Posted by The New York Times on November 11, 2009 at 08:53:57:
In This Corner - Turkey
By KIM SEVERSON
YOU know how it is with family during the holidays. One smart remark and someone leaves the table in tears.
It wasn’t quite that dramatic at a recent Dining section staff meeting, although we do see one another so much we feel like family.
I was deep into a description of the heritage turkey I had ordered for Thanksgiving, a real beauty that spent nine months running free in a field. I shared that I was feeling conflicted about whether to brine it or stuff it. I opened up. I was vulnerable.
Then my colleague, Julia Moskin, made her flip little comment. “Nobody really cares about the turkey,” she said. “It just has to be good enough.”
I bit my lip. I tamped down the urge to yell, “I know you are but what am I?” and run from the room in tears. Then I decided to show her how wrong she was. We would prepare Thanksgiving dinner together, her on the side dishes and me on the bird. Then we’d see.
I believe from a good turkey all Thanksgiving flows. Norman Rockwell didn’t spend all that time painting pans of sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce, did he? No. He painted turkeys.
From turkey comes stock, the flavor-giving fluid that pumps through the entire meal. Good gravy depends on good stock. So does stuffing (more on our stuffing fight in a moment). Delicious turkey does not come from a 29-cent-a-pound supermarket bird with cottony, bland breast meat. They are, as my favorite turkey breeder says, the Red Delicious apples of turkeys.
A bird that has been bred to reproduce naturally and thrive in the open develops tastier meat. I’ve eaten dozens of both, and I will swear to that basic truth on my favorite turkey platter.
There is a catch. Growing a great turkey takes time and serving one costs money. But if you can afford it, it’s the way to go.
The turkeys from Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, Va., spend their days on pasture and get organic feed. Much attention has been paid to their husbandry. They are certified by the Humane Farm Animal Care program. True, they start at $125. But frankly, no expense was too great in proving Moskin wrong.
I wanted a brine so the meat would still be relatively moist even if it was overcooked. The Ayrshire Farm birds spend six hours in a very light brine. But I needed more insurance.
Since I also wanted to avoid waterlogged meat and a tub full of saline sloshing around the kitchen, I turned to the collective wisdom of Judy Rodgers at the Zuni Café in San Francisco and a couple of well-respected food editors. Ms. Rodgers has long had exceptional results salting chickens long before roasting them. Other food publications have used the technique (also called dry brining) on turkeys with success.
I practiced on a supermarket bird, rubbing in about a half cup of kosher salt and allowing a couple of days for the salt to draw out moisture and then for the meat to reabsorb it. The turkey was juicy and had an unexpectedly deep, meaty flavor — even though I cooked it longer than I might have liked, to allow for the fact that I had stuffed it.
About that stuffing. Usually, I cook it outside the bird. An unstuffed bird is much more reliable in the oven. It cooks faster. And I never thought the stuffing was that much better inside.
At this, Moskin scoffed. The stuffing and the bird are parts of a whole, she said. She was shocked that a Thanksgiving purist such as myself would even consider separating them.
She knew I was uncomfortable stuffing the bird because I didn’t want to throw off my roasting times. Was she just trying to goad me into making a Thanksgiving dinner more to her liking? Or was it a trick?
The only solution: make two turkeys.
On our appointed day, I pulled out my bourbon red and my American bronze about an hour before I was going to roast them. Inside one I placed some onions, apples and fresh thyme. The other I gingerly stuffed with a soft dressing made from chanterelles, pancetta and caramelized pears mixed with white Pullman bread.
I pressed what remained into well-buttered tins to create individual stuffing muffins that would be crisp on the outside and steamy soft inside.
The birds were the talk of the table. O.K., some talk was about how the stuffed bird seemed dry. In my defense, it was the smaller one, and I was a little unsure about the interior temperature.
Let me just say: I rocked the stuffing muffins. Imagine how good they must have been, then times it to the 10th power.
Although the softer stuffing cooked in the bird had its fans, it didn’t please Little Miss Side Dish. “I think the problem is that you didn’t toast the bread,” she pointed out between rounds of praise for her curried sweet potatoes and roasted cauliflower.
I didn’t run from the table. I didn’t cry. I just offered everyone seconds on turkey and passed the gravy. After all, that’s what they really wanted.
IN THIS CORNER: SIDES
By JULIA MOSKIN
A PERSON can only take so much.
Every November, my colleague Kim Severson likes to chew over the Big Issues: brining versus barding, tenting versus turning, organic versus heritage birds. Her annual quest for a perfect turkey is deeply felt, heroic and — to my mind — irritating and perverse.
It smells good in the oven and looks good on the table (I know where your eyes are going), but doesn’t it always disappoint on the fork?
She has tried to bring me into the turkey fold with logic (“You just had a turkey sandwich for lunch”), with peer pressure (“Everyone loves turkey”) and with guilt (“These turkeys were slaughtered just for you”). Stringy and tasteless at worst, blandly savory at best, turkey in my opinion achieves greatness only late in life — eaten cold at midnight, slathered with mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, layered between two slices of sour rye bread.
And that’s how I disposed of her flesh-covered carcass last week (I refer to the turkey she roasted, of course), after a tense Thanksgiving cook fight during which we put the whole meal on the table and let the eaters decide what contributed more to their pleasure: a great turkey-stuffing combo, or great side dishes?
I felt my disadvantage keenly. Turkey is the bronzed and golden sun, the star around which the rest of Thanksgiving revolves. And I adore stuffing. As a cook, however, it gives me no scope. My family recipe is already fixed. It is the One True Stuffing (most people seem to feel this way), and we are no more likely to change it than to stop interrupting one another at the table.
And so I have to find my thrills and show-off moments in the root cellar. When one of those knocks the ball out of the park, as I would venture to say my sweet potatoes with coconut milk and fiery Thai spice paste did at last week’s dinner, the thrill is that much greater for being unexpected.
So I come up with new dishes each year, and also repeat old favorites, with the result that our Thanksgivings have ever more side dishes. This creates the indulgent holiday feeling that hovers over the table. (I almost wept last week at the tale of a friend whose kitchen-averse family made only one side dish at Thanksgiving: mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes, never both.)
What other sides could beat the traditional pull of the bird? I brought out an invincible weapon, hidden in reserve since summer: whole corn kernels, simply tossed in a hot skillet of melted butter, and showered with fresh mint when they started to pop and turn brown. When made with frozen yellow corn, the dish never lost the airline-food flavor that frozen vegetables often produce. But premium “petite” frozen white corn was less sweet and worked beautifully when thawed on towels beforehand to draw out the liquid.
I also decided to work on my vegetable-roasting skills.
Not so long ago, we Americans were famous for boiling vegetables into submission. In the 21st century, we roast every vegetable in sight. But my blast-furnaced specimens often emerge dry, charred and leathery.
“I never go above 375 degrees in a home oven,” counseled chef Ilene Rosen of City Bakery, in the Flatiron district, where the roasted vegetables are consistently golden and tender. She said high temperatures dry out and brown the food too fast. “Vegetables only release that secret buttery sweetness when they turn golden and then brown,” she said. A dish of hot water placed in the bottom of the oven when you turn it on produces the steamy heat that keeps the vegetables succulent. Using her method and the convection function on my oven, I achieved roasted vegetable Nirvana over and over again.
One shadow over the fun of Thanksgiving cooking is the worry of getting all the side dishes hot at serving time. But Ms. Rosen, whose food is set out buffet-style at City Bakery, liberated me from temperature tyranny with two words. “Abandon it,” she advised. “I haven’t eaten hot food for years.” And once I stopped noticing whether my vegetables were hot, I did notice their interplay of heat and richness, herbs and earth, caramel and citrus. I appreciated them even more later on, when they made a week’s worth of lively lunchtime salads.
And I saved a devastating stroke for dessert.
“If roast turkey is so good,” I said innocently as we ate pumpkin whoopie pies, “I wonder why we don’t we make it at other times?” You’d think people would serve it at dinner parties, I suggested, embroidering the theme: bohemian-chic restaurants in San Francisco and tongue-in-cheek chefs in Paris would reinterpret it. As yet, none of those things has come to pass.
I’m just saying.
FOLLOW UP POSTS ARE NOT PERMITTED - DO NOT COMPLETE & SUBMIT FORM