Making the Alton Brown Thanksgiving Turkey

Being a big Good Eats fan, anything Alton Brown says is good, I'm gonna trust the guy. So, if you haven't done so already, watch the online video snips of his Thanksgiving Turkey episode, and spy out the recipe.

First off, let it be said I followed the recipe fairly well, but with a few exceptions of importance. If you saw the whole Good Eats episode, and not just the vid snip online, he talks about using a cooler to do the brining in. I instead opted to utilize my turkey deep frying rig, which was absolutely the way to go. The deep fryer has a 5-gallon pot, and a nice post on which you impale the turkey and extract it. So, rather than mess with a picnic cooler, I lowered the turkey into the cold turkey fryer, and filled it up with the brine solution.

Ah, the brine solution. Alton Brown's recipe makes 2 gallons, and mine was close. I used 10 cans of Swanson vegetable broth, 1/2 cup kosher salt, 1/2 tablespoon allspice, 1/2 tablespoon ginger. Boil it, let it cool down cold. I put mine outside and it's 20 ° f. outside. Add a gallon of cold water. That's fairly close Alton's recipe, too. That yields about 2 gallons, and left me with a turkey that was half submerged. So now for my deviation from the recipe. I needed to hustle up two 1-gallon potfuls of something, so here is what I did. One pot got a good pour of kosher salt, and a good slop of worshestire sauce. The next pot got a good pour of kosher salt, and a couple packs of Dragonfly brand chicken stock (what on earth is Dragonfly brand? Think of buying the little soup stock pack from a package of ramen). Okay, so my four plus gallons of brine have about half the concentration of vegetable broth, possibly a bit less salt, and some extras.

So in our garage where it's barely above freezing is where the turkey spent the night, tucked snugly amid the briny water. With the lid on the fryer, it spent a cool evening sucking in the goodness and doing it's last of safe thawing out.

Okay, so fast forward to Thanksgiving day, somewhere after 11 a.m. I think it was more like 11:30 a.m. Ah. Anyhow, yeah, the turkey. I rinsed it off in cold water to get off excess brine, and sprayed the turkey with olive oil. I prepared the apple, onion and cinnamon aromatics. Alton's recipe called for a few rosemary sprigs and some sage. I went way past that level. At our local Fred Meyer they had a bag with a lot of rosemary, sage, and thyme. I crammed that turkey packed full of as much as I could. Oh yeah.

You see how the bottom of the turkey looks pretty pale? That's because I did not have a good roasting pan. I had a high-wall roasting pan, the black enameled kind with lid. The sides were too high. Next year I'll get a better roasting pan. Anyhow, with that being noted, I went with the suggested cooking method. I had a digital probe thermometer, I did the foil Turkey Triangle, everything. One odd thing, the probe would show the temp sometimes inching to 161, then it would drop, then go back up, sort of like the stock market on a good week. After it hit 161 ° f., it stayed in the oven for maybe a half-hour more with the oven down to 250 or so, as the in-laws wern't due til' 3:00 and it was only 2:30. No biggie.

The turkey came out and rested for 15 minutes prior to carving. As I lit up on it's juicy innards with my electric knife, I went to bust the drumstick off of that guy, and cut deep to the joint. To my dismay, it was pretty red pink there still. I was thinking "Uh-oh". Turned out it was fine. The breast meat was perfectly done, it was the juiciest turkey I've ever prepared. Moist and quite flavorful. Not too salty at all, despite the "brine" connotations that might cause one to equate "brined" with "oversalted". In short, I thought it was great, as did everybody else. Well, that's what they said at least! Would I make this again? Absolutely. Perhaps I'd go for 165 ° f. internal temp, but maybe not. It was fine, and we had a truly happy Thanksgiving.

I should note, a turkey alone does not Thanksgiving dinner make. We had all the classic stuff, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, baked yams, stuffing, fruit salad, rolls, cider, gravy (duh!), oh, I'm sure there was more. Of course we had pumpkin pie, along with Butterfinger pie that I'm sure had no Butterfinger in it at all, but it was nonetheless very good if not a tad oversweet. So it was all goodness and plenty, a cornucopia of holiday tradition spent with loving family.