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Speed up Sous Vide Turkey Leg (bone-in)?

Noel_Wade_33960

All -

Merry Christmas! I was planning on Sous Vide Turkey quarters for dinner tonight (finished with a quick deep-fry), and had thought that cooking the Turkey leg quarters (bone-in) could be done in 4-6 hours. Upon waking up this morning and reviewing my cookbook recipe, I see that they're recommending 8-10 hours for leg quarters. Yikes! That's going to mess up the whole family dinner timing.

Is anyone perusing the ChefSteps forum on this fine Holiday, and willing to offer suggestions? Should I de-bone the leg somehow? Partially cook it in a different method?

Thanks a bunch, and may your Holidays be bright and tasty!

--Noel

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Chris_Young_80640

Noel:

Two possibilities:

(1) Crank the temperature to 176 °F / 80 °C and give them 4 to 5 hours.

(2) If you have a pressure cooker. Pressure cook for 30 minutes at full pressure.

Note, these will yield a texture that's flaky and tender. But they'll be good.

Noel_Wade_33960

Welp, it turns out we had 3 breasts and only 1 leg (due to a purchasing error) - so we just skipped the leg and did the Breasts (bone-in) Sous Vide at 146 degrees F for 3 hours. They were then rested (in-bag) for 10 minutes before being deep-fried in ~350-degree Canola Oil for 3.5 minutes. I don't have a big enough electric fryer, so this was via a stock pot over high heat on a gas burner. I used a probe thermometer in the oil to chase the target temp - though with 6+ pounds of turkey going in over a short period of time, the temperature undoubtedly dipped a fair bit during the first minute of frying.

The breasts were vac-bagged with 2 Tbs of butter apiece, plus about 1 Tsp of fresh-ground pepper (we were short on peppercorns) and 1 Tbs of Herbs de Provence.

I made 2 mistakes:

1) When vac-bagging the first one, I didn't think about the bones and the concavity of the underside of the breast as a result (which I left facing down during the vac process). The vac pulled the pastic taught across the gap but did not suck out all the air in this area. As these pockets of air heated and expanded, some air built up in the bag as a result. To help with this, I rotated the bag (& meat) every 20-30 minutes to exchange the portion of meat exposed to the "air" and the portion that was fully submerged. This seemed to work well enough and this portion was cooked fully through. For the other portions, I bagged with the bones facing up (breast-meat facing down) and this pulled a much tighter vaccuum over the whole portion and no air built up in the bag.

2) Having used sous vide for more-amorphous objects recently, I counted on the brownian motion of the melting butter to help transport the Herbs & pepper across the surface of the turkey, with a little supplemental massaging of the bag with tongs as I occasionally sloshed the bath (to ensure even heating, as the size of the bird-parts prevented me from using any rack or spacers inside my Sous Vide machine). But the bones made this a lot harder, as did the size and coarseness of the Herbs - and the result was parts of turkey-meat with good flavor, but devoid of herb deposits. In the future, I definitely think an even pre-bagging rub would have been a better way to go.

In the end, though, the result was a juicy turkey with good (though not "bold") flavor. A last-minute SNAFU with some side-dishes (done by another family member) resulted in a rather hurried carving and plating - so forgive the less-than-elegant presentation in the attached photo (and note the large serving fork and photo-perspective hides the fact that these were 2+ pound breasts)...

Hope everyone had a Tasty and Merry Christmas Day!

--Noel

Chris_Young_80640

Noel: Perhaps the family members need to watch this video: http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/get-organized

Just saying...