From the comment section of the Guardian today. On cooking the Christmas turkey. By Galianoguy: The Morton Thompson Turkey, which can be prepped a day in advance (minus stuffing and trussing), is, I have to say, in fact the best turkey Ive ever tasted, and that includes the one I deep-fried last year. I felt bitter and betrayed by the deep-fried turkey because of (a) the added cost: I had to buy 23 litres of oil to fry it in, and then what are you going to do with that afterwards?, but also because (b) the trumpeted 45 minutes cooking time ignores the entire hour it takes to heat the 23 litres of oil up, and the 24 hours brining the day before, and the essential drying of the beast and the rub that should be there for at least 12 hours so theres a day and a half before you even start to cook not to mention the inconvenience of the oven gloves and the goggles and the rest of the protective clothing, then theres building the harness to lower it into the hot oil, and keeping small children, the elderly (Ooo. Ive always wanted to see this! Well you cant. Youre far too old. Go away and smell your new bath salts.), and pets in a distant location and you dont dare drink because you are operating what amounts to heavy machinery, and even after its eaten, its not over, not by a long shot, because now youve got a pot of hot oil deeply coloured with rub sitting outside cooling down for hours until you can start to decant it into smaller vessels and now its the third day of this nightmare except you spill some of the oil on the pavers and you cant get the stain out even with detergent and scrubbing, so your wife, who is a vegetarian and disgusted with the whole idea anyway, is even more deeply pissed off than usual with the whole turkey thing and you end up having to having to drive for hours all the way back out to the paving stone place on the fourth day except its closed till well after the holidays, so you have to drive all the way home and then back out there again in a week and a half except you get there and theyre not open on weekends during the winter so you have to wait till the Monday because now you have to replace the pavers with what you pray are identical ones). So the Morton Thompson prep time starts to look not so unreasonable, if you get all your ingredients mixed the day before. After half a dozen or so MTTs, apprenticing to my late mother-in-law, I now fly solo, and Ive made a few changes: first to the gravy: leave the liver out of the gravy, because, well, liver; brown the neck in rendered fat, simmer it in cider for hours, shred its flesh (mm, neck meat), and thats your basting liquid; and second a change to the application of the eggy paste: after the initial browning, the fridge sounds wrong, so you speed things up no end by returning the creature to the oven for a few minutes for each application of the paste to set, and then pulling it out and reapplying the paste. Its tedious, but wine helps; no heavy machinery issues here. After the paste is used up, then its the basting, and yeah its every fifteen minutes, but its a great excuse to get away for the family (Come and sit with us and help little distant cousin, or this obscure grandchild [name indistinct] build his or her Lego Hadron Collider Particle Accelerator or maybe its a Hunger Games megacity! Oh, I cant. I need to stay with the turkey. And drink.) and the cooking time is a lot less than they lead you to believe. All in all, its worth it if you want to hear genuine praise from your loved ones along the lines of the oxymoronic This turkey is brilliant, which is obviously a big improvement over the traditional gloomy eulogy my father would intone every year over my mothers heroic non-Morton Thompson attempts: Oh, dear, hed say, and wed all know what was coming next. Its a pity the turkeys so dry. You could hardly hear the last part over the sound of my mothers spirit being crushed. Plus the Morton Thompson Turkey makes a guest appearance in The Time Travellers Wife (although Im doubtful they know what theyre doing; the way the turkeys described in the book sounds off to me.)
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:10:24 +0000
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