THE PERFECTIONIST:
THANKSGIVING TURKEY TWO
WAYS
We’ve already talked about the problems of cooking
poultry, the main one being that legs and breasts need to
cook to different temperatures.If you’re not too worried about absolute perfection, the
recipe here will do you just fine. The hot steel or stone will
help the thighs cook fast enough to keep abreast of the, er,
breast. If true perfection is what you’re after though, you’re
better off breaking the turkey down into parts to be cooked
individually. That way, the breast and legs can be cooked to
precisely the right temperature. The divide and conquer
method mostly works for turkey, save for one small
problem: while it’s far easier to cook the breast alone than a
whole bird, the narrower, tapered end of the breast can still
overcook and dry out, meaning that at least one family
member is going to get stuck with subpar turkey (sorry,
Granddad).
Lowering the oven temperature helps—roasting it at
250°F rather than cooking it at a normal 300° to 350°F
range promotes more even cooking between the edges and
center and between the thick and thin parts—but it’s not
quite enough. What I needed was a way to even out the
shape of my turkey breast, and while I’m confident there are
bioengineers hard at work developing turkeys with perfectly
cylindrical breasts, for the time being, I had to resort to