Thanksgiving dinner preparations have begun. I don’t mean shopping and menu planning. Who has time for that? I’m talking about mental preparations. Making sure my mind is sound, ready and up to the occasion.
For there is no place for a weak mind on Thanksgiving when you’re the one doing the cooking. That’s how people die, a ladle sticking out of their chest or a cork screw protruding from their temple. Some can’t handle the pressure, crack and get sent off for professional help, screaming, “I told you it was too early to start the stuffing!”
Cooking on Thanksgiving is really a cocktail of skills, tricks and mental fortitude — 2 parts food, 3 parts high-wire juggling act, 2 parts actual skill, 11 parts self-doubt (“I just can’t take the heat in the kitchen!”), a pinch of moderated crankiness, and a peeled carrot for decoration.
Over the years, my specialty has become “turkey two-way.” That’s when the breast is cooked to perfection — golden brown with a crispy, glorious crust that breaks your heart to carve — and the dark meat underneath is perfectly raw. I’m always assured of one dark meat guest getting an extreme case of salmonella poisoning. They abruptly depart the dinner table, and for the rest of the meal we hear strange noises like bulldozers in the sewer pipes coming from the bathroom.
I don’t know what it is, but I never get the dark meat just right … or even cooked. One year the dark meat was still frozen after hours and hours in the oven. When my mother asked for a leg, I wrapped the joint in a paper towel and handed it to her like a popsicle. “Make sure you eat it over your plate,” I told her. “It’s going to melt and drip everywhere.”
Part of my problem may be that I never thaw my turkey early enough — usually just 5 or 10 minutes before it’s time to go in the oven. I’ve had years where on Thanksgiving morning I used a hammer and ice pick to chip out the bag of giblets from the body cavity.
“No, it doesn’t have to be fully thawed,” I will tell my disbelieving wife as she stands over me, tapping a foot. “Look it up in a cookbook: ice cooks just as fast as meat. It’s scientific fact.”
I know you’re supposed to use thermometers, but every time I insert one in a thigh it shows the temperature to be hovering just above freezing. It’s obviously broken! So instead I gauge it by holding a hand over the golden breast. I count the seconds until I have to jerk my hand away from the heat, do a quick calculation, and find that the turkey is a balmy 725 degrees — or right about perfect.
Yet, the dark meat is nowhere near ready, which causes me to panic, curse wildy and yell at the secessionist dark meat for thwarting my perfect holiday. “Now get back in there until your juices run clear!” I demand.
Therefore my goal this year is to evenly, and completely, cook the bird. No lagging behind. No parts left to stew in a bath of lukewarm turkey juices. This is the year that the dark meat will also rise to perfection.
I’m not sure how I’m going to do it. I’ve thought about sawing the bird down the middle and cooking the two parts separately. I could then stack them back up for the ceremonial carving. It would also be the world’s first convertible turkey.
I’ve thought about blowtorching the dark meat first, making sure it’s good and singed before throwing it in the oven. I could call it blackened Cajun dark meat.
I’ve thought about baking the turkey and then moving it to a large cast iron skillet where I could fry it the rest of the way in bacon grease. Can you imagine how delicious that would be?
More than likely I’ll probably just use a V-rack so heat can circulate below the turkey, or I’ll cook it dark side up, and then flip it.
But any way you look at it, I’m focused, I’m prepared, and I’m not going back to that special hospital again.