Talking Turkey: A Holiday Special Edition (Published 2022) (2024)

Today, a special Thanksgiving episode of “The Daily”—

Have you come across turkey in your research?

— about the high-stakes quest to cook the perfect turkey. Two food writers at “The Times,” Kim Severson —

Cooking a turkey can be one of the most pain in the ass exercises in the American kitchen.

— and J. Kenji López-Alt —

So the mayo, that one is all about getting the skin sort of flavorful, and dark brown, and extra crispy.

— on the hard-fought lessons that they’ve learned. It’s Wednesday, November 23.

First, Kim Severson.

So why is Turkey such a vexing culinary challenge? OK, first of all, it is a giant bird. Most people don’t even know how to roast a chicken. And this is five times the size of a chicken.

Second of all, you only do it once a year. So even if you made a killer turkey last year, you’ve probably forgotten what you did. And you have to start from scratch.

The other issue is that turkey is notorious for needing the white meat to be cooked at a different temperature than the dark meat. But it’s all one bird, and it can take hours. So inevitably, you either have that kind of gross, chickeny, raw thigh, or you have breast meat that essentially turns to sawdust when you try to cut it.

And you have to imagine that screwing up the turkey gives all of your in-laws and all of your friends who don’t like you a great opportunity to come down on you. So there is an incredible amount of pressure on the person who’s cooking the turkey. And it has spawned, essentially, a turkey panic industry.

There are gizmos, and gadgets, and methods, and advice, and media that have been built playing off of turkey fear.

It’s an entire turkey fear industrial complex.

I’ve been a food writer for a very, very long time, about 112 years. We have some young people on our staff, some new young people. And they’re like, I think my mom used to put it in a bag. Do you guys ever remember that? I’m like, look, kid, [MIMICS CIGARETTE SMOKING]:, bag’s been around a long time.

So that got me thinking about all the ways Americans have been told to prepare turkey over the years. And listen, I’m not proud. I’ve been responsible for some of these. I can own it. I can own it.

And I guess to make myself feel better, I decided to make amends by reporting out every trick, trend, and gimmick I could find. So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving, or at least as close as I could get.

Hello. My goodness, nice to see you.

If you want to know anything about how people cooked during that period, you call up Leni Sorensen.

She’s a culinary historian who focuses on the lives of Black cooks, particularly in the early 1800s and the colonial period.

OK, noted — don’t do this alone.

Leni is an expert in particular on cookbooks of the early 1800s, one of which was written by Mary Randolph, who wrote “The Virginia Housewife” in 1824. And it was considered, for a long time, really one of the most significant cookbooks of the 19th century.

So one of the big issues in the early days, particularly the colonial days and into the 1800s, was how far to keep the turkey from the open flame.

12 inches, 18 inches — very, very intense debate.

Mary Randolph gives us another tip in her cookbook. You start by rubbing the turkey with cold lard. The idea, I guess, is that it will crisp the skin better.

So hot tip from the 1800s — rub the turkey with cold lard.

But the era of turkey tricks and gimmicks really heated up in the 20th century. It kind of rose on a wave of food science, food media, and of course, a food industry that really wanted to sell us a lot of stuff.

OK, first up, the roasting bag. So around the 1910s or so, cooking in paper bags became a thing. But it was a fad. It faded pretty quickly.

But then the idea of cooking in a bag came roaring back in the 1960s, when the roasting bag was invented. And this was a plastic bag. So you would just shove everything into this bag, close it up, and bake it — no muss, no fuss.

Couple of problems — number one, the turkey skin was always kind of flabby and bland and pale. And number two, you had no drippings for gravy. Oh, and number three, they also were prone to exploding.

Now, we come to one of my favorite and most useless turkey gadgets — the pop-up timer.

[TIMER DINGS]

It’s that plastic gizmo that’s stuck into the breast of millions of supermarket turkeys. They came up with it in the ‘60s. The idea was a compound inside the timer would melt at a certain temperature and pop up. That temperature would assure that the turkey had reached 165 degrees, which is the governmental standard for killing bacteria.

So whenever I want a really good take on stupid ideas from the food industry, I call up Laura Shapiro. She’s a culinary historian.

And she also said it just adds to that idea that cooking a turkey is really hard, and there’s no way we can do it unless we have some magic gizmo from the food industry to help us.

Next up, we head to the great State of Louisiana, which is responsible for two of America’s very distinct turkey cooking innovations. One of them is the deep fried turkey.

[TIMER DINGS]

So I called up my old friend, Judy Walker, who was the Food Editor of “The New Orleans Times-Picayune” for a long time.

And she walked me through the origins of the deep fried turkey recipe that they first ran in 1984.

So a couple of years later, all the food editors in the country met in New Orleans for their annual convention. And of course, they watched a demo of a deep fried turkey.

So they took it home and told their readers about it. And before you know it, everybody was frying turkey, Judy included.

This is not a recipe without its dangers. You could catch your house on fire. And if you use a frozen turkey, it might explode, which brings us to Butterball.

[TIMER DINGS]

So the Butterball company was responsible for a lot of innovations when it comes to Thanksgiving turkey.

It was the first company to start injecting its turkeys with brine and then sending them to the supermarket.

But I think its most enduring achievement, and truly one of America’s best marketing gimmicks, is the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line.

So this was invented by a Chicago ad man in 1981, who was tasked with selling more turkeys by Butterball.

He put six home economists in a room with telephones and had them dispense Thanksgiving cooking advice. They fielded 10,000 calls that first year. And the Butterball Talk-Line has been going strong ever since.

This year, they think they’ll probably get 100,000 people reaching out either through phone or text, chat, email, Amazon Alexa.

So I gave Nicole Johnson a call, who’s been answering phones at the Turkey Talk-Line for more than 20 years.

So before the Talk-Line opens, all the advisors go to Butterball University and study the latest techniques for making turkey.

This year in particular, they studied how to make a turkey using an air fryer.

They had also studied whether you could make a turkey in a microwave oven, which is really a pain in the ass. It takes a lot of time and a lot of tending. But she said in a pinch —

And the number one question every year — how to thaw a turkey, which takes about five days in the refrigerator. So if you have a frozen turkey, I’m sorry.

Next up, the method that redefined the term turkey dressing.

[TIMER DINGS]

One of the most enduring methods of making a turkey involves soaking cheesecloth in butter and wine or stock and draping it over the turkey. Martha Stewart made this a big thing in the 1990s, although cooks had been doing it for centuries. In 2021, she turned it up a notch and decided if you didn’t have any cheesecloth —

You could use a clean white T-shirt.

And finally, we get to the salt years. And I take some responsibility for this one.

[TIMER DINGS]

So for a while, we all decided the solution was wet brining. And I, sadly, was one of the people who helped make it popular. This was probably the most awkward way to prepare a turkey ever suggested.

Basically, you put your turkey in a saltwater bath. So not only do you have to make gallons of brine, you have to find something that can hold all those gallons of brine and your turkey. Either you clean out a cooler, or maybe you do triple plastic garbage bags. And once you get it all set up, you’ve got to keep it cold for two days. This is insanity.

But some people still wet brine. Some people still soak their cheesecloth in butter. Some people even like that pop-up turkey timer. Once you start cooking a turkey a certain way, it can be hard to change.

So I called Chris Kimball, who runs Milk Street, and has probably tested more turkeys than anyone I know.

Maybe this is the year to just make things easy. I mean, the world is complex enough, right? So what if we just took our turkeys, and put them in a 325 degree oven, and cook them till they were done? I mean, maybe they would be a little dry. So what? As my good pal Doc Willoughby, the food writer, always says, that’s why God invented gravy.

After the break, what if your gravy just isn’t that good? And what if you’re not ready to give up the quest to cook the perfect turkey? We’ll be right back.

So Kenji López-Alt, welcome to “The Daily.”

And of course, happy Thanksgiving. This must be like Christmas for you, except it’s Thanksgiving. But you know what I mean. Like, this is your day.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, for sure.

So we are talking to you because you are a bestselling cookbook author, and because you’re not just a cooking expert, you’re an expert in the science of cooking. And you have come up with what’s been called a foolproof recipe for cooking turkey that is more elevated than the — we have given it all up, 325 version that Kim Severson left us with in a state of desperation.

Right.

And that’s the recipe we want to talk to you about, this solution, in theory, to our problem. So tell us about this recipe. Just give us the very top line of what this is.

Well, I hesitate to call it elevated, but it solves some of the problems that people typically have with roasting turkeys. But the top line is that it’s a spatchco*cked, dry-brined, mayo-rubbed turkey.

Which, OK, sounds amazing, but also sounds potentially complicated.

Mm-hmm.

Let’s start with that first word, spatchco*cking, which I know a little bit about, but which is a quite intimidating cooking term.

Well, spatchco*cking, essentially, you’re cutting the backbone out of the turkey, kind of splaying it out to get it ready for roasting or grilling.

OK.

And you can do this yourself at home with some hefty poultry shears, or you can ask the butcher to do it.

Yeah, that definitely sounds like something you want to ask somebody else to do.

Someone with a big knife.

And why do it?

Right, so the problem with turkey is that it’s very difficult to get the light meat and the dark meat to finish at the same time. So by the time your dark meat is tender, your light meat is generally dried out.

Right.

So spatchco*cking solves that essentially by flattening out the bird and splaying its legs out. So what that means is that the legs actually cook faster than the breast does. So by the time the legs are done, the breast isn’t overcooked. So it solves that problem.

It also cuts your cooking time down pretty significantly. So from about 2 to 2 and 1/2 hours for a 10 to 14-pound bird, it’ll cut out down to around 80 to 90 minutes.

OK. And I just want to be clear about what we’re talking about visually.

Mm-hmm.

Because the turkey of our imagination, the turkey of my youth, perhaps your youth, is this just giant ball of meat that, in its heft, is so elegant and wonderful. What you’re suggesting is quite literally butchering that ball of meat in such a way so that it lies flat in a pan, right? So it’s fundamentally different.

Right.

And you’re saying that that is necessary to solve this giant kind of cooking even problem.

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s necessary. It is a trade-off, right? The trade-off is, do you want the ease and foolproofness and the juiciness you get from using this technique?

Mm-hmm.

Or do you prefer having the big visual of the centerpiece turkey? And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to that question. I definitely don’t want to try and tell people that their traditions are wrong if they want to have that big centerpiece turkey. My in-laws do that. And I don’t tell them not to cook it that way.

[LAUGHS]: OK, so let’s talk about the second component of this recipe, which is a dry brine.

So dry brining, once your turkey is spatchco*cked, and you have it laying on a sheet tray, you’re going to take salt — so a good amount of salt. So I think of it as, if you’ve ever seen a snow flurry on a New England parking lot, a good amount of salt, but not so much that you couldn’t drive over it.

You sprinkle that on the turkey. You want to get it on every surface and rub it in. And if you really want the most benefit from it, you’re also going to want to take a teaspoon or two of salt and rub it between the skin and the meat on each breast.

Hmm.

And then once you’ve done that, you’re going to take your turkey, leave it uncovered, and then just put it in the fridge for at least overnight, and up to two nights before you roast it.

OK, and what does this accomplish for the turkey?

So it accomplishes the same thing as a traditional wet brine does, which is when you would take your turkey and dunk it in a bucket full of salt water.

Right, which is, of course, very inconvenient, as Kim told us.

Yes, yes, it is very inconvenient. Dry brining, I find much easier. So the salt initially is going to draw some of the moisture out from the turkey through osmosis.

And then what’s going to happen is that salt is going to dissolve in that liquid and form a really hyper-concentrated brine that coats the surface of the turkey. And so turkey meat, when it comes in contact with a saltwater brine like that, some of the muscle proteins are going to start to dissolve.

Mm-hmm.

And what that means is that as the turkey cooks, those proteins that would normally squeeze the muscle fibers and kind of squeeze juices out of the turkey, they’re not going to squeeze as hard.

Which means the moisture’s going to stay in the turkey rather than get squirted out.

Exactly, exactly. It’s a really good step for foolproofing if you want extra-juicy meat.

Got it. OK, so spatchco*cking gets us a pretty long way towards our foolproof turkey. The dry brine gets us even further. And then we’ve got this grocery store staple of mayo.

Yeah.

Tell us what we’re supposed to do with mayo, why we’re supposed to be using mayo on a Turkey.

Yeah, so the mayo, that one is all about the skin and getting the skin flavorful, and nice and dark brown, and sort of extra crispy. Although the mayo, you can’t tell the mayo is on there once it’s done roasting.

[LAUGHS]: You seem self-conscious about your mayo.

Well, I know some people get a certain way around mayo. People have strong feelings about mayo.

It’s a staple.

Right. The reason I am using mayo — so first of all, I find it’s very hard to get an herb butter to just the right texture that you can rub it over the turkey. So it either ends up kind of greasy and slops around —

Because the temperature’s always a little off. Right, right.

Yeah, exactly, or it’s too cold and it’s hard to spread. Whereas mayo stays spreadable straight from the fridge out at room temperature. So you’re taking your mayonnaise, and you’re blending a bunch of herbs, garlic, lemon zest, whatever flavors you want, honestly. But you’re blending them into that mayo. And then you’re rubbing the turkey with the mayo before you roast it, in the same way that you would rub it with, say, an herb butter or an herb oil.

Right.

It’s kind of easy to spread no matter what. So it’s really easy to get a nice, even layer. So while butter and oil will tend to drip off and fall down to —

Drip off.

— the tray, the mayo will kind of stay in place. And so the other advantage mayo has over butter or plain oil is that there’s protein in it. Those proteins do double duty, getting everything to stick in place, and then also helping with browning.

Mm-hmm.

I think the mayo step is probably the most cosmetic of all the steps. But it’s the next [INAUDIBLE] for the foolproof turkey.

Got it. So from everything you’re saying, this is going to be delicious. But it is not a dead simple recipe. It involves some steps, it involves some time. It’s not shove it in at 325, baby level of simplicity.

Mm-hmm.

And people have friends and family over. They’ve got kids running around. To those who heard this conversation and think to themselves, that is a whole lot of complicated, is it worth it? What do you say?

No.

Well, it really depends on your situation. I think one of the advantages of spatchco*cking is that it actually is, I think, once you’re used to it, easier and faster. And I say that as someone with two little kids and a large family that comes over on Thanksgiving.

Mm-hmm.

So for me, that ease and efficiency is something that’s appealing to me. But on the other hand, if you don’t feel like a spatchco*cked turkey has a place in your Thanksgiving kitchen or table, there’s no reason to —

Now get out of my kitchen, right? No, I hear you saying, much like Kim did, that there’s no wrong way to do this, and we shouldn’t kill ourselves with expectations.

Yeah, honestly, at the end of the day, I think you have to be kind to yourself when you’re learning how to cook. And for Thanksgiving especially, if you got people to come over and share a turkey with you, then by the time you’re all sitting down at the table, the turkey’s already kind of done its job. Whether it’s a little dry or a little overcooked, who cares at that point, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Well, thank you very much, Kenji, for this —

Thank you.

— informative, delicious-sounding conversation. This is our first-ever Thanksgiving “Daily” episode.

This will be the first podcast I’ve been on that my wife will listen to.

Thank you to her. And we appreciate your time.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a major legal defeat for Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has ruled that his tax returns must be turned over to a House committee run by Democrats, which has been seeking the documents since 2019.

Trump had argued that the committee was not legally entitled to the documents, and had hoped he could delay turning them over until after the midterms, when Democrats were widely expected to lose control of the House. But with the Court’s ruling, the documents are likely to be given to the committee before the chamber switches control from Democrats to Republicans in January.

And intense rescue operations are underway in Indonesia, where a magnitude 5.6 earthquake has killed at least 268 people and injured more than 1,000 in the country’s most populated province. The quake inflicted broad devastation, uprooting thousands of homes from their foundations and engulfing an entire village in a landslide.

Today’s episode was produced by Tina Antolini and edited by Wendy Dorr, and was engineered by Corey Schreppel.

“The Daily” is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, MJ Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Sofia Milan, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, and Alex Stern.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Cliff Levy, Dave Shaw, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Des Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, and Maddy Masiello.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.