This Thanksgiving, like last year, will only be attended by two meat eaters (my mom and myself). The other guests my wife and I will have over are vegetarians. Because less meat is needed, this year and last I just picked up a turkey breast instead of a whole one.

Now I'm getting a bit confused by the various options I have for preparing it, and what I need to do. I also wanted to get some ideas of what you guys do for your Thanksgiving meals, and how you prepare the turkey (if you have one). Do you brine or not? Stuffing? Breast v whole? What do you do for basting?

One of the things that I'm not sure if is how long I'll need to cook the breast. I have an electronic thermometer, so I'll constantly be informed of the temperature, but I've been reading that the breast takes only an hour to cook vs 5 for the whole thing, which sounds like a pretty big difference to me. Can I stuff just the breast? What if I don't want to, do I put something else in there?

Thanks for any help, and have a happy Thanksgiving!

I'm not particularly keen on Chicken or Turkey breast because its generally very dry unless you drown it in sauce or gravy.

I wouldn't bother actually putting stuffing inside. Just do the stuffing as a separate dish as a individual balls. Its not recommended you stuff it inside anyway even if you do have a whole bird because of the difficulty of cooking it properly without risk of food poisoning.

The one time I roasted a whole turkey I "pre-basted" the breast with ricotta and butter to stop it drying out, which seemed to work very well.

Of course, tradition dies hard and I also covered the thing with strips of streaky bacon -- though that's as much for the bacon's sake as the turkey's.

Peter

I brined the breast last year, and the whole turkey the year before, and that helped keep a great deal of moisture, but I've been hearing recently that you don't need the brine to keep it moist.

Nobody I know can roast a chicken or turkey properly then it seems I guess I should attempt it again and maybe also try Peter's recipe. If you can get it moist still then that'd be great.

The legs (thighs) take longest to cook. If you're cooking just a crown, or a saddle, or just one breast, then it ought to take a lot less long, which should help avoid dryness. (Another thing in that Worrall Thompson recipe that I linked is cooking much hotter, for a much shorter time, than "classical" Mrs Beeton-style turkey roasting -- which also helps avoid dryness.)

This is of course the definitive Empeg turkey thread.

Peter

Heh, I do remember that thread, but as far as I can tell, only fried turkeys were discussed there (with the discussion devolving into cajun food).

If I were in your shoes, I would have purchased two cornish game hens, then you and your Mom could have each had an entire one. They are easy to prepare and I think they are more delicious than turkey.

I would get a couple of ribeyes.

I made a whole turkey on the grill it took about 90 minutes but it was quartered. I brined it first. I think if you brine it, it's impossible to make dry turkey.

I just saw an episode of Americas Test Kitchen where instead of brining they covered the breast with salt pork and cooked it a while at a low temp. Then they removed the pork and finished it at a high temp to brown the skin.

I never am good with the times I just cook it 'till the thermometer tell me it's done.

heh

I think the actual turkey makes a difference too, for a good free range bird that's been hung:

http://www.kellyturkeys.co.uk/kellybronze-turkeys-chickens-default.aspx?m=10&mi=98

We use the timings on the Kellys site, have been cooking whole turkey for years, much prefer leg to breast

Shame the video link doesn't work now.

EDIT: It looks like they've moved it:

http://www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/offerings/perspectives/consumer/productsafety/turkeys/

There was a great episode of Good Eats that talked about the hazards of turkey frying too. Lots of fire in that one!

If you're talking about just one breast, there's nothing to stuff. There's no cavity. Not that you should do that anyway, unless you want to give thanks for salmonella. I suppose you could butterfly it and create a sort-of roulade, but I wouldn't.

My wife has done pretty well with a single breast by just putting some salt and pepper on the skin, putting it in the oven on a sheet pan, and baking it. I don't know offhand how hot or how long, but I'd guess about 350F for about 90 minutes.

As far as temperature and thermometers, if you leave it in the heat until the center of the breast is done, you're going to end up with an overdone, super-dry turkey. Remember that once you remove it from the heat, the center is going to continue to get warmer for at least five minutes, and probably another five degrees. Also, don't pull the thermometer probe out until after it's rested for five to ten minutes; it will just leave a hole for the juices to be pushed out of by the constricted proteins. The same goes for the useless popup thermometer, if your breast has one; don't remove it until ready to serve, but ignore it otherwise.

Here in the US south, we just deep-fry the turkey. MMMMmmmmm!

Thanks, Bitt. Are you sure the breast won't have a cavity to stuff? From the outside of the packaging it feels like it might have at least an area I could put stuff under...

The last time I cooked a whole bird, I used a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and it tasted amazing. This time I'm going to use the same recipe, even if there's no cavity, plus I'm going to brine it first with directions from Alton Brown. It's a Food Network Holiday!

As mentioned on the radio this morning...

"The only reason for baking the whole turkey is to get that Norman Rockwell moment where the golden turkey is presented to the diners."

Quick query, as I have never been in the US or near any Americans during Thanksgiving or Christmas - do you guys also have turkey at Christmas? Or is Thanksgiving your core turkey weekend?

From my perspective - I never eat turkey. I far prefer goose or duck, as they aren't so dry :-)

Turkey for Christmas dinner is also common.

Though when my grandma was in charge of the holiday family get to gathers - there was pretty much something of everything. Turkey w/cornbread stuffing, ham, roast, string beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, yams, scratch made biscuits, cornbread, fresh corn off the cob, macaroni and cheese, deviled eggs, olives, potato salad, many bean salad, coleslaw, turnips and greens (as a kid it was not to my taste). Desserts included, angle food cake, German chocolate cake, apple pie, cobbler, chocolate pie, lemon meringue pie, fudge, divinity (which is hard to get right in damp weather).

I'm pretty sure I've forgotten those dishes that, as a kid, I didn't care for.

So many different dishes it seemed that at least one thing had to be constantly passed around for lack of room on the table.

Now that sounds like my ideal :-)

mmmmmm - foood

Cookies, How could I forget the cookies.

Oatmeal w/raisins and walnuts, oatmeal w/chocolate chip and walnuts, brownies, lemon bars, toll house, something with a lot of coconut, I didn't like coconut then, bet I'd like them now. Platter full of various nuts, bowl full of Brauch's candies.

Grandma had a large family and grandad was part of a large family, which made for a large extended family centered on them. Many lived close enough that making a day trip to grandma's house was easy. So it was always a large dinner at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Classic adults at the big table. Kids at card tables and tv dinner tables.

FWIW, virtually no one in the US prepares goose or duck at home, and I'm not sure I've ever even seen goose on a restaurant menu.

Also, most holiday feasts center around either turkey or ham. Other large meat presentations are far less common. I can't think of anyone who has roast beef for Thanksgiving or Christmas, for example.

My brother has served roast beef at Christmas for the last decade or so.
I agree it's non-standard fare for the meal.

Most of our Christmas lunches over the last 10 years involved fore rib of beef. Don't often get an excuse to roast an excessively large bit of beef like that.

Which reminds me, must go to the butcher and order it.

Same here. Love it, and you can cater for people that like rare and well done with the same bit of meat.

Right. I picked roast beef because I knew that it was very common in the UK, and not uncommon as a non-holiday large gathering food in the US.

I think beef is pretty rare at Christmas in the UK too. Just about everyone I know cooks turkey year after year. And most of them cook it twice as long as it needs to be cooked for.

I just wanted to post an update. I used the Alton Brown turkey brining recipe and the Giada roasting recipe. The latter, as Bitt warned when talking about stuffing, was largely ineffective. As he said, because there's no real cavity in just the breast to put things into. Most of her recipe includes putting orange/lemon slices and onion into the cavity to get some of that flavor into the meat, but because it all sort of fell into the rack and the bottom of the pan, it didn't really do anything to the flavor.

I would say that the part of Giada's recipe with the rub was effective. She says to melt butter and olive oil with some herbs de provence, then rub half of that on the skin and half under the skin. That provided some good taste.

The most credit, though, goes to Alton's brining recipe. I think brining it in general is good, but his recipe seemed to add a little to the procedure. The result was a very juicy bird with good flavor. The sliced breast meat even microwaved extremely well the next day for Thanksgiving 2 It was still very juicy and not at all dry, though the skin didn't survive the reheating process. I'm not sure if it can...

Not in the microwave, at least, where much of the heat comes from steam.

Oh, also, if you're not going to eat whatever you stuff the bird with, and it's just there to provide flavor to the bird, then that's okay. It's just when you put stuffing, the food, in there, and then eat it, that you're in for some fun gastroenteritis.

Oh no, I understood that. I already knew I couldn't eat the stuffing inside, so initially I should have made the distinction between stuffing you eat and stuff to flavor the meat. The part I was talking about when I said you were correct was when you said there wouldn't be much of a cavity in a turkey breast alone to stuff at all.

Besides, we already have a couple really good stuffing recipes and I wouldn't want to prepare them in a turkey anyway. And even though it uses HFCS (which I try to stay away from), I do love Stove Top Stuffing.

Quick poll: do you call it dressing or stuffing? Is there a difference?

It's when you put stuffing in there and don't alter the cooking time to account for the heat taking longer to get to the centre that food poisoning becomes a possibility. That's why hoying a few veg in the cavity is safe but stuffing the cavity isn't; it's nothing to do with whether or not you eat the few veg.

Peter

Yeah, but altering the cooking time enough to cook the things stuffed inside means that your turkey is going to come out like sawdust.

Not if you do it properly.

Stuffing, the kind meant to be eaten, has always been a part of every turkey dinner served among the family. Never ever known of any one getting sick.

Thought the way the turkeys get cooked, about all you need do to remove the meat, is grab the breast bone and shake.

Brining a turkey to make it more moist is such an odd concept to me. Brining is ususally used to draw moisture out of the food and act as a perservative. It just seems counterintuitive to use it to moisten food.

My mother tried brining a turkey for the first time this year, and said it came out amazing. Apparently the brine sucks the blood out of the bird, which is what makes it more moist. It still makes my brain hurt trying to figure it out, though.

How brining works

Basically, relatively low concentrations of salt cause muscle fibers to swell and hold more water. Higher concentrations cause the opposite effect.

Exactly. There's a great Good Eats about it. For example, the recipe I used called for two gallons of liquid and one cup of salt. That's a pretty low concentration.

In the end, I don't care how it works, I just know it's friggin' delicious!

*edit*
To be clear, because it was just the breast, I halved the recipe I used. .5 gallons of water and .5 gallons of chicken broth.

I didn't think about the concentration (I still haven't gotten the recipe from my mom yet so no clue how much she used). I generally use a lot more salt than just a cup per gallon when I brine.

Pretty hard to satisfy a taste for the dark meat, when you're only cooking a breast.

So buy drumsticks.

I think higher concentration just means you need to brine it for less time. I am always afraid of using too much salt and making it taste salty.

I am making wings to take to a holiday party, I wonder how brining those would be.