Happy Thanksgiving To Everyone...

a reply to: rickymouse

We're using the Serious Eats website. They go mainly be temperature, and your older cookbook sounds about right without looking it up.

EDIT ...

No ... I got it wrong. They recommend 150 for the breast with proper resting, and 165 for the thighs. Since we do the bird first and let it set tented on the stove while everything else cooks to keep it warm, it gets plenty of rest.

But this is for a butterflied bird.

a reply to: whyamIhere

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: rickymouse

Looking at recipes for our bird, it's only a 13 pound, and they were saying 13 minutes per pound unstuffed, 15 minutes per pound stuffed.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Fifteen minutes for pound unstuffed is ok for that size bird unstuffed, but with stuffing it takes about eighteen minutes per pound to make sure that the turkey is all cooked properly. That is at three twenty five degrees. Making sure that your oven is accurate is important, we have to put our thermostat at three fifty to get three twenty five. Lots of the newer electronic ovens are off.

Speaking about these new electronic ovens, ours has a way to re-calibrate it to get the right temperature electronically. But every time the power goes off it reverts back to the uncalibrated default and the temperature is unknowingly wrong. So we learned to just add twenty five degrees to the temperature when we cook. The old electric stoves had a screw behind the knob you could use to permanently alter the temperature. It made up for production differences and it was faithful. The technology just made it a pain in the a$$ now, what happened to fixing something once and it was fixed. I asked at the store about new stoves and the guys at both places we looked said they are all like that now and lots of people complain about that. He said many people coming in have our same problem and he doesn't like lying to people that it will get better if they buy a new one because there is no way for him to tell if the stove will do that. Now both of my daughters have the same problem with this. it is evidently common, so when we discuss temperatures while cooking we discuss how to compensate.

This new world of technology sucks.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: rickymouse

We're using the Serious Eats website. They go mainly be temperature, and your older cookbook sounds about right without looking it up.

EDIT ...

No ... I got it wrong. They recommend 150 for the breast with proper resting, and 165 for the thighs. Since we do the bird first and let it set tented on the stove while everything else cooks to keep it warm, it gets plenty of rest.

But this is for a butterflied bird.

Some science site the wife looked up said that their tests show that the breast should be at least 165 and the legs and thighs should be at least 185. Now how can you cook a turkey so the legs and thighs get to 185 while the breast stays at 165? They were talking about safety, not practability. So we need to make sure to put the legs and thighs into the oven a half hour earlier? Or maybe just put a cold washcloth over the breast to take down it's fever or something.

When the breast is at about 180, the inner thighs are at about 165 and the legs are about 180

I would rather have my poultry a little over cooked, who cares what the turkey looks like on the table, I would rather not get sick. Taurine binds to the meat at about 185, and Nacetylcysteine falls apart or binds at about 205 degrees. There is plenty in the area of the turkey at 18o of either of these to supply our needs. The outer area is usually hotter, but it is also important to kill microbes, a long cook at medium heat will also kill viruses....but they aren't alive anyway...so lets say burn their legs off.

IMO, this is the BEST thread of the week. Well said! I'm about to take my family to my sister's for some chow. Hope you and your family are enjoying some quality time together. Take care!

a reply to: whyamIhere

Thanks! Its been a good one so far.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and everyone here.

Every time Thanksgiving comes around I can't help but wonder what the actual menu was.

They sent hunters out 3 days fowl hunting so they could have possibly gotten some duck, turkey, geese or pheasant or any of the other birds they were lucky enough to catch. Maybe they even got a deer or two.