Alison Roasts A Turkey On A Sheet Pan and Makes Gravy Ahead | Home Movies with Alison Roman

Turkey rub, take one. Okay, hello everybody. Welcome to Hello Movies. Welcome to Thanksgiving. Today, we're making turkey. If you would like the longer version of this episode and how the turkey sort of fits into the larger grand scheme of things in terms of like planning and scheduling and meal prep and like the day, you can watch the full-length video, which I recommend, obviously. But if you're just here for turkey, that's what we're talking about. This is crazy in here. Every year I say that, but every year it's true. Oh, oh, oh. Turkey, take two. I've done turkey 42,000 ways. I've done like slow-roasted. I've done braised. I've done confit. I've done dry brined, mostly dry brined. Today, we're gonna do it the way that I kind of always do it, the way that I think is the best way to do it, which is to dry brine your turkey, dry brine, meaning equal parts salt and light brown sugar. You can add in seasonings, flavorings. Today, we're gonna do like garlic and fennel seed and black pepper, some sage. Very like Thanksgiving, but different. Thanksgiving with a twist. Thanksgiving, but there's fennel. It's kind of like if you love Italian sauces, you're gonna love this turkey, but it's not so fennel-y or like flavorful that you're gonna feel put off by it feeling like intensely flavored. It will go with everything else on your table, regardless if you're making this menu or not. I am making this not at Thanksgiving time. I'm not getting the like small local heritage bird because those turkeys are still with us on the corporeal plane. Very difficult to find an out-of-season turkey because most people eat turkey once a year. This is on the larger side of a turkey for me, personally. I think a like 12-pound bird is exactly where you wanna be. This is almost 15. So for your turkey, again, I don't use a roasting pan. You will need two rimmed baking sheets. These are your standard sheet trays. They have a rim. These are not cookie sheets, which those are just the flat sheets that things slide off and on, and a wire rack. Again, if you are making Thanksgiving, you should have two sheet pans anyway. Like even if you're not making turkey wing stock, I would say invest in a second sheet pan if you only have one. I'm gonna get my dry brine ready in a second, but I'm just gonna prep this. The first step you're gonna do is remove the plastic, take the giblets outside. One time I did, I think I, have I told every story about Thanksgiving 100 times? I can't imagine every person has seen every piece of Thanksgiving content I've ever done. I'm sure you exist, but like, or maybe you enjoy it, in which case I'll tell it again. I roasted the giblets inside the turkey. It was disgusting. Don't do that. One important thing with the turkey is go in both sides. So that was side one. What awaits us inside two? This is the bag I forgot. I took out that. I took out the first side, but I didn't take out the second side. The liver, yeah. Like all dry brines, this is going to be a basic mixture of sugar and salt. I use light brown sugar. I think it has more flavor. I think it gives you more color. This basic ratio is third of a cup, third of a cup. If you're making a lot more turkey, feel free to double this. This rub also is excellent on chicken, on pork chops, and your turkey won't be perceptively sweet. Don't worry about that. I am very sensitive to sweet foods. I don't care for them, but without the sugar in this brine, you would miss it. It does kind of lack a festiveness, a richness. The color is lacking. You would miss it if it were gone. Okay, so this is your basic dry brine, right? This would be good as is. If this is all you did, great. We are going to sort of season it with things. I'm just going to grind the pepper to the best of my ability. I'm like out of breath. Grinding pepper. And then I'm going to finely chop the fennel seed. You can crack these with a rolling pin. You can chop them with a knife. You're not looking for like a super fine powder. You are just kind of looking for them to be broken open a little bit and not whole individual seeds. Does that sound good? I'm worried this feels like too much flavor for some people for Thanksgiving, but I promise in the context of the rest of the meal, it is extremely harmonious. If you're like, I hate fennel, then you've already made up your mind and you're not going to make this. And that's fine. I'm not talking to you. Make a different recipe. Not to be rude, just. People hate the weirdest things. I mean, I don't like things, but the things that I don't like, I think most people also don't like. Not to be like, I'm right. I don't know. Like red bell pepper. I'm just going to do these three cloves because these are pretty large. And then I'm going to add some herbs. You could use all or none or one or some of these herbs. I'm going to do sage. And then I'm going to use the other two sort of in and around the turkey. Sage is a pretty intensely flavored herb. It tampers the fennel. It like enhances the garlic. It's like, it's meant to be here. It reminds you that it's Thanksgiving and not just like a regular poultry rub. Okay. So sage, garlic, fennel, pepper, light brown sugar, kosher salt. Okay. This turkey will get nothing but this rub. It's going to slowly penetrate the chicken. Wow. The chicken. It's a turkey. It's going to slowly penetrate the turkey over the next 24 hours. You can go 48 hours, even better. Anything that falls off, I'm going to gather and then like redistribute, by the way. For me, the place that I want to focus on the most is like the thigh. And as you roast the turkey, you are going to baste it. And some of this flavor is going to come off in the liquid and the basting liquid. It's like all going into the same place. And I'll just kind of like rub the bottom as well. The bottom being important because that's where the thighs are. This is like extra credit, but I'll lift it up. And this is like pretty grown. Okay. Hey, Allison, can I ask you some questions? Always, yeah. When do you start shopping for Thanksgiving? Like the day before, maybe two days before. Thoughts on thank you cards? Something that I'm really trying to do, not always succeeding at, but I aspire to it. Okay, last question. Can you tell the audience a little bit about the episode sponsor, Klaviyo? Yeah. Klaviyo is an online marketing tool and they are trying to help you, a small business owner, reach your customers in a better and more efficient and more joyful way. Thanks, Allison. Yeah, thank you. Zoinks, what was that? Cranberries are done. It's so nice, everything's already done. Yum, delish. It's day two. It's Thanksgiving day. This is our turkey. It looks wild. It looks like a bald bird, which is never cute. I'll be honest. A lot of the bits of like garlic and fennel seed are still on the bird, but all of that brown sugar and salt has been absorbed and you'll see there's like quite a bit of juice on the bottom and I'm really grateful that the turkey is not sitting in that juice. I'm going to put it on the sheet tray with a bunch of fennel. These are some older fennel bulbs that were just, they're like nicer to start and smaller. Flavor-wise, is there much of a difference? Smaller vegetables tend to have more flavor because there's less water in them and these are excellent for your turkey stock, which you'll make with the turkey carcass. Is that a cat? Or a baby? Cat or baby.com. For this, I actually kind of like it when you have some like really large chunks that stay like more supple and juicy and then you have some thinner, skinnier wedges that get like kind of crispy and deeply caramelized. You basically want to make room for the turkey in the center. For inside the turkey, we'll do some onion. This garlic is sort of more for show than anything else but I also do eat it. And then some herbs. I have sage. I have oregano. I have thyme. If you're basting, I would go either all olive oil or a mix of 50-50 butter and olive oil, which is what I'm gonna do. And I'll probably start by pouring most of it over the turkey and then saving a little bit for that like beginning baste. I think it looks nice and beautiful. Okay, I'm gonna pick it up. And I'll tip the turkey. And that's just getting rid of any sort of excess juice inside. I'm plopping it right down in the center there and saying goodbye to this. Thank you for your service. Okay, so I'm gonna stuff it with some onion and some herbs and that's it. You don't ever want it to be too tight or too full. I'll stick anything in the turkey really. I've stuck lemons in there before. So I am going to trust but I'm not going to tuck the wings because I like the way these get really golden brown and I think keeping them wild and free is silly and fun. And when the legs are trussed and the wings are tied, I feel like it's been like, there's like a bondage turkey energy that I don't care for. Wow, not you, not from you. People are gonna hate this. Turkey weighs 14.13 pounds. Leonard weighs about 17 pounds. You're bigger than a turkey. Okay, well, I'm just gonna leave him here for now. So take one leg and like lift it up, really lift it up. See the difference? Why do I feel like it's like a Pee Wee Herman fit? And cross it over the other one as you lift that one up and then as tightly as possible so you're not just tying them together, you're like binding them together, if that makes sense. Sage, like roasted. There's fresh fennel, there's fresh sage and there's leeks, which is an allium which will reinforce the garlic flavor. So it's kind of like, you know, we're just using the things that are already there in different ways that show up differently. It's going in at 325, which is not very high, not very hot. I feel like I'm taking care of the turkey right now. Like I'm giving it a bath. I'm gonna take the turkey out. I'm gonna give it like a nice little baste. Some more of this olive oil, butter situation, including the vegetables. Okay, that's all done. So now I'll give a little love to here. I love this part. Again, I just like feeling like I'm taking care of the turkey. Every oven has hot spots. Every oven is a little uneven. So it's a good opportunity to flip it. So I will go in this side now instead of the other side. Okay, the turkey came out of the oven. I let it hang for like 10, 15. You don't wanna be too crazy. I'm going to very carefully transfer this turkey to a rimmed baking sheet from once it came. How do you know when the turkey is done cooking? One is you can pierce the thigh, check for juices to run clear. You could also temperature it. It should be, temperature it, put a thermometer in it. In the thigh part here, it should be 165 minimum. I never temperature the breast. I think that that is not a good indicator of how well cooked the leg and the thigh are. A juicy, juicy breast, perfectly cooked, is gonna give you an undercooked leg and thigh. It just is. That's my plea. So I'm just gonna let this sit over here for as long as we need. I'm gonna transfer these vegetables to a plate. So they're brown, but they're also tender. They're caramelized. They're also juicy. This is like ideal side dish. And you didn't have to do any real extra work. Turkey. I'm going to lift it. I can now hold it. It's easy to handle on the outside, but still warm on the inside. I can still feel it. And when I cut into it, I bet it steams. In order to eliminate any extra juices that might spill out on my cutting board, I am gonna start carving it here on the sheet pan. I'm doing this in a few different parts. I'm taking away the legs first. And what I do is I just sort of cut them away from the body, trying to keep the skin intact, following this piece of meat here, carving it away, because that's part of the thigh. So separating the joint from here. It should pretty effortlessly pull away. If it's not, I would be concerned that your turkey isn't totally cooked through. This is the oyster back here, that like succulent piece of meat. It's also like really beautifully settled. It's still very, very warm, closer to the center of the body. Sorry if it's gross to talk about a turkey like that, but I like really will hunt for any little pocket of meat back here, because I feel like this is where the best stuff is. Chef's treat. Sometimes it's nice to shred the thigh meat. This is from the back. If you have someone in the kitchen with you that you love, you can just share the oyster with them, but there's too many people here to choose from, so I shredded it. Leg. A thigh is difficult to slice. So what I like to do is take out the bone, there's one very obvious thigh bone. I would put this in the soup pot. So then you have sort of this big piece of thigh meat. This knife again is extremely dull. I said, I'm gonna sharpen my knife before Thanksgiving this year. I didn't. I do find it nice to kind of put the dark meat in a pile. People do still like to sort of separate the meat that they enjoy. Now comes the breast part. It obviously has this pretty pronounced breastbone right here, coming all the way back. The skin is much tougher and a lot more leathery than a chicken. This should also just peel right away from the breastbone, which it is. And give you one beautiful breast with the wing attached. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that we'll eat more dark meat than white meat. So I'm just gonna slice this one breast. So I've got two thighs, two legs, one wing and breast gonna be on this plate. Should people want more white meat, I will carve into this breast. That's what I'm gonna do. From this, I just took off that wing. So the bone is out and now it's just a boneless breast. I don't go super, super thin. This isn't a deli sandwich. It's a really good turkey. Okay, are we ready for this? Oh. These are our gorgeous vegetables. Our fennel, our leeks, simmered in those juices. I just popped it in the oven at 425. For too long, I forgot them. So you just want them warmed up because they were beautifully colored before. For this, I'm just gonna kind of spoon some of them. It's also nice to take these juices here and spoon over your turkey. And the rest of these vegetables can go on the side. Beautiful, that looks so nice to me. This is just some fennel fronds, some parsley. You can use on top of our fennel that's roasted. A sort of sneaky salad. On the turkey, put a little parsley. We did it! Grab your plates. I'm going, are we going? You're good. Okay, I'm picking the skin. And I also pick a wing. I'm sorry to anyone else who wanted a wing, but we have a whole tray of wings. Is there like thigh meat? Yeah, it's under here. It's under this wing. It's under this wing? Who's next? So far, Jane's plate is looking most similar to my plate. I'm getting my sea legs. Oh God, I have to do this on camera. This is beautiful.