a significant amount of strength in order to break the breast and flatten it. Dry-brining your turkey will ensure that it doesn’t dry out in the oven, and also require a large amount of salt, and take up almost half of your fridge for 24h, so that’s something you should account for as well.
That said, once you get to the actual roasting part, it’s easy sailing: Put it on a baking rack in a 230ºC oven, add a baking sheet right below filled with vegetables (to catch the juices from the bird), and wait about 70 minutes. If you have an instant read thermometer (which gets my vote for most under-appreciated kitchen tool), you’ll want the breast to be at about 66ºC. Remove from oven, cover with foil, and let rest for at least 20 minutes.
Making the stuffing is easier: Dry some bread in the oven (which you can do well in advance), roast minced meat, add some vegetables and aromatics (sage and garlic work well), add some turkey stock, and combine with the dried bread and some eggs. Since we butterflied our turkey and can’t really stuff it, put it into a baking dish, cover with foil, and put in the oven after the bird has been cooking for about 20 minutes.
Invite some friends over so you don’t have to explain why you cooked an entire turkey just to make a sandwich, add another side dish (I recommend Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Best Roast Potatoes Ever, and make sure to use duck fat), and spend a nice evening.
The goal of this exercise wasn’t just to make a sandwich, of course. I like to cook, and cooking and eating interesting food is a large part of why I cook. This also means I want to try out new recipes, techniques, or ingredients. Nowadays, you can get almost anything edible from anywhere in the world, and there’s no reason to not try something new and different. While cooking a turkey doesn’t really qualify as a new exotic meal, it did teach me a new technique (dry-brining, which should work well for chicken too), taught me that I’m able to improvise recipe alterations, re-emphasized the importance of backwards planning, and now I can add “creating an entire thanksgiving meal” to the list of my skills.
In short, I gained some more experience, and now know that I can spend an entire day cooking without a problem.
Oh, and the sandwich? After sending this out, I’ll make myself one. Follow me on Instagram if you want to see a picture of it.