How To Make The Perfect Turkey

The average Thanksgiving turkey takes five hours to cook and still comes out dry. I'll show you how to cook one that's easier, takes half the time to cook, and tastes twice as good. The biggest mistake most people make on Thanksgiving is that they prep and cook their turkey whole like this. But we're gonna flatten it out by doing something called spatchcocking. And it's a weird-sounding word, but all it really means is that we cut out that backbone so we can lay the bird flat and it cooks faster and more evenly. To begin, we're simply gonna remove all the insides. This right here, if you didn't know, was once the turkey's neck, and that's gonna be great for making a gravy. And they usually tuck some stuff in the other side as well. Do not make the mistake of baking your turkey while this stuff is still in there. These are the giblets, and we're also gonna save these for the gravy. Once you've checked the entire bird to make sure there's nothing left inside, go ahead and open up the legs and flip the whole bird over, breast side down. This right here is the backbone that we're gonna remove. All you're gonna do here is grab a nice, strong pair of kitchen scissors and cut all the way down either side of the backbone so you can remove the whole thing from your turkey. And now, just to fit it inside my bowl, I'm just gonna break it in half here, and once again, you guessed it, we're gonna save that for our gravy. If there's any extra skin connecting anything, you can trim that out here too. And now, as a final step, we'll flip the bird back over, and the goal is to break this breastbone right here to lay the bird out fully flat. There should be a nice, satisfying crunch sound too. Here we go. Sometimes you need to hit a few times. Oh no, that's why we wear an apron. See, I feel like a chiropractor. The final step here is to invert both of the legs, just like this, and this here is now a beautifully spatchcocked turkey laid out nice and flat so it can bake evenly. Once our turkey's spatchcocked, we're gonna be making an herb salt to brine it with. Along with the salt, we'll add a little bit of thyme, then some sage, all these herbs, by the way, are fresh for maximum flavor, and a little bit of rosemary, and then we blend. You wanna let this blend for a few minutes to really break up all those herbs and release the oils into the salt. This process of blending the herbs with the salt makes them smell several times more powerful than they do even by themselves. I'm gonna transfer my bird now onto my baking tray, dripping off any of that excess liquid. Now I'm gonna move my bird over onto a wire rack lined sheet tray, and now we're gonna cover the entire bird with our herb salt. This is the very first layer of flavor we're adding onto our turkey, which makes it very, very important. I'm not actually gonna flip the bird over when I season right now because I don't want all these herbs falling off. So instead, if you wanna hit the underside a little bit, just go ahead and lift up certain areas. Your main focus here should really just be spreading out all those herbs and all that salt. And even though we haven't started cooking, it should already smell amazing. I'm now gonna bring this to the fridge where we'll leave it uncovered for somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. While our turkey brines and soaks in all that flavor, we're gonna start building the next level of flavor that we'll add to the turkey. And that is this compound butter that's gonna go right under the skin while it bakes. A compound butter is just butter that's been mixed with flavorings. We're gonna start with a few sticks of softened butter, zest of one whole lemon, and yes, looks like a lot of zest, but in my opinion, you can really never have too much. Then we got some brown sugar for sweetness and a generous pinch of salt. And then we're gonna mix it all up. This, by the way, is why you wanna use softened butter when making a compound butter. I'm gonna reserve a tiny bit of this butter to top things off with later. Traditionally, you wrap it up like this and then toss it in the fridge, and the rest we'll save for our turkey. Now that we've finished our compound butter, we need to fill the bottom of our roasting tray with vegetables and some turkey trimmings. This is very important because it's gonna build the foundation of our gravy, which in my opinion is the most critical part of Thanksgiving. If you give me the option of turkey or gravy, I'm probably picking gravy. First things first, I'm gonna chop up my leek into nice one-inch rounds that look like this. Then I'll cut my orange into quarters and do the same thing with my lemon. And then all of this is gonna be evenly spread out into the bottom of my roasting tray. In addition to adding flavor, these fruits and vegetables are basically gonna act as a roasting rack to prop up your turkey while cooking instead of using one of these. And don't forget, now we're gonna toss in all of those turkey trimmings. We've got the backbone, the neck, and all the giblets, and together, these are gonna roast and catch all the turkey drippings to create the most amazing gravy. Once our turkey is done brining in the fridge, we're ready for the next step. This is actually one of my favorite tricks for when cooking any kind of bird. We've got our compound butter from earlier, and what I'm gonna do here is put on a pair of gloves and start wiggling my fingers in between the skin and the meat. The goal is to separate the skin and the meat without tearing through. My biggest piece of advice at this stage is to not rush this process. The skin protects the meat, so if you tear it, your bird will end up a bit drier. Once you've separated as much as you can up here, go ahead and move to the thighs. The skin's gonna be pretty tight after brining in the fridge, so if you can't find your way under the skin on the thighs, don't worry about it. But if you can, it definitely doesn't hurt to sneak a little bit of butter under there as well. For me, I found the easiest place to get in was from the sides here, but everybody's bird is gonna be different. Once you actually get in there, it's a lot easier to separate the skin here than it is on the breasts. And now I'm gonna take half of my remaining compound butter and start sneaking it under the skin. We wanna spread it all out evenly here. It's definitely not the most beautiful-looking process, but just remember, all that butter is gonna melt into the turkey meat to make it super juicy and flavorful, while also giving you nice, crispy skin. I'm gonna take a little bit more of that butter now and place it under the skin on the thighs, and you can even spread it around from up above if that's easier. Now, we still have a bit of butter left, so to this, I'm gonna add some white wine, just when you might've thought we couldn't add any more flavor to this bird, as well as some black pepper. And we're gonna toss this in the microwave for about a minute or as long as it takes to melt that butter. Notice how I took this out right before all that butter had melted down, because we don't want this to be boiling hot right now. We just need a good, evenly mixed liquid. Now, I'll bring in my roasting pan. On goes our turkey. It's okay if it's falling off just a little bit, as long as all the juices are falling into that roasting pan. And once you've fit it in there as best you can, it's time to measure out our cheesecloth. To put it simply, using cheesecloth to cook the turkey is an old French technique that's hopefully gonna give you the juiciest bird you're ever gonna try. I'm gonna cut my cheesecloth into three pieces. This larger piece, which is gonna be one half, is gonna be used to cover up the turkey breasts. I'm then gonna fold the remaining piece and cut that in half into two smaller pieces, and these, I'll use to cover up the thighs and legs. Now, as for our beautiful butter mixture, I'm gonna toss in that cheesecloth and fully submerge it to let it start soaking up all of that goodness. Just like a sponge, it's gonna soak up all of that moisture and flavor, and after just a few moments of soaking, we'll cover our entire turkey with all that cheesecloth, sort of like a mummy, and then I'll bring it carefully to the oven to start the first cook. We're starting it off at a high temperature to brown the skin and lock in the juices, and remember, don't throw away this basting liquid. We need it to keep the turkey nice and juicy. I'm gonna fast forward to our bird that's been cooking for 30 minutes. Before I baste, I'm also gonna drop my heat down to a lower temperature. And now, the fun part. Your goal here is basically to re-moisten the cheesecloth. During this process, try to cover every single area of the cheesecloth that's touching the turkey. You can also tilt the pan and start picking up some of those juices that have dripped off the turkey or come from the vegetables, as that is where the real flavor is gonna come from. I should also note that you should be doing your basting right in your oven. Just pull your oven rack out and do it carefully that way. I'm just doing like this so I can show you a bit easier. Once you feel you've basted for long enough and your oven's come back down to temperature, you can go ahead and put it back in for another 30 minutes. And just like that, another 30 minutes has passed. But this time, the cheesecloth is darker and things are starting to smell even better. Before sucking up all that liquid on the bottom, I'm gonna first use what we have left of our original basting liquid. I know cooking a turkey can be a little bit overwhelming, but remember, because we've spatchcocked, we basically change the shape of the turkey from a football more into a book. So instead of this cooking for five hours, it only needs to cook for two. And when you think about it like that, it suddenly becomes a lot more manageable. Also, just like with my family on Thanksgiving Day, I'm guessing you need your oven for a bunch of different things. Could be stuffing, it could be sweet potatoes, maybe a pie. So this method really helps to free up that oven space for three whole hours. Our second round of basting is done, which means this goes back in the oven for another 30 minutes at that exact same temperature. Our turkey has now been cooking for 90 minutes, or an hour and a half. And as you can see, that cheesecloth has gotten quite dark. Now that we'll be basting with hot liquid from the bottom, you should get this beautiful, incredibly delicious smelling steam. That steam is sort of an early hint as to what your gravy is gonna taste like. This is the third of four basting cycles for our turkey. So before it goes into the oven, our final step here is to pull off that cheesecloth on the breasts only, and then tuck the cheesecloth that's over the legs and the thighs off to the side just a little bit. And we'll baste once more right over the breasts. We do this because the white meat in the breasts takes longer to cook than the dark meat in the thighs and the legs. And we wanna get those breasts nice and crispy. So this is it. Back in the oven one more time at the same temperature for 30 more minutes, and then we're done. And here she is, our finished turkey. That took just two hours to cook. But can you imagine cooking for three more hours like you'd normally do with a regular turkey? Since we're done baking, you can go ahead and remove the cheesecloth from the whole bird. Wow, look at that color. I want you to listen to the crust on this thing as well. Perfect. Equally important to cooking your turkey is letting it rest. That'll lock in all those juices so that when we cut it, the juice will stay in the meat and not on the cutting board. As for all your fruits and vegetables, remove those now and place them off to the side. We're gonna want these later for serving, but we don't need them anymore to make our gravy. And when you do this, be sure to leave all those turkey trimmings behind because we will use those for our gravy. As for the gravy, we're gonna make it right in this pan. For the gravy, I'm gonna turn up the heat to about medium, medium high. And once you start to get a few bubbles, go ahead and add a bit of butter. And while whisking, a little bit of flour, which is gonna start to thicken things up. Don't worry if you get a few clumps in there as you're gonna strain this a little later in the cooking process. To finish our gravy, we're gonna add some wine as well as a sprinkle of salt and some fresh cracked pepper. And then just cook this about five to seven minutes over medium heat to cook off that alcohol and reach your desired thickness. And pro tip, if you have a lot of people and wanna make even more gravy, you can always stretch this out a little bit more by adding some turkey or chicken stock as well as a little bit more flour and butter to thicken it up. I usually do exactly that given how much my family and I love gravy. As a final step, I'm gonna remove all these bones and turkey trimmings. You can certainly eat them if you want, but by now they've served their purpose. This step is also optional. You don't have to strain your gravy if you don't want, but it definitely gives a more velvety, luxurious gravy if you do. And now I'm just gonna assume you've got all your sides figured out, which means all that's left is carving the turkey, which there's a right and wrong way to do, so you're gonna wanna watch this part as well. To carve our turkey, we'll start by removing each of the wings and then do the same thing for the legs and thighs. And then remove each of the breasts from the breastbone and cut them into nice, even slices. And ultimately, it doesn't really matter how you plate it. As I think we all know, Thanksgiving is about family and flavor. Where am I even supposed to throw the knife? There we go. I think we mix it up and end this video with a nice gravy pour.