Family Chow Hall

Upside Down Turkey

December 4th, 2006

I think I mentioned around Thanksgiving that I was planning on roasting my turkey upside down, and promised to tell all of you about it…

The traditional image of a roasted turkey is with the breast up, round, golden, and gleaming. (Although the Pilgrims almost certainly roasted theirs over an open fire on a spit, which I think would be even tastier.) Lots of people these days use a fryer and deep-fry their entire turkey. I’ve heard this is good, too, but I honestly am a little scared to do it that way. One year we cut our turkey into pieces and grilled it. That was tasty, but I didn’t really enjoy cutting it!

Anyhow — I’ve heard that roasting your turkey with the breast down makes for juicier, more tender breast meat. It made sense to me — All of the fatty, juicy meat is at the ‘bottom’ of the turkey, and if you leave the dry breast at the ‘top’ it will definitely stay that way. If you invert the bird, putting the juicy meat at the top, gravity should pull the juices down into the breast, right?

Right. It did. I roasted our eighteen-pound Thanksgiving bird with its breast down instead of up and I definitely had juicier breast meat than ever before.

Here’s what I did: I prepared the bird as directed on the package, then I ’stuffed’ it — not with stuffing, but with large chunks of onion, celery, and garlic. (We never ate the vegetables, they were just there to give it some flavor.) When it was time to put it in the oven, I put it in breast-side up (the usual way) so that the breast would brown properly.

After it was brown — I can’t remember how long it was, I just kept an eye on it — maybe an hour or two — I removed it from the oven and literally flipped it over, so that now the breast was down and the dark meat was up. I left it that way for the remainder of its roasting time.

The tricky part came when it was time to carve. By now, this bird was smelling pretty good and I could tell the meat was practically falling off of the bones. Problem: How to carve it?

Hubby helped me carefully flip it back over so I could slice it as usual. This was tricky because it really was coming apart, it was pretty hot, and it was a good-sized bird, too. We managed and had the tastiest turkey!

Now I will apologize for all of my Thanksgiving rambling and I will try very hard to give you some new recipes, advice, and tips this week!

Entry Filed under: Holidays, Supper, Table talk