Upside down turkey
This past week the store started carrying meat from Rainbow Meadow Farms, a family farm right at the 100 mile mark in Snow Hill, NC. The first delivery consisted of a dozen pastured turkeys. I brought home a fourteen pounder to cook for a holiday meal.
This would be the second turkey I have ever cooked, and the first truly local one. Last year at Thanksgiving I cooked an organic bird from who knows where. I missed an opportunity to get a local turkey this Thanksgiving, but was glad Tidal Creek finally got a delivery system in place for Rainbow Meadow.
I cooked both turkeys “upside down”, meaning the breast faces down in the pan instead of the traditional way of roasting the bird with the breast up. The effect of cooking the turkey breast down is that all the juices from the roasting flow down into the breast. This is a good thing.
1 – Let the turkey sit out (in its wrapper) for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees near the end of the hour.
2 – Wash the turkey, remove the neck and innards and pat the turkey dry. I don’t eat the innards (yet), but I saved the neck to make some soup stock later.
3 – Get the turkey into the roasting pan. Rub it with salt and either butter or olive oil.
4 – To the inside of the bird, add a couple chopped carrots, leeks, garlic, basil, thyme and rosemary.
The leeks and carrots are from Oakley Laurel CSA, the garlic from Black River Organic Farm and the basil from my garden. The other herbs were from the dumpster.
5 – Tie the legs tightly together so that the veggies don’t fall out.
6 – Flip the turkey breast side down, rub with salt and butter/oil and sprinkle with herbs.
7 – Here is how my turkey baking time came out – 400 degrees for a half hour, 350 degrees for two hours and 225 for one hour and fifteen minutes. I also turned the turkey over for fifteen minutes at 350 to slightly brown the breast. The two important cooking times are the 400 and 350 degree times. The 225 degree time will vary by the size of the turkey. Use an instant read thermometer to be sure. The temperature in the deepest part of the thigh should be over 165 degrees when fully cooked.
8 – After removing from the oven, let the turkey rest for at least fifteen minutes before carving.
9 – My method of carving is to just randomly cut pieces off. I really can’t give anyone advice on how to do it since I really don’t know what I’m doing. As long as good chunks of the meat come off, I’m happy. The rest can come off in soup.
There are still three of these local turkeys in the frozen meat section at Tidal Creek if anyone is interested…