I must admit to you my dears, my darlings, there is one thing that deeply annoys me during the Thanksgiving mealtime area. They scoff, they look dumbfounded, some have actually asked if my mind has stopped working. Here is the one issue.
No one ever believes me when I tell them how long a turkey takes to cook.
Two and one half hours. It should take no longer than that. Three hours total. Ten minutes to get it out of the brine and into the oven, half an hour at 500, two hours at 350. Then you rest it for 20 minutes before eating. Three hours from the brine to the table. Crispy, crackling skin. succulent, juicy, flavorful meat. Along with gravy handed down by Louis Servan himself.
Add in stuffing (dressing really), cranberry sauce and whipped potatoes that I produce along with the abomination that is Green Bean Casserole. It’s an abomination because I cannot create this dish “properly” without the canned ingredients. And I cannot do without the thing because “We hath always done as such, and shall ever do as such, forevermore.”
POINT BEING!
I produce perfection. Perfection on a plate.
I keep hearing people tell me I’m crazy, that you cannot produce the whole of the meal in 3 hours. But then I also hear complaints that the turkey they allowed to cook for 9 hours was dry and had a taste somewhat reminiscent of library paste, only less flavorful. Cardboard was a word someone used this year. Then you have my turkey, which has brought strong men to tears of joy and was produced in a third of the time.
I’m not sorry to sound smug about this but... do you suppose it’s possible that I know how to cook turkey and you do not?
It’s not your fault. If you are Generation X, like myself, then you are greatly unraised and untutored. Our parents were never taught how to cook properly, because their parents were never really taught how to cook properly. We’re the third generation of a system that was dedicated to making sure we could not fish, so that the marketers could sell us a fish every day. Our grandmothers were handed recipes in advertisements, that used all the companies canned goods, loaded with sodium and garbage. Our mothers were then handed these useless bits of information, and did their best to hand them off to us. Yes, I know, one of you had a mother that could cook and a grandmother that knew what she was doing. You are, I’m sorry to say, a rarity in this world.
As a result, I will write you out my method for a perfect turkey... but not today. Today I’m feeling too smug, too full and too drunk to write anything with any alacrity. If alacrity is indeed the word I want. Jeeves would know.
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