My first Thanksgiving turkey
In Canada Thanksgiving is celebrated in October, in the US in November. Even if the date is different, the tradition for the feast is the same! There are Turkey with stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Cranberries are a cranberry sauce.
This year I made my first turkey! It was very delicious. I have the recipe from a Canadian friend, and I do not want to tell you.
For now: It takes time and some equipment for it. You definitely have to start at around 1pm if you want to eat at 6pm (depending on how big the turkey is, see below). I do not know if this is exactly what you get in Germany, but you can adapt that too.
- filling
- Turkey
- sauce
(How to make mashed potatoes, yes, yes, here at TheFruitAndFlowerBasket.com, we bought cranberry sauce, probably cranberry jam goes very well.)
1st filling
You can of course bake the filling in turkey, or in an extra refractory form. Quite to taste. If you make them extra, they are a bit crunchier, which I find personally tastier. But you can also put the stuffing in the turkey, of course.
Fillings come in all colors and variations - each family has its own recipe. This recipe is that of my friend and I find it extremely delicious.
Needed:
- Prepare 6 cups of diced and dried white bread (for example toast) - the day before
- about 250 g butter
- 1 diced onion
- Spices: 1.5 tsp dried parsley (also fresh), 1/4 tsp pepper, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp dried sage, 1.25 tsp turkey spice mixture (if you can not get it, it contains thyme, sage, Marjoram, rosemary, pepper and nutmeg)
- Chicken broth (cubes)
- 1-2 eggs
Preparation:
Melt the butter in a pan and fry the diced onion. Now add the spices and let it stew for 5 minutes. In a bowl, mix the bread cubes and the butter-onion-spice mixture. Approximately 200 ml of chicken broth are now added and everything is stirred well. Now the eggs are opened and added. Put everything in a fireproof mold (grease before or lay out with aluminum foil, otherwise it will bake). This is then about 1 hour before the turkey is done, put in the oven.
The filling is almost the best part of the whole feast. I can also imagine that cut mushrooms fit very well in it. Will I try on Christmas.
2. turkey
Here in Canada you get the turkey of course in all sorts of sizes. Of course it depends on how long you have to put the turkey in the oven. My turkey weighed 7 kg and was in the oven for 3h 45min. Temperature is always 165 degrees Celsius. At 5.5 kg, it is only 3h 15min. That per 500 g a quarter of an hour more or less. The turkey is ready to be measured with a meat thermometer. The temperature inside must end up being 82 degrees Celsius, then the turkey is done!
For preparation:
The turkey is already hollowed out therefore, so you just have to take out the pouch with the offal (you can make great broth), wash the turkey, free from any spring residue, free the cavity of any grease and then pat dry with paper towels / rubbing. Should the innards still be in: Have fun hollowing :)
Now the turkey is rubbed with butter and seasoned with salt and pepper from the outside. We stuffed two sliced apples and one roughly diced onion into the turkey, but it does not have to be.
If the flails are not tied together, you should still do that. Now off in a large roasting casserole or whatever you have to get such a bird in the oven! Oven should be preheated to 165 degrees. If you want, you can add one or two cups of chicken stock to the roasting pan.
For the first half of the baking time, a lid or foil should cover the turkey. For the rest of the time, without, so that the turkey is beautiful brown. From there you also need a "Turkey Baster", a kind of oversized pipette, with which you can get the juice from the roasting pan and squirt over the turkey. This is done about every 30 minutes. The first time you take out the lid or aluminum foil. Alternatively, you can safely use a ladle
Do not forget! One hour before the bird is ready, the stuffing must be in the oven, should not it be in the turkey!
The times can of course vary slightly, as the birds vary in size and the ovens are different. Therefore, the meat thermometer is essential!
When the turkey is done, get the bird out of the oven, cover it up again and let it sit for 15 minutes. If you have done everything right, the meat is tender and the skin is brown and crispy. If you want to transport the turkey (e.g.on a nice large platter or a tray), you should handle big forks (depending on the size of the bird). There are extra large "Turkey Lifter" - oversized wide forks, see second picture.
3rd sauce
Now you can also make the sauce! Leave the leftovers or the juice in the frying pan (maybe scoop off the fat first and scrape off everything) and mix about two cups of potato water (from the mashed potatoes). The whole thing is then poured into a pot and boiled. When the sauce is boiling, add about a cup of water, into which you have mixed some sauce binder, and boil everything again. Finished!
We did not cook the "cranberry sauce" ourselves, as there are quite good ones in the supermarket. In Germany cranberry jam is probably doing well, if you do not get the original.
There was, as already mentioned, mashed potatoes. As a vegetable garnish, we cooked carrots and Brussels sprouts.
A turkey of this size (7 kg) is enough for 8-10 people. We were only four, but you can superfreeze the meat in the sauce or make it "turkey sandwich", and then you have a few days of it. After all, that's a big hassle that you do not do every day. At Christmas I might make an even bigger one - here are the ovens so nice :-) But as already described above, you can easily adjust the baking time with the above calculations. Up and down ...
