Whole Roasted Turkey

My friend told me today that she's never roasted a turkey, and was disbelieving when I said it was dead easy. It really is, so I thought I'd tell you how.

Choose your turkey. In Australia we like turkey buffet, which as a massive breast with the wings removed. A whole turkey is just as good.

Defrost the turkey 48 hours before you want to cook it. Place it in a baking dish or tray and leave it on the sink. If it's a typical hot Australian Christmas, you should defrost the turkey in the fridge, starting a day earlier.

When it's turkey time, rinse the turkey in the sink under cold running water. Rinse it inside and out - this is really important. Pull out any gibblets inside the bird (if there are any) first. My cat used to eat those. I just chuck them in the bin.

Inspect your bird and cut off any oogie bits. Oogie bits are any bits you find gross. Stuff the cavity with the stuffing of your choice and seal the cavity with the heal of the bread you used to make the stuffing. You can still cook the turkey even if you don't stuff it! Tie the legs together with a piece of kitchen string. If you don't the legs will spread during cooking and the turkey will come out looking odd!

Rub the entire exterior of the bird with butter. Lightly salt the bird and place it in a baking tray. A disposable aluminium one is okay. Cover the legs and breast with a piece of aluminium foil. This will stop it from drying out and burning.

Roast the turkey in the oven at 180 degrees celcius. You calculate the cooking time by adding up 20 minutes for every half a kilo of bird. Today's 4.8kg turkey was cooked for three hours, 20 minutes. Remove the aluminium foil from the breast for the last hour of cooking time.

Once cooking time is complete, rest your turkey for a good half an hour before serving it. Transfer the turkey to your serving platter. Pour off all the pan juices and set aside to use in the gravy.

Voila! You have cooked a turkey!

Note: once you have finished preparing the turkey, clean your pre area down with disinfectant. Poultry is famously for germs, and you don't want to make anybody sick at Christmas. Just wipe down all surfaces with a warm cloth dipped in disinfectant and you should be fine. Wash your hands thoroughly too!

Comments

Unknown said…
I googled a lot of information about how to safely defrost, prepare, and cook a frozen 4.8kg turkey, and yours was the first that made sense to me! The others kept stressing the importance of making sure the turkey was properly cooked aka the cooking thermometer read 80oC at the thickest point of the thigh - but not one of them told me how to safely get the turkey that point! So thank you for walking me through the whole process from A - Z!
11:54 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marshmallow Sherbet Cones

Image
I have always been a big fan of sherbet in the many forms it comes in. As a kid, I loved those sherbet cones you bought from the corner store – semi solidified sherbet in a stale cone, with chewy marshmallow on the top, coated in hundreds and thousands. I also loved Wiz Fizz – fruity sherbet in a glassine bag with a little plastic shovel. I’d most often buy these on the way home from the pool, because they were only five cents. Unfortunately, my hands were usually still wet from the pool, turning the bag to a sloppy mess before I could eat its entire contents. For my 10th birthday my mum decided to include homemade sherbet cones on the menu. Thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly recipe cards, we had the recipe for sherbet and marshmallow, albeit, on different cards. My clever mum bought flat bottomed square cones, half filled them with sherbet and then topped them with pink or green marshmallow. Of course each had a liberal sprinkling of hundreds and thousands. In my explo...
Read more

White Chocolate Ganache

Image
I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope. If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married. As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When...
Read more

Road Test: Sunbeam Mixmaster v Kenwood Patissier

Image
Back in 2003 when I began my most recent baking odyssey, I acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster – the remake of the classic retro mixer from the fifties. My mother had a Mixmaster which she bought in the seventies, and which I did most of my cake baking with as a teenager (when the obsession truly took hold). She still has that Mixmaster today, although it is significantly worse for wear – the plastic cover over the light is broken and they haven’t made the bulbs for years, so there’s a “live” cavity where the light bulb should be. I can vouch for that because I stuck my finger in there accidentally last year and got a nice shock from it. I paid quite a lot of money for my Mixmaster and it held pride of place on my kitchen bench for three years. That is until I had it running one Sunday and one of the motors blew up! I discovered that the twin motor “600 watt” power it claimed worked in two ways: 1. to run the beaters; 2. to turn the turntable the bowl sits on. After seeing flames shooting fro...
Read more