FoodieChat

Ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve purchased a 7kg frozen turkey 2 days before Christmas, and wondering how you’ll ever have enough time to thaw it, let alone cook it?  Well I did, and here’s some wisdom/tips I can share.

1. Even though the turkey packet says that each kilogram requires 18 hrs to thaw in the fridge, and not to thaw it on the kitchen bench, it doesn’t actually say that you shouldn’t thaw it by sitting it in a bath of water On my estimationg 18 hrs x 7 kgs is around 5 days. And I only had 2. So in the water it goes.  Did you know that it actually floats? No problem. Anchor it down with a 2L bottle of diet coke.  the next morning, I found that it started to seep some yucky pink liquid, so I took it out, ripped open the packet, and washed my turkey. Seemed thawed enough (after 24 hrs) so I put in my fridge just in case.

2. Next day (eating day). It actually says that each kg requires 45-50mins cooking; so for a 7kg turkey it recommended 5hrs 55minutes. This could be a problem if you are having more than one meat – so find a nearby relative to cook it at their place.  Make the stuffing: pan fry half a bulb of chopped up garlic with 5 rashers of chopped bacon, a chopped onion, then process half a loaf of bread to make breadcrumbs, and mix in with a handful of chopped parsley, thyme and 1/4 cup of lemon juice.  Shove stuffing up turkey carcass if you are not faint hearted.  Massage the bird with olive oil and butter. Sick…

3.  Cook the turkey covered with foil for the prescribed time. Since I wasn’t sure if my turkey did in fact thaw, and thinking that I would have double chance of food poisoning through improper thawing and undercooking, I used a meat thermometer for good measure. 180 degrees meant it’s cooked. And amazingly – that coincided with the 5hr 55 cooking time!  Actually I was a bit worried that 6 hrs of cooking would result in turkey jerkey, but it was fine – as I unwrapped it every hour and based it with the pan juices.  End result – every bit eaten up. Lovely!

I think next year I may just be a bit more organised and buy and thaw it ahead of time Merry Christmas!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Crowd cooking, Recipes, Special occasion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.