It's that time again! Time to roast! Somewhere between 90 and 97% of American households have turkey on Thanksgiving. Over the course of a year, each of us, on average, eats a whole turkey. (I must be eating a couple of vegetarians' share.)

Most of those are roasted. Sadly, many are roasted badly, with ghostly skin, squeaky, dry breast meat, and greasy, salty, jello-thick gravy. It's not surprising — with its different types of meat, tacked on to an oddly shaped, heavy frame that's not much smaller than a home oven, a turkey is not an easy thing to roast well.

It does not have to be that way. Turkey heaven takes just a little knowledge and a few simple practices.

Here are the most important hints for roasting the perfect turkey. If you are not as obsessed as I am, you don't need to follow every tip. The list is in order of importance. Just start with number one and continue as far as you can stand. But you MUST do number 1 and number 2 is very important, too. Ah, so is 3. After that, it's small stuff. Well, smallish .. mm, told you I am obsessed!

For a more detailed, step-by-step approach, see: http://www.turkeyhelp.com/ (free, from Cook's Illustrated magazine, may require free registration).

 

Food Safety Note: This is important. Raw poultry harbors salmonella and campylobacter, which pretty much ruins a dinner party. Happily, it's not hard to prevent. Treat anything that touches the raw bird or its juices as contaminated and wash with hot soapy water. You can also followup with a disinfectant wipe or spray (let it air dry). Make sure all bird components see 140 degrees before they see the platter. Store food safely. Anything that can spoil should be in the danger zone of 40-140 degrees F for no more than two hours.

1: MEAT THERMOMETER!

With any roast, the internal temperature is the ONLY reliable way to know it's ready. It's even more so for turkey, with its giant slabs of breast meat that go from delicious to painful in ten degrees.

The worst mistake is relying on the pop-up thermometers that come implanted in some turkeys, almost all of which trigger at something like 185 degrees.

Basic rule:

You want the breast at 165 degrees and the thigh at 175. You need to pull it 10 degrees below the target temperature, as it will continue to rise after you remove it from the oven.

Until 2006, the USDA recommended an internal temperature of 180 degrees -- but that is dry, dry, dry. They now recommend 165 but a lot of sources still reflect the old advice. Salmonella, Campylobacter, and other bird-borne nasties are both history at 160. It's not necessary to take the bird to cardboard-land. Just make sure your thermometer is accurate (calibrate using boiling water, which is 212 degrees). Take multiple readings in the thickest parts that are not adjacent to bone, and wait for the reading to settle. Cook until your lowest reading is the target temperature.

The second coolest food thermometer is one with a remote probe at the end of a cable. The probe goes into the meat and the read-out is outside the oven. An alarm sounds when target temp is reached. My Polder probe thermometer is dead accurate and is less than $30. There are also wireless units so you can walk around the house and know what's going on inside your bird!

Placement can result in incorrect readings. Set your probe thermometer's alarm to ten degrees below target, then follow up with multiple readings from an instant-read thermometer.

The coolest thermometer is the Thermapen. Most so-called instant-read thermometers take most of a minute to take an accurate reading but the Thermapen is there in less than ten seconds. But it's about $80 so I am not suggesting it. Unless you gotta have it. Then I recommend it.

Allow the bird to rest a half hour or so before carving. It prevents the juices from running out, helping them stay in the meat. It also helps with the meal timing. This is the time to complete the gravy and the rest of the meal. The meat will stay hot for a half hour to an hour if you tent it with foil.

2: BRINE THE BIRD!

A salt and sugar soak seasons the meat and makes it absorb water. This makes for a much moister bird and gives you leeway on the temperature — brined breast meat is still quite palatable as high as 180 (don't ask me how I know). Which is good since it is hard to get the thigh to 175 without taking the breast higher than 160. So you must, you must, you must brine.

You can brine it yourself or buy a brined bird — see item 4, about how to buy a good turkey.

Basic Brining Procedure

This is an overview. If you crave more detail, see "More on Brining" (below).

• The amount of brine will depend on the container you have. A close fit means you need less solution. Your aim is to have 1 cup of table salt (which is 1-1/2 to 2 cups kosher salt) and 1/2-1 cup of sugar per gallon of water, for eight hours. If you are short on time, you can double the concentration and brine for four hours. You do not need to be precise in these amounts or times.
• I use a 3-1/2 gallon pot. A turkey in the 14-18 pound range displaces 1-1/2 gallons of water and I use about 1-1/2 gallons of water. I dissolve 1-1/2 cup table salt and 1 cup sugar in 1 gallon of hot water and add 1/2 gallon of ice and water.
• Many recipes suggest you add spices to the brine or use apple cider instead of the water and sugar. I don't find it makes much difference.
• You need to have a way to keep the turkey cold. If the brining container won't fit in the refrigerator, use a cooler and ice.
• Remove parts from inside the bird. Discard liver. Remove giblets and neck, cut off wing tips, place in bowl to save for gravy-making. Rinse bird and place in the brine. Add a little water if needed to cover, then place in refrigerator.
• After brining is complete, rinse the bird well and dry very thoroughly.

Additional hints

• A brined turkey cooks faster. Don't be surprised if it's ready an hour earlier than you would expect! Mine are done in 2 to 2.5 hours, for a 12-14 pound bird. Schedule your guests and side dishes accordingly. Note that the resting time is flexible. You have a half hour resting time and if you go an extra 15-30 minutes, it will be fine, especially if you foil-wrap the bird.
• Don't brine a turkey that's packed in a "solution" — you would be double brining and making it too salty.
• Don't brine longer than the recipe tells you or it will be too salty.
• Important: Rinse after brining. This removes surface salt which will ruin your gravy.

3: GOOD GRAVY!

Good gravy is an absolute requirement for me. I have a PhD in gravy. It is a big subject but there is a simple, reliable route to excellent gravy: make-ahead pan gravy, wherein much of it is done before the bird is ready:

Make-Ahead Pan Gravy

When you put the turkey in the oven, put the neck, giblets, tail, and wing tips in a pot with water to cover. Simmer for an hour or so to make soup. Add one can of low-salt chicken broth (recommended: Swanson's lower-salt version).

Meanwhile make a roux in a skillet. Combine 3 tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup of flour, cooked at medium heat, strirring pretty constantly, until it's brown and nutty — your nose knows! Don't try to go past dark brown, as it will burn easily. You want it darker than peanut butter but not as dark as milk chocolate. Turn off heat before it's too dark, and set aside.

When the turkey comes out it needs to rest. Move it to a platter and cover it well with foil. While it rests, complete the gravy.

Add the broth and 1-2 cups of wine to the turkey roasting pan and heat over medium heat using two burners, to dissolve up all that good, browned stuff. Pour into your saucepan, including the carrots, celery, and onion from the pan, and stir in the roux. The advantage of roux is that the flour granules are all greased up, so no lumps!

I make a couple of quarts of gravy and freeze the rest in baggies. Myum.

4: GOOD TURKEY!

Size Matters

A really big bird is hard to cook well. While it's best to stay under 14 pounds or so, Cook's Illustrated developed a recipe for 20-pound birds that serves 20-24 people.

Frozen? Fresh? Heritage? Which Brands?

Frozen turkeys do as well as fresh in some tests and I have had approximately equal success with average supermarket birds and fancy-name fresh ones.

In past years, one of the best turkeys in Cooks' Illustrated's and other tests was Empire Kosher. In the San Francisco South Bay Area, they are now widely available, at Nob Hill, Safeway, Albertson's, Mollie Stone's, and Andronico's. Also available in Oakland Kosher Butchers on Lakeshore Ave.

Another top-rated turkey in more than one magazine report was the plain old Butterball. Most (but not all) Butterballs are packed in what they call a "solution," which is basically a brine -- actually "salt, modified food starch, sodium phosphate, and natural flavors." I have used them twice with great success.

This year, Cook's top-rated a Kosher bird — Rubashkin's Aaron's Best. They are hard to find on the west coast but I learned that Trader Joe's Kosher Turkey, available only during the holidays, is a Rubashkin. I cooked one today and was disppointed. It was good but very salty. Cook's mentioned that while they rated it as the best, it was also the saltiest. It sure was! I thought it was too salty and that the salt dominated the flavor.

Kosher birds have two other disadvantages. One is that they are not cleanly plucked. A spokesperson for Empire explained that this is because the Kosher laws do not allow the hot water dip used by most processors to loosen the feathers. A Kosher bird will have small pieces of feather. They are a bit off-putting but don't affect the flavor. I pull the larger ones. The second complaint is that Kosher birds don't have any giblets or wing tips, which are part of my gravy-making. All you get is the neck.

So far, I have to give the nod to good old Butterball. Will try a heritage turkey in the future. A lot of gourmets are turning to "heritage" birds — the original breeds before the Dolly-Partonizing of modern breeding. I haven't tried them yet. From what I read, they vary quite a bit. Even the same breed can taste quite different, depending on the grower. If you can suggest one that is available in the Bay Area, let me know: .

Do Not Brine Solt-Packed Birds

Do not brine Empire or solution-packed turkeys (read the labels) or they will be too salty. They are already brined.

5: TURN THE BIRD!

Cook's Illustrated's original method had you start it breast down, then on one side, then on second side, then breast up. I had mixed success with this and it's a lot of fuss, so I turn it just once. Cook's has evolved their instructions and they now do the same.

But you do need that one turn. Recall that you want the breast at 165 degrees and the thigh at 175. The breast-down period helps shield the breast so it can be ten degrees behind the legs.

But don't try shielding the breast with foil, because the skin won't crisp up. Alton Brown on Good Eats disagrees -- he starts the bird at 500 degrees, then shields the breast. I will try this someday but am skeptical.

And yes, he brines his bird. All turkey-masters do.

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Additional notes

High-Heat Roasting

Imagine roasting at 550 degrees instead of the usual 325! That's the idea behind high-heat roasting or "high-roast." I have tried it three times, twice following Chef Marc's instructions, once more along the lines of a Cook's Illustrated article. I have also done other meats at high temperatures.

High-roast delivers some great browning and speeds things up but is hard to control with turkey and it's large mass of heat-sensitive breast. It works much better for chicken.

If you try this, rely on the Cook's Illustrated article rather than Chef Marc. He is sloppy. There are several inconsistencies on his site and if you hear him on the radio (he is an annual guest on Gene Burns' show on KGO-AM in San Francisco), you hear still more inconsistencies, all belted out with the emphatic certainty normally reserved for conservative talk show hosts and Scientologists. A lot of what he says is either wrong or dubious. The videos on his site are especially odd. He drinks wine the whole time and by the end, he is getting sloppier and sloppier.

I love high-roast chicken but for turkey, stick with the standard 325 degrees.

Grilling and Smoking

Of course you can grill turkey! It turns out well but you miss the pan drippings, so the gravy suffers a little. You can put a drip pan under the grate, in the middle, where you have no coals if you are doing Weber-style indirect grilling.

Turkey takes smoke beautifully. I've never done genuine smoking (which is an all-day, low-temperature affair) but I have added smoke during a normal two-hour grilling and it works very well. It's not really Thanksgiviing tradition though. I especially like to smoke turkey parts other times of the year. But it's apparently hard (or impossible) to get the skin crisp. Two friends have grappled with this unsuccessfully.

One friend, Dave, hot smokes a turkey and says that if you use a pan to catch the drippngs, you get a wonderfully smoky gravy.

Frying

In 2006, I finally fried a turkey. It's very fast and works really well. The method has potential but I had a few issues.

• The dry rub blackened (even though I was careful to avoid spices that contain sugar. I think I would omit the dry rub.
• It was overcooked. Research led me to expect a cooking time of 49 minutes for a 14-pound bird but after 43 minutes, it was already overdone. Still good, but not perfect.
• I am not fond of using $25 worth of oil on one turkey. You can reuse the oil, but that means frying something else big in the following month.
• You need the gear. Not an issue for me since I use a turkey fryer to brew beer.
• Then there is the matter of 3-1/2 gallons of boiling oil. It's possible to do this safely but a mistake could be costly.
• And as with smoking and some grilling setups, there are no drippings, so the gravy suffers a little.

Vertical Roasting

There are various vertical roasting products on the markets and my friend Linda swears by (actually, rahes about!) a clay upright, the Cocorico (which she got at Napa Style). I have not tried it and wonder if my oven would not accommodate a turkey in the upright position. She says it's tight — she has the rack at the bottom, sticks with an under-14-pound bird, and it means the oven is not available for anything else.

I saw George Duran do beer-can-chicken with a turkey (Foster's Lager's 24-oz can was required). I do like beer-can chicken but I'll not be trying this one.

Dressing

Everyone knows that stuffing the bird is a food safety no-no because reaching 160 degrees inside tends to ruin the breast. But if you insist, put the dressing in a cheesecloth cloth bag, microwaving it so it is quite hot, and then placing it inside the bird. Alton Brown of Good Eats re-addressed the stuffing question in the show titled "Stuff It."

More on Brining

How long do you brine?

I usually do it overnight but have been leaning toward shorter brines. Turkeyhelp.com has a detailed brining formula with variations for longer and shorter brines (or at least, they had one — they keep moving their links around). I use 2 cups of kosher salt or 1 cup table salt and 1 cup sugar per gallon of water for 8-12 hours; or twice the concentration for 4-6 hours. You must keep this at under 40 degrees.

You might also wonder what vessel to brine in! If you don't have a pot big enough for a turkey (6-8 gallons), an ice chest is a good choice because you can include ice to keep the food safety police at bay. (Remember: no more than two hours in the 40-140 danger zone). Ice packs or ice both work.

When you're finished, rinse the turkey well, to remove surface salt. Then -- important tip -- dry the bird very thoroughly to help the skin crisp up.

In fact, Cook's Illustrated recommends you start all this a day early and then leave the turkey unwrapped in the refrig for a day, to dry the skin.

Benefits of Brining

• It provides a safety margin for the breast meat. Even if it overcooks by 10 degrees or more, it remains moist.
• The brine seasons the meat, giving it a mild salting that penetrates the meat.
• A brined bird cooks faster than an unbrined one. One source claims that this is because the absorbed water conducts heat into the bird.

Science Lesson

Inquiring minds want to know: How does brining work? And the often-asked question: How much salt does brining introduce?

Geek alert: This is hugely nerdy.

Cook's Illustrated looked at how much water enters the meat and how much remains after roasting. Plain water hydrated the meat just as well but brining made it stay there. Brining and soaking both added 6% to the weight. After cooking, a pound of untreated meat weighed 0.82 lb., water-soaked meat ended up at 0.88 lb, and brined meat was 0.93 lb.

I did a fair amount of research and no one really knows how brining works. It's believed that salt interacts with the structure (probably by denaturing proteins) in a way that helps retain water.

How much salt does it add? I believe the amount of salt introduced is significant but not massive. I have seen some discussions guessing at mechanisms and amounts, nothing iron-clad, but if we assume the added water is similar in concentration to the brine, then an 8 oz serving of meat, which normally contains 120 mg of sodium, has an additional 0.09 tsp of salt, or 225 mg added by brining. That's 350 mg for a half-pound of turkey meat. A slice of bread, and English muffin, or a pretzel rod has around 200 mg. Recommended daily is 2400 mg and for low-sodium folks, 1500.

So it's significant but not greatly so, especially given that it's one of the two great eating holidays.

Ways to Cook Turkey

Someday I'll have tried them all:

• Roasting

• High Roast

• Grilling

• Hot Smoking

• Cold Smoking

• Rotisserie: This is a great method for any meat. Just haven't done a turkey this way. Yet.

• Deep Frying

• Confit: New one I just found, from Mark Bittman, New York Times. He cooks turkey parts as one would duck legs for confit, poaching them slowly in oil. Then he browns them in a skillet and says the results are juicy and tender and the skin cracklin' crisp.