Desperation turkey

How to cook a frozen bird

When producing a Christmas meal becomes a last-minute affair, you might think getting a bronzed bird on the table presents the toughest challenge. Don’t worry. Cooking a whole turkey from a rock-solid, frozen state can yield respectable results. If you stick it in the oven by 9 in the morning, it can be ready for carving by 4 p.m.

For decades, frozen turkey has been the No. 1 concern that Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line operators hear about. They’ll counsel you through thawing techniques and suggest that cooking one of their birds fully defrosted is preferable.

But “from frozen” is doable and perhaps the least fussy way to handle a bird of any size. Size translates to oven time for a whole turkey, and size will be an issue when you are faced with last-minute choices in your grocer’s freezer.

Generally, a frozen bird needs to spend about 1 1/2 times as long at a low-ish oven temperature (325 F/160 C); an unstuffed 19-pounder (8.6 kg) that takes almost 4 hours to roast from fully thawed will take 6 to 6 1/2 hours from fully frozen.

Search online and you won’t find a Butterball-approved chart for roasting from frozen.

“It’s not something we promote,” says Butterball’s Talk-Line director Nicole Johnson, due to optimal quality control — but not any food safety issues. The pan you use for this is nonnegotiable. It needs to be low-walled so as much air as possible circulates around the bird.

You have the technology at hand:

Seat an ovenproof wire rack inside a rimmed baking sheet. Hoist the bird onto the rack. Move the middle oven rack down one level, keeping the lower rack in place (for reheating sides), removing any upper rack.

Pour a cup of water into the pan.

That’s it. That method would benefit most oven-roasted turkeys. Why sacrifice so much potentially crisped and golden brown skin to steam heat?

For me, this renders those expensive roasting pans with nonstick V-shaped rack inserts unnecessary and less effective. (The same can be said for deep disposable aluminum pans, which are not great conductors of heat.)

The Butterball experts agree and have recommended using lowwalled pans for years.

At 2 1/2 to 3 hours in, the turkey will be thawed enough for you to deal with the giblets packet.

Chances are that it is either in the main or neck cavity. Remove the baking sheet from the oven just long enough to retrieve the packet via tongs. Its contents will still be usable, whether the bag is made of food-safe plastic or paper.

Even if you don’t plan to use it, you need to remove it, because leaving it in will cause the meat to be cooked unevenly around it.

At that same time, you can use a small, sharp knife to cut a slit just under each drumstick, which is a Jacques Pépin trick to help that deep joint get cooked through.

You can leave in the plastic handle that holds the legs together; it can handle the heat.

The same standards of doneness for roast turkey apply here: drumsticks that have a little give at the joint, 165 F (75 C) for dark meat.

None of the turkeys we tested had areas of undercooked meat, and even when the temperature registered 175 F (80 C), the dark meat was still quite juicy.

What about seasoning? Turkey cooks have wet-brined, dry-salted, injected, basted, slid compound butters under the skin and stuffed their birds with herbs.

Your unseasoned bird cooked from frozen will yield a decent amount of pan juices — especially when you choose to lay a swath of butter-soaked cheesecloth on top for the remaining oven time — and all you need to do is season those juices and then spoon them over the carved platter.

The turkey should rest for 30 minutes to an hour before you carve. That’s when you will can reheat any sides you couldn’t fit on that lower rack.