A NEW WAY TO ROAST A TURKEY
Splaying the bird ensures it is evenly cooked with tender and tasty dark and white meat
There’s an age-old problem with roasting a whole turkey. How do you cook the dark meat to juicy tenderness without desiccating the white meat? Theories abound, and I’ve tried most of them, like attaching ice packs to the breasts to slow down the cooking or cutting out the backbone and flattening the bird (a technique known as spatchcocking).
They all work to some degree, but they require far more effort than I’d like to invest on the most cooking-intensive days of the year.
With Thanksgiving and Christmas in mind, I decided to try something new. I took my cues from a much smaller bird: the humble, amenable chicken.
Like the turkey, the chicken has the same white/dark meat divide when it comes to cook times. To compensate, I often splay the chicken’s legs, then sear the bird in a very hot pan before putting it into the oven to roast.
The dual strategy of splaying the legs to allow more hot air to circulate around them, combined with the initial searing, gives the dark meat a head start before the breast hits the heat of the oven. You get an evenly roasted bird, with silky, juicy white meat and perfectly cooked dark meat. And you get it fast, or at least faster than roasting it whole.
Would the same technique work with a fowl three times the size of your average chicken? The answer was a resounding yes.
Unlike spatchcocking a turkey, which requires a certain amount of skill and strength, splaying is a cinch. You can use a paring knife to cut through the skin that connects the legs to the body, then just press down and pull on the thighs until you hear them pop out of their sockets and lie flat. Easy.
As with a chicken, you’ll need to get the pan blazing hot before searing the bird. I used a standard heavy-duty roasting pan, removing the rack and heating it on my stovetop before putting in the turkey. To encourage the legs to flop open, I pressed down on them so they made firm contact
with the pan. You’ll likely hear some wild sizzling when the damp bird meets the hot metal; that’s a good sign.
All of this is pretty much my standard technique for a splayed chicken, swapping in a roasting pan for a cast-iron skillet. But for the turkey, I made an important tweak to help the dark meat reach even greater succulence. After searing, I poured wine into the pan to braise the legs.
If you haven’t had a braised turkey leg, you may not know that braising is truly a magnificent way to cook one. Unlike chicken, turkey legs have a lot of connective tissue, which can make them tough. The liquid in a braise softens these sinews.
Splaying allows the legs to lie flat while the breast rises regally above them, which means you’re able to add wine and onions to the bottom of the pan without them touching the breast. So the legs can braise while the white meat roasts to crisp-skinned perfection — at the same time, in the same pan.
You can use any liquid here for braising: wine, cider, beer, stock, diced tomatoes, even water. But a combination of wine and onions imbues the meat with a heady, savoury character. Just be sure that the onions are thickly sliced, no less than two centimetres, otherwise they could burn to a sooty mess on the bottom of the pan.
When properly cooked, the onions caramelise into the wine and turkey drippings, giving you a gorgeous oniony jus. You can use this jus to zip up your gravy. Or use it instead of gravy. It’s so tasty and rich that it can stand alone.
For seasoning the turkey, I like the drybrine method, patting a mix of salt, herbs and aromatics onto the turkey a day or two before roasting. I also like to leave the bird
uncovered in the fridge so that the skin can dry out a bit, which makes it extra-crunchy.
Along with the recipe for an herb-imbued turkey, I also suggest a couple of flavour variations. In one, I use orange zest, chilli powder and sage leaves to season the bird, then drape it with thick-cut bacon. And in the other, fennel seeds, rosemary and garlic flavour the turkey, then the whole thing gets doused in anchovy butter and showered in grated Parmesan, which browns gloriously in the oven’s heat.
These variations may be outside the box. But then again, so is roasting a splayed turkey.