Wild Turkey Time

One of my life’s greatest pleasures is wild turkey. Another one of life’s pleasures is having a hunting friend who shares. Our dear friend, the award winning Field & Stream editor, Jay Cassell, shared one of his birds with us and as always it’s a flavor revelation. Wild turkey tastes good. Really good. Now, I’ve heard some people say its too lean and tough, and it’s true that the legs and wings are inedible. These turkeys actually run around, so their legs are tough, it’s not like a raised turkey that just stands around waiting to be fed. But the breast meat has a distinct, delicate, non-gamey flavor. And no, it doesn’t taste like chicken. It tastes like turkey.

 

I’ll share this cooking technique with you because even if you don’t have a wild turkey sitting in the freezer, this should taste just as good using a farm-raised turkey. The other advantage of farm raised is that they are usually well plucked.  Not that I’m saying Jay’s a lousy turkey plucker. I’m just saying….

 

The basics:

ºBrine for 4-6 hours

ºLard with bacon, fill cavity with 1-2 tangerines

ºRoast for 1 hour, then start

ºBasting with maple syrup/rum glaze and keep roasting & basting until done

ºEat

 

The secret is to brine, baby, brine. It makes all the difference with a lean meat, and turkey qualifies as lean. Guidelines for brining are here.  Brining is not the same as marinating because the large amount of salt used in brining actually causes a protein melt down and osmosis. One of the few times in life when a melt down is desirable.

 

Due to my nomadic life style, I don’t have any spices left in the cabinet, so I headed on over to the A&P where I had a small heart attack over the price of dried herbs. $250 a pound for parsley?? $263 for marjoram? Not that I was buying a pound, but still. I wound up buying some roast meat spice mix that was about 50% salt and since I was brining anyway, I figured this would do the trick to season the brine.

I’m also a fan of the garbage bag method. Put the birdie in a doubled garbage bag, add the cooled brine to it and a bag of ice, or two bags of ice, just be sure you have enough water and ice involved to keep the bird submerged. Then it goes into an old cooler, with a good lock and onto the back porch. Raccoons can be very inquisitive so a seal on the cooler is essential.

If you have a small turkey or chicken, then you can probably make room in your fridge, but the key here is to keep the bird at 38F/3.3C, or damn near freezing, if you catch my drift.

 After a few hours in the brine, a nice warm shower to start bringing the birdie up to room temp and to rinse off any residual salt, we are now ready to roast it. I pierced a few tangerines and filled the narrow bird cavity with the citrus fruit. This particular turkey had a strange physique, that’s another difference between wild and unwild. The wild guys come in all shapes and sizes and this guy had the narrowest rib cage, so there was no way I could get him to lay quietly on his back in the roasting pan. Although I did keep trying. I larded Mr. Tom Narrow Chest with a full blanket of bacon, and carefully slid it into to the oven. But, it still kept tipping over and then the bacon would slide off and by now the thing is HOT and HEAVY. Finally giving into Newton’s Law of Gravity, I tipped the bird over and each time I basted it, I flipped it over and moved the bacon along with it. Why am I telling you all this? Because one day you may have a tipping bird on your hands and instead of coming up with some elaborate propping up system that surely will involve scorched fingers, you now know that you can use the tip method Just make sure you are using a roasting rack in the pan or you will no longer be tipping you will be ripping that bird’s skin off.

 

About halfway through the roasting process, I started glazing the bird using a milder variation of my maple syrup bourbon glaze. This glaze was  6 oz of maple syrup, 3 oz of rum and a stick of cinnamon. Turkey is a delicate flavor and you don’t want to overpower the turkiness of the meat with too aggressive of a glaze. 

After about 3 hours, the turkey was probed for doneness with my trusty thermometer, and with clear juice literally bursting out of the probe hole; I knew we were in good shape.  I drained the turkey juices, mixed them with the remaining maple glaze, brought it all to a boil,  and that was our ‘gravy’. Use a probe thermometer on a turkey, ok? You want it to be about 180F/82C on the thigh, or a little less on the breast. I have my hands over my ears and I’m singing LaLaLA if you are talking to me about a pop-up thermometer. Turkeys have a lot of angles, creases, crevasses and they have more mass than a chicken, so even though I can eyeball the skin of a chicken, shake its leg, check to be sure the body juices are clear and free of blood and pronounce it done, I don’t trust those methods with a big turkey.

  The rest was easy. I turned over carving to the Intrepid Carving Duo, while everyone else got the veggies onto the table. There was much grousing about how long it took to take the picture, but all in all, a fine time was had by all. 

Rumor has it there is some more wild fowl in my immediate future. What good luck!