 Meat Boy is here for Thanksgiving and I'm going to show you guys how to make the most delicious dry brine turkey and reinforced gravy that you've ever had. Super simple, easy, delicious, not going to get better than this. Let's start with the turkey. In regards to choosing your turkey, here I have a local, organic, soy-free pasture raised turkey. This is about 550 a pound, so for a 14 pound bird, we're looking at around $65. Worst case scenario, you know, your butter ball conventionally raised turkey from your local supermarket, it's been fed GMO corn, soy, you know, those crops were sprayed with atrazine, various agrochemicals, herbicides and pesticides that is stored in the tissue in the fat of the animal and you're going to be ingesting that. Not only that, it's going to have a higher omega-6 content, it's going to be devoid of nutrients. What you're doing by going organic is removing the agrochemical concern. If you remove soy from the feed, you know, you're optimizing the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and the animal is going to get more forage or just higher quality nutrition in its diet and it's going to be more nutrient-dense. You can go pretty crazy, you know, this is actually really affordable, you know, $65 for a 14 pound bird. I've seen some turkeys like $8, $9, $10 a pound, which you end up paying almost $200 for a Thanksgiving turkey. Is it worth it? I mean, I would only pay that much for an actual legitimate wild turkey and you want to make sure you're getting what you're paying for. You know, look at the turkey itself. The flesh should be darker, you know, the fat should almost be yellow in some places. That also depends on the breed of the bird but as we could see, you know, this isn't your typical run-of-the-mill turkey. The flesh is darker, the skin is darker, you know, the fat has a slightly beige yellow coloring to it. You know, we know, you know, we're getting what we're paying for, maybe not the best but it's good enough especially for a once-a-year thing. The only concerns with this one, you know, might be that the Omega 6 to 3 ratio still isn't ideal and it's not as nutrient-dense as possible but we removed any negative concerns that could be in the meat. This did not come with the organs. Thankfully, it did have the gizzard which I just cut off. We're going to use this later to build flavor in the gravy. If you don't have this, it's not too big of a deal. Dry brine is very basic. You need about three tablespoons of salt for a 15-pound bird. You don't have to be too exact or precise with this. You definitely don't want to over or under salt the bird. Some people use herbs and seasonings and that might be necessary with, you know, a lower quality turkey but we really want the flavor of the turkey to shine here. And you might see some people like go under the skin and do stuff like that but the salt is going to penetrate completely through the flesh over, you know, the 48-hour dry brining period. So this is just a regular, you know, Mediterranean sea salt. I'm going to eyeball it here. Maybe you got a tablespoon and a half on here already. Just making sure to get salt on everything, every crevice, the wings, the legs. Very important, salt the inside of the turkey as well. Reminds me of some New York City grills. Not that there aren't any lovely New York City grills but, you know, a little loose in here, what are you going to do? The turkey is generously salted. Now I'm just going to transfer it to our roasting pan and bring it down to the fridge. This is probably the most difficult part of the whole process. Just having enough space in your fridge to have the turkey for 48 hours. Over the course of 48 hours, the salt is going to draw moisture out of the bird and it's also going to season the bird throughout. So every single bite of this bird will be salty. Most importantly, the skin is going to dry out a bit and that's going to allow us to get a really crispy crust incredibly easily. So we'll see you guys in 48 hours. Man, my hair is getting as wild as a turkey. Maybe I should hop in the oven. So it's been 48 hours and approximately one to two hours before you plan on cooking your turkey. We need to get it to room temperature. So take it out, you know, let it sit on the counter and we have a few things to get ready for the gravy. At the simplest, all you need for your gravy is some chicken stock or turkey stock, whatever stock, as well as something to thicken it. We're going to use a roux, which is a classic French combination of flour and butter, typically used to thicken sauces. I'm using high quality raw grass with butter and an heirloom variety of wheat. If you have allergies or don't want to use that or you're a carnivore, you can use beef gelatin to thicken it. There's things like arrowroot starch, potato starch, corn starch, bunch of different ways you can thicken your gravy. You can even just reduce it so much that it actually gets thick. So again, bare minimum, chicken broth, any broth and your thickening agent. To me, the best way to do this is to layer it with flavors like every classic French stock. This doesn't take too much more effort and even if you did put in more effort, it's not going to be much better than this. So we have mirepoix, which is two parts onion, one part carrot, one part celery, and you want the classic French stock seasonings of bay leaf and thyme. If you do have turkey organs, turkey gizzards, we can use those here as well. And one little secret is kombu, aka kelp, which is seaweed. Japanese use this in their stocks, their broths, their soups, and it adds a whole new layer of flavor. It also adds quite a few minerals, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. So all we're gonna do is put half of the mirepoix in the roasting tray with the turkey, roughly half. All right, so just like this, we have a nice little nest in the middle for the turkey. I don't like using the rack because the bottom of the steel is gonna retain some heat. And since the dark meat usually takes longer to cook, we want that heat on the surface area of the bird. We don't want the bird sitting on a rack and not getting heat on the bottom. So turkey in the oven, 500 degrees Fahrenheit, 30 minutes. Then we're going to lower the heat to 350 and cook it to temperature. If it gets too brown at any point, just cover it with foil. This is where you really need an instant read or probe thermometer. The biggest mistake people make when it comes to poultry is the cooking temperature. And regardless of dry brining, regardless of all these cooking methods, the most important thing to get right is that you get that bird to the perfect temperature because that will yield a moist and delicious meal. So we want the white meat to be at about 143 to 144 degrees. Then it will go up to 150 after taking it out of the oven. The meat still retains some of the heat from said oven. And we want the dark meat to be about high 160s, 167, 168, then it'll go up to 175. Since the dark meat has a higher moisture content, it tends to retain a higher heat, a higher temperature. So don't worry about one cooking before the other. In the meantime, while that turkey is in the oven, we're going to prep the other things we need for our gravy. One extra thing to note is, if you want to add some aromatics to the turkey, like cinnamon or apple or lemons, like you can stuff the turkey cavity and it will make your house smell really good, I don't really care about that. For our gravy, we need to sweat the other vegetables as well as prepare our roux. So two pans on the heat, butter in both, medium heat, turkey parts go in the big pan. While the turkey is browning in the pan, we're going to add equal parts flour to the smaller pan. And don't be afraid if it yet too much, you can always add more butter. We want to add flour till this is not really wet. For those of you that don't know, this organic, iron-corn, whole grain sprouted flour, much less inflammatory than modern meat and it's also much more complex in flavor. And for what it's worth, the protein content is higher, less carbs, more nutritious. So this is where we want the roux to be texture-wise. We just have to cook the flour because it's raw flour being put into this pan. We want to get rid of that raw flavor. Turkey's a little bit brown. Now we're going to add the other vegetables. So you got the onion, you got the carrots, you got the celery. Now, if there is a lot of turkey fat in your roasting pan, you can actually make this roux in the roasting pan itself, but this is just a safe precaution. So we don't really want to caramelize these vegetables and we just want them to expel a little bit of their flavor. Some recipes call for a dark roux which is where you cook it a little bit longer. It really brings out the nuttiness and the flavors of the grain. I just can do that if you'd like to. Very easy to burn it though. All right, the roux is done. We're going to set that aside. So in total, the vegetables are going to go for 10, 15 minutes depending on the size of your pan. You know, if you're not too bright like cranky boy, you'll have a pan that's a little too small and it's going to take longer. But again, we don't want to caramelize these. We just want most of the vegetables to be translucent. The vegetables have been sweating for about 10 minutes. You really don't want to overcook these here because they're going to be simmering in the gravy for like half an hour, 40 minutes. So this is really perfect. You know, everything's translucent. Pretty much raw on the inside though. It's been half an hour. We're going to rotate the turkey and lower the heat. A little bit of color on top. Nothing too crazy yet. One thing I didn't mention, make sure the turkey is as low in the oven as possible. Too close to the burner on even cooking. So now we're putting it on 350. It's been about an hour and 15 minutes. Turkey looks nice and golden brown. We're going to check the temperature. So you want to get really deep, close to the bone here for the breast. And about 149. So actually a little over where we want to be. And the leg muscles are way higher, about 175. So we went a few degrees over where we wanted to but should still be okay. To make our gravy, we're going to take the turkey out of the pan to rest. Now this needs to rest for an hour or two preferably. About as long as it cooked. And now you can see we have a lot of liquid. I'm going to put this on the heat. Since this is mostly liquid, we're just going to build our gravy right now. So I'm going to add the vegetables in that we sauteed earlier. And keep in mind these vegetables were sauteed and butter adds a whole new layer of flavor to this. I'm going to put in two bay leaves and a little bit of thyme. Maybe like a teaspoon dry. Kelp, I'm going to add about two sheets. And then we're going to pour in our chicken broth. Now I'm going to do two whole containers. And that might seem like a lot of chicken broth but this is going to reduce a lot. And the reason I like this brand is it has a little bit of fat in it. The fat is where the flavor is. Might be hard to find a brand with fat in it but you can always make your own. So we need to bring this back up to a simmer. And then I'm going to start incorporating the roux. And then we have to reduce it for 20, 30 minutes. Move the pan a little bit, try to get some triple burner action see if it gets this hotter quicker. I'm actually going to add another container of chicken broth because there's a lot of solids in here and the seaweed absorbed a lot of moisture. So I'm going to season this with a bit of salt. I'm going to put in a couple tablespoons of the roux. The starches in the flour are going to bring everything together. And it's going to have more of an opaque color to it. Now the reason we're doing this in the roasting pan is because it's easier and you know we're scraping up all the brown bits from the turkey cooking. But at this point I can transfer this to a pot since I'm having a hard time bringing this to a boil but I think we'll let this go for a few more minutes. And then the rest of the roux. And since we brown that flour this roux smells really nutty. It's almost like chocolate. They could eat this by the spoonful if you wanted to. I'm going to let this boil another 20 minutes or so and we'll see where it is. When you have a thicker sauce like this you want to make sure to keep scraping up the bottom especially where the burners are. So it doesn't burn. So if your gravy's on the thin side you can add more roux or you can increase the heat a little bit and we'll reduce it quicker. The main goal is to just have these flavor components in the stock together, you know for 20 to 30 minutes over heat so that they incorporate before we strain out the solids. Even though this looks like a lot of gravy keep in mind we have to strain this out and there's quite a few solids in here. So it's a little bit misleading. It's been stirring for about 20 to 25 minutes now and the texture of the gravy looks great. Keep in mind when this cools off a little bit it's going to get much, much thicker. So we're going to strain this right now. We're just going to strain this through a mesh and discard the solids. One last thing you could actually add is you know some alcohol, some acidity. Sherry vinegar would be great for both of these. You could add some Sherry wine as well as some type of like apple cider vinegar or something. When you do this you don't really want to press on the vegetables. You just want to move them around make sure all the gravy goes through. If you press on them you might get some unwanted sediments in the gravy. Quite a bit of gravy. Not as much as it looked like in the pan. Took about an hour in change to make that gravy so the turkey can definitely sit for a little bit longer but I want to get to bed at a reasonable time tonight. We're going to try a piece of the breast. Now this smells like turkey. For those of you guys that watched my vegan cake and egg and cheese yesterday didn't exactly smell like turkey. Flavor's very prominent, retains this moisture. I've never been a fan of the white meat that much. I usually like the thighs. So I'll take a piece of those, just grab a piece of dark meat. Pretty good. I'm just not a fan of turkey. The difference between this recipe and other ones is that it's really moist. The one thing that makes turkey good is the moisture content. The flavor is never going to really knock you off your socks. It's never going to have this amazing texture but if it's moist, it's good. So of course you have to try a piece with gravy. Oh my God, that gravy is, this gravy is crazy. You'll forget the turkey. Legit. Not gravy, it smells good. All right guys, so what I would do is, don't bother getting the turkey, just make that gravy recipe. I'm telling you guys, you will want to drink this gravy. No Gina, I think you've eaten enough today. So I was going to have my mother taste the turkey with gravy and my sister being the little piggy that she has ran down asking to taste it. So I guess she can have a little bite too. I just came to gaze upon my brother's handsome face here. And it is not store bought. The gravy's my favorite part. It's so moist and delicious. Well there you have it ladies and gentlemen. My brother Frank is a very good cook and ladies he's single. He can cook and do it all. Please date my brother ladies, please. Did Gina taste the turkey? Yeah, she tasted it. Actually I know that what's the difference. I can't get it on my roll. What are we in like a? This is a spa. What's that temple in like the Middle East called? Bratahj Mahal. Happy turkey day y'all. Am I even on camera? Not yet. Now you are. Hey, happy turkey day. I just want you to see this. Doesn't it look amazing? It's for my baby. I have to tell you, this is the dark meat. It's so perfect in color. I don't know if you could see that, but it's amazing. Okay, it's amazing. It's so succulent and Gina can't stop eating the sauce. I would marry his sauce if I could. Well ladies he's single. He's mad out there. Please date my brother. I'll give you whatever you want. And so is Gina by the way. Shut up mom. This is so amazing. Look, I'm cutting it and I don't even need a knife. It's so tender. You could drink the sauce. What time? Do it right now. What? It's amazing. If I could find a man that can cook like you, I can be considered very lucky. If you watch this video and do what my son said, you're gonna have the most perfect turkey and happy Thanksgiving to all. Man, is that what I really deserve? They steal my food, leave me with the dishes to wash, tell other women to take my money. Well, thank you guys for joining me. If you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon. Of course, share the video if you can. You guys do wanna support me further. Check out Frankie's free range meat. We didn't have turkeys this year, but we have rib roast, Wagyu untrimmed rib-eye roast for Christmas. So definitely check that out in about a week. You can also go to Frankie's naturals for minimal ingredients, minimally processed hygiene and cosmetic products. If you guys would like to reach out to me for health consultations, you can send me an email, frankatefinalatgmail.com. Everything is down below in the comments, guys. Thanks again. Enjoy your Thanksgiving. And if you're Canadian or not in America, sorry.