The Best Turkey

Although I love Thanksgiving, the holiday, I am not equally enamored of the traditional feast. Turkey once a year is too much turkey for me. In the oh-so-many years since I have been keeping my own house, I can count - not quite on ten fingers, but almost - the number of Thanksgiving turkeys I've actually cooked.

My favorite Thanksgiving dinner was in 2004, the year I made Shrimp Creole.


My right hand was in a cast that year because I had broken my wrist mountain biking. There was no way I could have carried a turkey home, let alone gotten one in and out of the oven. But I could stir roux and peel shrimp, and with the one exception of having to find a store that was open on Thanksgiving morning so I could buy an electric can opener (since I hadn't figured out that you can't use a regular can opener with a broken wrist - duh), the meal went off without a hitch.

But last year I won a free-range turkey from my market and decided to try my luck with it. Since it was delicious, I decided I would do it again.

Except this year I would make my turkey the same way I make my chicken. The Zuni way.

As it turned out, I wasn't the only one. Kate over at Savour-Fare had the same idea. I always enjoy reading her posts, but when she posted about making cannoli cream as a topping for fruit from Richard Sax's book, Classic Home Desserts, and pointed out that she had never liked cannolis until she had one at Rocco's on Bleecker Street, my Rocco's on Bleecker Street, I knew she was a girl after my own heart.  And it turns out Russ Parsons had the idea before I did, and it's now a Genius Recipe at FOOD52 called The Judy Bird.

I got a 13 pound free-range turkey, washed it, dried it, and salted it all over with Kosher salt. I put it breast-side down on a rack in the refrigerator, turning it over, breast side up, after a day and a half, for a total resting time of 3 days.

We left the City early Wednesday morning with the dry-brining turkey in a cooler and stopped at Fairway to get everything else, which included clams to make pasta for dinner that night.








Thanksgiving morning dawned warm and sunny. It was the first Thanksgiving that I woke up in the country to green grass with no frost on the ground.




There was still parsley in the garden.




Good news for cooks; bad news for Jiminy Peak skiers.

Late that morning I put fresh sage and thyme under the turkey's skin since those are the herbs I use in my dressing and let the bird come to room temperature. I don't have a cast-iron skillet large enough to hold a 13-pound bird, so I used the bottom of my All-Clad 13-inch braiser.



I heated the pan on top of the stove, then rubbed a little canola oil on the bottom of the pan with a paper towel, and let that heat up too. I put the turkey in the pan breast-side up and slipped it into a preheated 450-degree oven and cooked it for 55 minutes. Then I took the pan out of the oven and flipped the turkey over, breast-side down, cooking it that way for 35 minutes. Finally I flipped it right side up again and cooked it for 20 minutes more. Using Kate's suggested cooking time of 8 minutes per pound, the total cooking time was 1 hour and 45 minutes.

The turkey was beautiful, fragrant, and brown. I let it rest for 30 minutes before I carved it into slices. I wasn't planning on making gravy, but the unexpected bonus was that there were abundant juices from the turkey in the pan. I heated them on top of the stove and whisked in a slurry made from Wondra flour, a little water, and some of the juices to temper it. It didn't need any salt, and the color was rich even after the slurry was added. I talked Walter into continuing to whisk it with this,




which I got at E.Dehillerin when I was in Paris, while I got the rest of the meal together.

Side dishes were cold broccoli dressed with a lemon/olive oil dressing, sweet potatoes pureed with maple syrup, Brussels sprouts braised with heavy cream from Molly at Orangette, and dressing made with country bread, sausage, fennel, leeks, shallots, carrots, celery, mushrooms, golden raisins, sage, and thyme, which I call Tom's Dressing because Walter's brother-in-law Tom makes it, but it's really  a recipe from Tom Colicchio that the NYTimes published on November 19, 2003.




Dessert was a Marion Cunningham recipe for spicy gingerbread and vanilla ice cream,




the perfect ending to this meal - better than pumpkin or pecan pie in my book any day.

I was so busy getting my meal on the table that I didn't snap pictures as I went along. But you can see my leftovers.


Hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

P.S. I'm making Shrimp Creole for dinner tonight.

Amazon Links Are Affiliate

Sylvano in the City

A Promise Kept

Don't give up on me. I've been busy, busy, busy, working twenty-six days in a row and - very unexpectedly for me - somewhere in the middle of that twenty-six days, I ended up spending a night in the emergency room.

Things seem to be pretty much back to normal, and I'm here to make good on my promise to tell you about how I fared with the Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad.

A few years ago I read an Amanda Hesser column in which she said her sister-in-law-(to be), Timmie, had given her six of her favorite recipes for Christmas - a wonderful way to welcome someone into your family and a great present anytime. This was shortly after Amanda Hesser had written a different article saying that although she cooked often, she hadn't yet developed a repertoire.

Well, I have.

And as much as I like to try new things, I have a basic repertory of recipes. Of course, it's changed over time. I used to make something that my friends call Vic's Chicken, which I don't make at all anymore (but they still do). And I am always happy to try my hand at a new dish. But for the most part, there are things I cook that people are happy to eat on a regular basis so I cook them over and over. And since I add new recipes to that list sparingly, it's been a bit of a surprise to find a lot of the dishes I've cooked from Zuni so far have instantly made it into my repertoire.

Before I started this project, I had already adopted the Zuni method for making chicken stock as my own. But the Pasta alla Carbonara, the Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes (please make these right away), the Chocolate Pots de Crème, and the Roasted Applesauce, which you haven't heard about yet, are now mine too. And in spite of actually having a repertoire, I've never had a dish that I find myself making once a week. Without fail.

Until now.

Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad

Poultry, Page 342

In life-before-Zuni, I already had a way of roasting chicken. And it was good. In fact it was VERY good. And I did read Carol's post about roast chicken, which looks wonderful and is very tempting. But once I made this dish - at EB's insistence - I was a goner. Not only is it a once-a-week dish, it might be morphing into what I eat on most Saturday nights. Adding the bread salad is not necessary in terms of having a lovely roast chicken dinner, but it is delicious and such a perfect accompaniment to the bird that I've been making it a lot too.
Judy Rodgers says that "the Zuni roast chicken depends on three things," (which I had already figured out on my own) - small birds, high heat, and salting the bird twenty-four hours in advance.

Two other things I already had in common with Judy Rodgers when it comes to roasting chickens - the chicken is not trussed nor is it rubbed with oil or butter before cooking. We were in accord so far. I do not, however, have a wonderful wood-burning oven to cook my chickens in, although - I swear this is true - I have a book on how one is built in case I win Mega. (Have you ever seen a picture of Alice Water's home kitchen?)
The one caveat about this recipe is that in addition to salting the chicken twenty-four hours in advance, the bread salad is made with day-old country - not sourdough - bread so you do need to plan to make it the day before you're going to cook and eat it.

The Chicken

The Bread Salad

Currants in Red Wine Vinegar

Pine Nuts Toasting

And, of course, Sylvano