Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
I’m in the process of cooking the turkey as we speak. I decided to use a combination of my friend Tom’s method for brown skin/moist bird, a commenter’s advice for seasoning, and my uncle’s method.
Which is, respectively:
1 - Cook uncovered at 500 for4 the first half hour, then cover with foil. Also baste at least every hour.
2 - Put some rosemary and garlic powder under the skin in places.
3 - Put pats of butter under the skin in places. Well, he does that in conjunction with all night cooking, covered, at 250, followed by finishing at 350 uncovered.
I put pats of butter under the skin, which is harder than it sounds, and in the cavity, and some in the pan. I mixed up probably a tablespoon or so of rosemary, which I have never used before, but it smells great, with a little garlic powder, a pinch of ginger powder, and a dash of seasoned salt, which contains celery and so replaces the celery salt I’d planned to use. Then I stuffed bits of the mix under the skin, which essentially meant mixing it right into and onto the butter, got some on the skin, and tossed a little into the cavity. I sprinkled a very small amount of soy sauce into the little bit of water I’d put in the pan and onto the turkey.
Then I cooked it 35 minutes at 500, which smelled wonderful but filled the house with some of the most voluminous cooking smoke I have ever managed to incur. The range hood fan is a POS, and I don’t mean a retailer’s register, so I ended up opening the window and being glad it’s warm out today. How sad, thinking that 47 is “warm,” but it feels that way. Then I ended up opening the bathroom window for extra airflow. Then I ended up putting a small yet powerful fan that was left in the living room from summer on the counter blowing out the window. Yeesh.
After the 35 minutes, it looked absolutely wonderful. Slight burning of the wing tips that nobody eats anyway, but otherwise golden and crisp. It’s now cooking at a more normal temperature, covered in foil. I had intended to go more plain this time, but it sure smells great. Deb went out to her truck, parked near the road, and you can smell it out there.
I guess one of our “new house checklist” posts needs to be a good fan for whatever stove we have in our eventual house. Speaking of which, I need to find all those posts and make sure they have viable URLs, given the Expression Engine import problem with same-named posts (but not with newly created ones).
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