Thanksgiving 2024

Cooking Discussions
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I was not overwhelmed by the result. Nor was I particularly underwhelmed. I guess I was just whelmed. The crumb was as lighter and more airy than anything I’ve ever baked, but the flavor was really just meh. After you get past the first couple of chews to break down the structure in your mouth, it’s basic white bread. It was an interesting experiment, but not one I’ll be repeating exactly again. Maybe with a good sourdough starter, though.

I do think I could use some improvement in the shaping of the loaves, though, to keep them a little tighter. They really spread a lot, but if I handled them a little more carefully I think I could have mitigated that quite a bit.

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Our Thanksgiving went well. Just immediate family plus my wife’s younger brother who is a bit at loose ends at the moment (8 adults plus my 360 day old grandson).

We decided to hold it at my oldest daughter’s house so as to not have to put the dogs in another room here (due to baby). She made GF macaroni-cheese bake and the mashed potatoes. My younger two daughters and son combined (with just a bit of oversight/advice) to make the GF dressing, cranberry-pineapple fluff stuff, candied sweet potatoes, GF dinner rolls, and from-scratch GF green bean casserole (except this year she bought the fried onions instead of breading/frying herself). Oh, also GF crust pumpkin pie and a GF pumpkin cake.

The only things they left for me were the two turkeys, gravy, and the rutabagas. I used a turkey bone broth from December 2022 for the gravy, so I didn’t have to try to rush the gravy with the just-collected drippings and saved the giblets and necks to go in with the carcasses for the (to-be) new bone broth.

Everything turned out just perfect. No one could tell that the GF bready items were actually gluten free. Everyone had fun. The baby got to try a lot of new stuff that he probably won’t have again in a long time because my daughter won’t feed him anything with added sugar.

The turkeys were brined, one cooked whole in an “air fryer”, the other one I parted out and smoked with a bit of apple and hickory chunks. Nice and juicy.

I stripped all the meat off after dinner, split it between houses, and made bone broth Friday with necks and bones. Super thick with collagen - remained a gel(*) even at a fairly cool room temp (67°F). One quart of the bone broth was split between the 3 daughters just drinking it.

The other quart went into a white bean turkey chili that I cooked Saturday, but served as Sunday late lunch. I put seven kinds of chilis in it for flavor variety. Hatch, cubanelle, poblano, waxy Hungarian, serrano, jalapeno and half of an orange bell pepper. Not too much spice, and my grandson liked it, too.

(*) Edit - this is kind of overstated, once I considered that I simmered it down to what I figured to be about double strength. And I had the ladies mix in a scant quart before drinking their share.

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Sounds ideal! What map(s) did you play?

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Ooh , that sounds good.

I applaud the splitting between houses.

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Classic USA/Canada. I didn’t know until just this minute that you could get other maps. Ordering one for son……

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The expansions are fun - but you do need the base game to use them. The Nordic Expansion is a standalone for 2-3 players. (I think we have all but the Africa map.)

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My thanksgiving also went well, after having to be rescheduled from Thursday to Saturday due to illnesses.

Normally I get my turkey delivered on the day, and so don’t do anything other than rub it with olive oil garlic and salt and bring it to temp, but since this year I had a couple of days after the delivery due to the rescheduling, I decided to try a dry brine. I just used salt and a little pepper in the dry brine. Two days later the turkey looked so odd coming out of the fridge and I was full of doubt when I added the oil and garlic before putting in the oven. But it turned out great, probably the best turkey I have ever made!

Everything else came out pretty well. I wasn’t happy with the mashed potatoes which I felt like I added too much cream to and were lumpy, but people seemed to love them. The stuffing was the best I’d ever made - I used some rye-wheat sourdough I had made earlier in the week and made a stuffing with lightly caramelized onions and chanterelle mushrooms, plus celery and a little fresh sage. Probably it was the best stuffing I’ve ever eaten. I cook it in the bird, and put a temperature probe in the stuffing as well as the thigh and breast. This is the first time tha tthe stuffing didn’t also come to temperature when the meat did, so I scooped the stuffing out and continued cooking it in the oven while I was carving the bird an serving everything else.

I also made a sweet potato mash and let the kids take their own little bowls of it and add mini marshmallows and torch them themselves. That was a huge hit.

I also made some grilled butternut squash that I served on labneh with pomegranate arils. Not sure where I first came across that combo but it’s really yummy.

My partner was up late the night prior working on a dealine and he usually makes the pies, but I made a pumpkin pie that turned out pretty well from fresh pumpkin, and the 12 year old made a key lime pie (the 8 year old did all the zesting!)

I also made a couple of cranberry breads from the book A Cranberry Thanksgiving, from when I was in kindergarten and they sent us home with the recipe. We read the book and bake the bread every year.

2024-cranberry-bread
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Everything else was good and not particularly noteworthy. Overall it was a great thanksgiving! And surprisingly fun to do on Saturday instead of Thursday. And I just ate a great leftover turkey and avocado sandwich on a hamburger bun.

It’s not easy for me to post due to my technology choices, but I so appreciated following along here the whole lead up to thanksgiving!

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Your stuffing sounds amazing!
Also love roasted butternut squash with labneh (plus a sprinkle of sumac).

Hope you can find a way to participate more – you can share tech challenges on Site Discussions if you need help troubleshooting.

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Wonderful! I just put that book on hold at the library.

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Ok, need to explain that for many years I used a NYT high heat technique using a recipe written by Ray Sokolov. It starts high - I think 450 or 475 and maybe a reduction to 375 after the bird was in its final breast up position. involves stuffing, trussing and most of all turning the turkey 3 times while it roasts. Wet brining in a big canning pot too. This was quite a production but pretty much always produced an excellent bird. In recent years I started cooking the stuffing separately which significantly reduced the cooking time.

this year with a small group I decided to simplify further with my 13 lb bird- I saw Alison Roman’s article about her simple turkey - why bother trussing and all - and decided to dispense with that step (by the way, trussing must slow down the cooking of the dark meat since it pulls the legs close to the body. Also no - presauteeing of the vegetables in the roasting pan and cavity, speeding things up. I dry brined my turkey overnight with salt pepper a little sugar and some fresh thyme leaves. I put the cut up veg in the roasting pan with a couple of cups of broth and put the turkey on its side as usual but with its legs and wings free in the roasting rack and rubbed it with some olive oil. Started at 450. 20 min later I came back and rubbed it with a butter stick., then at 30 minutes I flipped it to the other side., rubbing that side with butter too. 30 min later I flipped it to the back up position, rubbed it again and poured on some white wine and rubbed with rosemary leaves. Didnt think it was quite browned enough so kicked up heat to 475. 20 min later came back and flipped it to breast side, rubbed again, sprinkled again, did a little basting with wine and broth from pan.Forgot to turn it down. legs and wings were sticking out a bit. Came back a while later and decided to test temp (I usually aim for around 160-165 as pull temp. It was up above 190!!! in multiple locations (much easier to test the thigh when it is not trussed. Anyway I pulled it and let it sit til dinner time a couple hrs later. Dissected and sliced, it was done and still juicy throughout! We just finished the last bits last night. My conclusion is that most turkey is grossly overcooked due to the need to get the stuffing of our huge modern birds to a fully cooked state as well as getting the thighs cooked. This high temp unstuffed method although it requires a bit of wrestling (I have some silicone gloves) definitely delivers meat that anyone would be happy to eat in significantly less time than traditional min per pound methods.

PS the small quantity of drippings was caught by the broth in the roasting pan and my housekeeper had no complaints about the oven! For once there was no smoke cloud either due to the more ample than usual broth. Not a lot of browning in the pan but I made a roux and cooked it all down to a nice gravy on the stovetop.

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I’m glad your housekeeper had no complaints about the oven.

I don’t really roast anything higher than 400 lately because of the clean up in the oven, afterwards.

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I don’t remember trying the 500˚F for one hour method… simply bc it would be too much of a risk when one is expecting guests… who are expecting a done turkey :wink:

Our hosts this year used the (a?) NYT method, and the turkey came out perfectly.

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Thomas Keller’s high heat roast chicken method applied to turkey doesn’t call for (or need) any bird-turning at all, same as the chicken.

What was the reason to turn it so many times?

As an aside, I’ve come to the conclusion that all the “crisp skin” stuff can be dispensed with at our end, because turkey skin is not worth eating in the same way that chicken skin is.

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I think the reason for the turning is to give more heat exposure to the thighs, which take longer to cook, and less to the breast. it was actually a lot easier without a trussed and stuffed bird. One side up, than the other than the back then the breast. Moist heat below (veg, broth and drippings. I like my grandmothers solid aluminum roasting pan too, which is less likely to burn than the thing I used to use.

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Im looking for the “original” Sokolov high temp recipe when he was food editor - this is a recipe he offers later in WSJ that involves a small turkey, steaming AND turning . https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122731028315549273