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.
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!