Archive for September, 2010
The Truth About Turkey
All along, turkey has been associated to once a year family feasts. You know, the Thanksgiving turkey. The Christmas turkey. Roast turkey stuffed with some yummy stuffing, eaten with gravy or cranberry sauce is a must for the end of the year celebrations.
The fact is, turkey is such a healthy meat, it should not be reserved ONLY
for Christmas and Thanksgiving. You should have turkey as part of your daily
diet. Especially the breast meat of the turkey, without the skin.
The Perfect Thanksgiving Day Roast Turkey Recipe
Once an exclusive Thanksgiving dish, the turkey has now become one of the most common meats we eat today. Any celebration lunch or dinner is given a facelift when there’s an elegant turkey on the party table. It does take a lot of time and effort to prepare the perfect turkey; but it’s well worth all the hard work. A succulent roast turkey is sure to impress your guests.
You could buy fresh or frozen turkey to prepare your dish. Needless to say, fresh turkey always tastes better, but frozen turkey will also do. Just make sure you defrost the turkey well in advance since it takes quite a long time to thaw the turkey.
How to Cook a Turkey – Without Poisoning Your Guests
Why temperature is so important
NB. F = Degrees Fahrenheit and C = Degrees Centigrade
Temperature is critical in determining how long to cook a turkey, for the simple fact that the bird must have reached a uniform temperature of at least 165 F throughout in order to destroy harmful bacteria. You do not want to give your guests food poisoning!
The turkey is a weird shaped food source! – Large body covered with thick flesh around the breast area, large legs made up of dense muscle and a large internal cavity. Because of this, it is not so easy as cooking a single joint of meet for example. The breast meat tends to cook much faster that the dense muscular leg meat, so there is a risk of over-cooking the breast meat whilst waiting for the leg meat to cook thoroughly.