“Behind the Bird”

Thanksgiving was Thursday, and my mother wanted to do Alton’s turkey recipe also.  Maybe I inspired her with my stab at it, maybe not.  Regardless, three weeks after my first relative success, I had a chance to improve on a second bird.  And improve I did – the turkey was perfectly cooked, moist and even more flavorful than the one I made at my apartment.  I suspect this had to do with the simple fact that my mother purchased a fresh turkey, while mine was frozen solid when I bought it.  The meat might have been more receptive to the brine.  Still, we had all the fixings – gravy, dressing, rolls, cranberry sauce, and a delicious green bean recipe with pancetta, roasted chestnuts and shallots.  That one will definitely be showing up on our table again next year.

As I helped her cut the breast off the side we didn’t eat, I looked longingly at the carcass.  I had made this promise – I had to go through the book linearly, get everything done in the order Alton did.  If I didn’t, then what was the point?  Why don’t I just skip around and make whatever I want?  Still, I was about eighty pages and a whole season away from Behind the Bird, the Thanksgiving leftovers show.  If I wanted to do it right, I would have to make a third turkey, and salvage the meat and carcass for the recipes in this chapter.  I couldn’t win, no matter what I did.

So, I made a fateful choice.  And it was predicated on one simple realization: “When the Hell am I going to have a turkey carcass again?”  I suggested I could come over the next day and work on some turkey soup.  She immediately agreed – I’m guessing she had no problem if someone wanted to cook another meal for her.

If I had to qualify this decision, it’s this: even though Behind the Bird is in season 3 and Romancing the Bird is the end of season 1, the show’s lore states that it takes place immediately after.  It’s a weird cooking show that has a Blair Witch plot to suggest the episode is actually a behind-the-scenes look at a Good Eats shoot.  So, yeah, even though I’ve gone around my original intent, I can at least justify it.  And I will not be breaking this again – not that I should need to, since I can’t immediately think of any episodes that are so dependent on another like these two.

So, the recipes.  They’re pretty simple, as you might expect a show about leftovers to be.  The soup starts with vegetable broth as its base.  We ended up adding the remaining turkey stock and some additional chicken stock, since it was just sitting around the pantry.  The carcass gets placed in the pot and brought to a simmer.  It simmers for an hour, then the carcass is removed.  At that point, the bones have given as much flavor to the liquid as possible, and the rest of the ingredients are added.  Some frozen vegetables, some uncooked white rice, some leftover turkey meat, some Old Bay, and some dried thyme.  That cooks for 20 more minutes, then the seasonings are adjusted.  It’s a tasty brew, and a good way to use up the entirety of the bird.

This wasn’t the only recipe in the chapter, and since I’m in for a penny here, I decided I might as well make the turkey salad as well.  Not much to write here, other than you take more leftover turkey meat, mix it with some mayo, lemon juice, celery, red onion, toasted pecans, fresh sages and dried cranberries.  Season to taste, then let it chill for an hour for the flavors to marry.  Spread onto toasted bread and consume heartily.  This takes longer to prepare than simply slapping it between two slices of bread, but it’s definitely worth it for the flavors of everything together.  No recipe on this one at foodnetwork.com, but if you go to Alton’s FB page, you can find it there!  Go now!

Next time, we get back to where we left off.  We look at what happens when good milk goes bad in just the right way…

Recipes:

Bird to the Last Drop

“It’s a Wonderful Cake”

I’m not a baker.  Cooking is easy – most things roast in the oven at about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, vegetables like to be served al dente, and there’s no such thing as “too much cheese.”  Baking, though, that’s tricky.  It’s like compiling a program, almost.  You design the main system, work up the subroutines, and run it to see what errors you made.  The difference, besides one leads to a delicious baked good and the other doesn’t, is that you have the chance to go back and edit a program if it doesn’t work the way you wanted.  If you screw up a baked good, you have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch.

Worse, there’s plenty of places to go wrong.  Don’t add enough leavening?  Your product won’t rise.  Stirred too much?  Your angel food cake has developed gluten and will be way too tough.  Forgot to add salt?  Your bread will taste flat and lifeless.  (I did that once.  It was a great way to learn how important such a simple ingredient like salt is to pretty much every food on the planet.)  So, in general, I try to stay away from making baked goods, leaving the professionals to do their job.

So, here I am, staring down the next recipe in Alton’s book, and it’s one of my least favorite items: fruitcake.  I’ve had a few bites of the stuff over the years, and my impression is about what most people would say about fruitcake: “fake,” “inedible,” “commercial,” and “bakery sausage” come to my mind.  “Fake” because I have no idea what those green round fruits are supposed to be (I refuse to believe they’re cherries); “inedible” because they have an unpleasant chewy texture; “cmmercial” because they come wrapped like Twinkies; “bakery sausage” because it looks like someone rounded up all the bits from other better desserts and shoved them in this thing.  That said, my father loves fruitcake.  He can’t wait for the holiday season, so he can tear into some of the storebought fruitcakes.  The man has a serious sweet tooth, and so I have my in for the dish – I want him to try a real fruitcake for once in his life.

Fortunately, the recipe is pretty simple.  Take a bunch of dried fruit (golden raisins, currants, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, and apricots), the zest of an orange and a lemon, and some minced candied ginger, and let them macerate overnight in some good rum.  That lets the flavors of the fruit hydrate with the alcohol, and lets all their flavors marry.  The next day, grind up some cloves, some allspice and some cinnamon and combine the macerated fruit with the spice in a saucepan.  Add some sugar, butter, apple cider and ground ginger and bring it all to a boil.  Back off on the heat and let it simmer for 10 minutes to develop the flavors.  Let cool, and get to work on the nuts.

Alton advocated shelling your own nuts for this, and looking at the price per pound, I have to agree with him.  Sure, shelled nuts saves labor, but you pay for that labor.  I also bought his tool of choice for nutcracking – a simple C-clamp that cost me about $5 at Home Depot.  I lost some of the nuts, but got more than enough for the recipe, even after snacking on a few.

Once that’s all done, add some flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder to a sifter and sift directly into the pot containing the protobatter.  Stir until it comes together, then add the eggs, one at a time.  Then fold in the pecans and spoon into a nonstick loaf pan and bake for about an hour.

Now, as I’ve said, I’m not a baker, so I spent the hour hoping everything would turn out right.  Alton advocated putting a roasting pan filled with water beneath the pan nn the lowest rack.  This will create a humid environment inside the oven, and prevent the top from cracking.  I don’t know if that worked or not, because I had a different issue – the pan I used was just a bit too small, so it rose and flowed over the sides.  Fortunately, the pan prevented the batter from dropping onto the heating element and burning, so it ended up having a secondary and unintended function.  I also had issues with the center – it didn’t quite want to set.  I ended up pulling the cake after an extra fifteen minutes, and had to shrug my shoulders when the center fell some.

Once removed from the oven, the fruitcake gets a good spritzing of brandy.  This also guards against cracking, but also begins to cure the cake, and was a necessary step back when fruitcakes were made as provisions for the lean winter months.  The alcohol acted as a preservative, and kept the food fresh all winter long.  Of course, we don’t have that issue any longer, but it does add a good flavor component.  I made my fruitcake about two weeks ago, and it gets spritzed with brandy every few days, just to keep it moist.  I plan on serving it on Christmas morning to my family – and hopefully, my father will enjoy it.

Next time…we go off script.

Recipes: Free-Range Fruitcake

“Romancing the Bird”

Let’s literally talk turkey.  It’s the all-American bird – this overgrown pheasant never graced the European palate until the 1550s, it was Ben Franklin’s choice for America’s national bird, and I’m pretty certain it’s the top answer to “Name something you’d find on a Thanksgiving Day menu” on Family Feud.  The archetypal image of Thanksgiving is a beautifully browned bird, stuffed to the brim with dressing, afloat in the middle of a sea of bowls of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and green bean casserole.  American cooks have attempted to recreate Rockwell’s OURs… to fight for Freedom from Want ever since that image entered into the public’s consciousness, but with varying degrees of success.

And it’s not an easy task.  The big problem?  Breasts and legs are only considered done at certain temperatures, and the time it takes to cook the dark meat will dry out the white meat.  My own experiences with Thanksgivings past have that very issue.  I prefer white meat over dark, but most of the time the breast is just dry and flavorless.  At that point, not even the best turkey gravy in the world can save the bird.  Maybe there’s a reason my favorite part of the meal is the pumpkin pie.

So, what to do?  Well, according to Alton, brining the turkey will help it retain moisture for the two-and-a-half hour roasting.  Now, I’m familiar with brining – Lord knows I’ve heard Alton preaching its virtues every Thanksgiving on repeats of this show, and he consistently uses it for other poultry and seafood dishes.  But I’ve never done it, so I’d never known just how good or bad this particular recipe was.  Oh, I’d made it before – a friend had a turkey they needed cooked, so I used the base recipe.  I just didn’t brine it.

Brining is a very simple process.  The idea is to place your bird into a salty solution and keep cold.  It takes advantage of osmosis to naturally inject the meat with the flavor of the brine.  How does this work?  Well, let’s just say that nature wants to balance things out, and because you’ve put a not-salty bird into a salty solution, the bird will give up its unflavored water in exchange for the flavored brine.  All you need for a brine is salt and water, but, really, if we’re flavoring the bird, there’s no reason not to add more.  Alton’s brine uses vegetable broth and kosher salt (natch) as the base, but includes some brown sugar, whole black peppercorns, whole allspice berries and chopped candied ginger as a flavoring base.  All of that stuff gets brought to a boil, then cooled in the fridge.  As usual, I had a few issues with this one.  The recipe just calls for vegetable broth, but the show specifically mentions avoiding the unsalted variety.  Naturally, it was too late for me to do that, so I just added an additional cup of salt after researching brines on the web for a few panicked minutes.  The overall flavor?  Salty, almost like tasting the sea.  Through a carrot.  The other issue?  My pepper grinder is apparently permanently attached to the bottle, so I had to go buy a big bottle of peppercorns.

The day of the roasting, the bird needs time to soak in the brine.  About twelve hours, in fact.  I actually have room in my fridge for an entire cooler (I’m a bachelor, my needs are few), but I realize most people don’t have that option.  Your best bet is to freeze some water bottles and throw those in to keep the brine cold for the long haul.  Once you’re ready to cook, turn your oven up to a scorching 500 degrees, and remove the turkey from the brine.  Wash off the brine, and pat dry.

Now, the iconic image of Thanksgiving has that turkey cavity filled with stuffing, but that’s dangerous.  Filling that cavity with anything you’d want to eat later means you need to thoroughly cook it to avoid food-borne disease, and that again requires a long cooking time.  As we’ve said before, that means your turkey will be dry and tough, so stuffing the turkey with dressing is out.  What’s in, though, is aromatics.  A small onion, an apple, a stick of cinnamon, some rosemary and sage – all that gets stuffed in there to perfume the meat.  Finally, rub on a coat of canola oil to promote browning, and stick into the blistering heat of your oven for a good half hour.

DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR.

That’s critical.  Every time you open the door to your oven, you lose heat.  That means it takes longer to get back up to temperature, meaning your turkey is gaining a Saharaesque quality to it.  Don’t do it unless you see smoke coming out.

Now, once the turkey’s skin has browned, reduce heat to 350.  That’s your cruising speed.  You’ll finish the rest of the cooking at that temperature.  How do you know when it’s done?  Well, stick a probe thermometer into it, and watch for about 160 in the breast meat.  You’ll then remove the turkey from the oven, take it off the rack, and let it rest for fifteen minutes to half an hour.

So, how was it?  JUICY.  I have never had turkey this moist.  It was so juicy, I’m pretty sure I went through an entire roll of paper towls cleaning up the runoff from the bird.  But it was good.  I had several friends over, and they each brought Thanksgiving dishes – mashed potatoes, dressing, casserole, cranberry sauce, and so on.  It was a great first Thanksgiving dinner at my new place, even if it was done a few weeks early.

Would I make this again?  Definitely.  It’s a very easy recipe, and I even scraped together a quick gravy out of the pan drippings.  The browned bits got deglazed with a stash of turkey stock I bought, and all of that was poured into a measuring cup.  That got stashed into my freezer for fifteen to twenty minutes to encourage the fat to float to the top.  The fat was used to make a roux, and the pan drippings were added once the roux was ready.  It got thinned out by turkey stock until a lusciously thick sauce came to be.  And what flavor!  It had a savoriness that you could feel in your cheekbones, and that’s the mark of a truly delicious sauce.

Thus ends season 1 of Good Eats.  And it only took me most of a year to do it!

Clearly, I need to move a bit faster – I’d like to do more than a season a year, after all.  The good news, though, is that the turkey episode represented one of the more difficult to pull off dishes, and we won’t have that issue for awhile.  Next time, though, things do get a bit nutty…

Recipe: Good Eats Roast Turkey