Turkey

Hi my name is Stacy. Hoping ChefSteps can assist. I have the past several years cooked your deconstructed Turkey breast and legs in the Joule. I was wondering if you have found a way to do the entire turkey whole opposed to deconstructing it? Thanks.

Find more posts tagged with

Recipes Q's

Comments

FrankM_3301

Hi Stacy,

I don't work at ChefSteps, but I can tell you that the main challenge of cooking turkey is that the dark and white meat is best when cooked to different temperatures. Cooking the whole bird is always a compromise. Either the white meat is over cooked, or the dark meat is under cooked. That is why deconstructing the bird produces the best results. It doesn't look "traditional", but it avoids the problems encountered when trying to cook the whole bird.

Brandon_Byrd_40557

It's also a challenge to get a large (or even medium-sized) turkey to a safe core temperature in a short enough timeframe. Bruno Goussault (one of the OGs of sous vide cooking) developed a recipe for a whole SV turkey, but it requires a small 8-10lb bird and cooks at a quite high temperature which would compromise the quality of the breast meat. There's no culinary reason to cook a turkey whole. In fact, there are bunches of culinary reasons not to. The only real reason to do it is because it allegedly looks better. I think that's mostly something that we've been conditioned to believe rather than an objective truth about turkey aesthetics. I stopped doing whole birds years ago and nobody cares, especially since a deconstructed bird tastes so much better.