 I left the bone inside the leg because who doesn't want to hold a turkey leg like this? Turkey is juicy on the inside, golden and crackly on the outside. It's a reason to gather together around a table. It's elementary. I'm going to share the Spruce Eats quintessential go-to roasted turkey recipe that you're going to want to share with all your family and friends. When we're all done with this, you're going to know what makes turkey turkey. I'm Heather. I'm the editorial director of the Spruce Eats, and I'm going to make roasted turkey, a spatchcock turkey, which is, in my opinion, the most delicious turkey, and a deep-fried, country-fried, crackly, crunchy turkey. There's a lot to talk about with turkey, but the main thing that I want you to know is if you can cook a chicken, you can cook a turkey. This is our basic recipe for how to roast a turkey. Okay, so you have this bird. You've taken it out of the package. You often have to go inside and see whether the neck and the liver and gizzard are inside. They're very good pieces of meat. They're not that common here. A lot of people just don't know what to do with them because they're not something that you encounter every day. This liver is just good if you like liver, or if you don't like to eat innards, you can cook them on really low heat and feed them to your dog or your neighbor's dog. I'm putting them in a pot because I'm going to cook some stock while I cook my turkey. Don't rinse your turkey. When you rinse your turkey, the splashy germs go all over your kitchen, so just dry your turkey with a paper towel. I'm going to slide my fingers underneath the skin of the turkey between the skin and the breast meat, and this really isn't for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, you don't have to do this. You can put herbs under here. You can put melted butter underneath here. I'm going to just add salt because I just like the really simple flavor of it. I have a little bit of salt in a bowl because you obviously don't want to put your hand back into the salt bowl with turkey juice on it. So it's all seasoned under the skin, but put it face up on a rack. The rack will hold your turkey snugly inside. You slip each wing underneath, and it will sit high up in this, and the air will circulate around it, and it will cook really evenly. Now we're going to just pop some of these aromatics inside. I'm going to cut up this onion. If you keep your onions in your refrigerator or your lemons, just bring them to room temperature. It's going to cook from the outside in, and anything cold in the cavity is going to keep the inside of your turkey cool, which you don't want, and that's why I don't like stuffing a turkey. Because if you stuff a turkey, you basically ensure that you're going to overcook the outside. You can put in thyme, some rosemary, anything that's going to steam up a little bit and just scent the inside of your bird is what you want. And then I'm going to put some oil on the skin, and then I'm going to season it with a lot of salt. I put a lot of pepper on this. I'm going to spread it all over the wings. Turkey is tricky because the breast meat is really, really, really tasty and at its most delicious at a much lower temperature than the thighs. What you want to do is you want to not trust the legs. Don't stuff it. Put it in the oven with the legs towards the back because that area stays hot if you have to open your oven to slide something else in. Every single time you open the oven door, it loses sometimes 40 degrees and then it has to climb back up. So every time you open your oven door to peek, and every time you open your oven door to put in something else, you have to add a few minutes to your thyme, and that just gets really complicated. So what you want to do is try to avoid opening your oven. So it smells incredible in here and our roasted turkey is done. Really, look at this crackly skin. So in order to test it, I'm going to poke it into the breast and I'm going to look for it to be about 158, 159, 158. Okay, I'm going to check it in another couple places. Sometimes it's different temperatures in different places. Like this is going to be way, way hotter than this, than the middle of this. The heat's just evenly going from the outside towards the center. So different parts, you just want to make sure that it's safe to eat. On the sides, the thighs are already 165, so they're going to keep cooking for a little while while I wait for this to rest, and it's going to be amazing. Now I'm going to move on to my favorite way of cooking turkey, which is spatch cocking. It's the most delicious way to cook a turkey, and it takes a fraction of the time because the turkey is flattened out. It solves the problem of the leg meat wanting to be a higher temperature than the breast meat because the legs are actually a lot thinner when they're flattened out and the breast meat is pretty big still, and so this makes the legs perfect at the same time as the breast is perfect. I'm going to show you how to do it. I am going to cut off the wing tips because nobody really eats the wing tips. They just kind of get in the way. To find the joint, you sort of articulate the wing, see where it bends, and cut it exactly where it's bending. Take out the wishbone, and it just makes the whole thing easier to carve. Take your finger and feel there is a bone on either side of the breast meat. Take a knife with a thin point and find that bone. Draw your knife along it, and then you're going to take your kitchen shears and cut the top of it. Snip, and then you're going to just pull it out. Okay, wishbone. I'm going to make a wish on it later. This turkey has its leg joint is right here, and you can feel it because when you move it, you can tell where it's moving. It's right here, so just know where that is. They're right here. You want to take a sharp knife, and you want to cut down the spine, so you're going to do part of the work with a knife and part of the work with scissors. You just cut through until you find the actual joint, and then you take the leg and you just pop it out. Same thing on the other side. Once you have the legs out of their sockets, the rest of it is just scissor work. I'm going to turn the turkey around, and I'm going to cut through. Don't be afraid of the noises, and take your time. You want to snip at a time. It's pretty gory. You're cutting the spine out of a bird. Snipping, snipping, snipping, snipping, snipping. That's in the instructions. The word snipping four different times. The thing that's amazing about this is that most butchers will do this for you, and they will give you a turkey that's already spatch cocked. But I wanted to show you how to spatch cock it yourself. I'm going to give my work friend the bones for gravy. Todd? Yes? Do you want this for gravy? Absolutely. I can use that for the stock. And I have some like a neck and some a gizzard. Great. I can take it all. I did the liver. Maybe not the gizzards, but those are kind of for the birds. Okay. This is what I'm taking? Okay, cool. Okay, bye. Thanks. So I'm going to season this side of the bird with salt and pepper, and really you want every bite to be well seasoned. So you have to compensate with a little bit of extra salt. So the bones are gone. The turkey is now really floppy. I'm going to turn it over. I chose not to use a roasting rack because I want to make a gravy. I'm just going to use this cut up onions, celery, and carrots. So now here's the moment that can be a little bit intimidating for people, but you basically want to flatten the bird. So you're crushing it with all of your weight until it snaps. So you hear a pop. I held my breath, and now I'm a little bit dizzy. So I want to talk about some of the differences here. Obviously, this is breast up just like the standard turkey. The legs are obviously not in their normal position, and the wings are spread out. They're not tucked in because you want this to cook quickly. That's the whole entire benefit of this batch of cock turkey is you don't have to cook the turkey all day long. You can start about two hours before you're ready to eat. This is my herby butter. You can brush it on if you have a pastry brush, and then I'm going to season it up with a little bit of salt, now a little bit of pepper. You want every bite of this turkey to be the most delicious bite. Okay, now it's time to check on the spatchcock turkey. It should be done. Look at this. I just know, because I've made this enough, I know how delicious this is going to be. Let's check the temperature. This is good. This is 159. So I'm going to let this rest. Like you always let roasted things rest so that the juices redistribute, and everything stays juicy when you cut it. All of these three turkeys are cooked in slightly different ways, but the thing that they have in common is that if you want juicy turkey that's delicious, you have to cook it to the right temperature, and you just have to make sure the breast is the right temperature, and the thighs are the right temperature, and it's going to be amazing. The second variation on this is deep fried crunchy country fried turkey. It's like a crunchy outside. You crunch through it. It's super flavorful, and then you get to this juicy, incredibly tender, perfectly cooked inside. We're doing a brine in this one, and it's a buttermilk brine. Buttermilk has enzymes in it that actually break down the inside of the turkey a little bit so that it becomes a little softer, and it's definitely a little bit juicier, and then we're going to add a lot of spices. I'm going to make the spice mix for the whole entire thing. You mix a little tiny bit of it into the brine, and I have some ginger. This is like the secret ingredient. It's not really a very good secret, because you guys all know it now, but this dried ginger is really good. You could use fresh ginger, but I like dried ginger because it has a really big punch, and then this is poultry seasoning. It doesn't have any salt in it, and it just has a mix of sage and some other powdered spices. I'm going to use some of this for the breading, and I'm going to use a little bit of it in the brine, and some of the flavors will sink deep inside of my turkey pieces. I'm going to add some eggs to the brine. Buttermilk is amazing because it's creamy and it's sour. I'm going to add two tablespoons of salt. Okay, and then I'm going to take my turkey pieces, which I've removed the skin. Skin on chicken is good. Skin on turkey underneath the fried batter is a teeny bit tough, so I prefer to take it off. And then here are my breasts. I'm going to cut these into about four pieces each, so I'm going to coat all the pieces. What happens when you have a salt brine is that the salt is like, I want to be equidistant the way that birds wind up on a wire. They're all like the same distance apart, and so if there's less salt inside of your turkey and more salt in the brine, the salt molecules will like make their way into the turkey, and so that really like everything evens out over time. That's why it's more flavorful and more juicy. So, I have this turkey that has been brining for about eight hours, and over here for my coating I have flour, baking powder, I have my spice mix that I made, and some salt, and I'm going to mix in the brine. And what this does is it makes really, really bumpy crust. You just want the clumps to sort of form on their own. I want the legs to start frying first because they take much, much longer than the other parts. Oh, I left the bone inside the leg because who doesn't want to hold a turkey leg like this and eat it? That's why. I left it in there because it's really a big pain to take out, but also it's just super fun to grasp a turkey leg and eat it like that. So, I'm pressing this on here because I want it to stick, but I don't want it to be smooth. I want it to be bumpy. Do you see this? Do you see these bumps? These are going to become brown and crispy and crunchy. This is not a simple, easy, squeezy, neat and breezy recipe. This is like you're frying, you have frying oil, you are breading. Here's what I think you should do. Start on Tuesday, put the brine in, bread them on Wednesday, cook them on Thursday. They can hang out in the refrigerator on this rack overnight and it's actually completely fine. They get draw, they get a little bit drier and they get even a little bit crispier. I would like to know in the comments below if you end up frying your turkey wing, you cut it into little pieces and deep-fried turkey fingers. Do you make turkey nugs? Do you make turkey tendies? Do you call them tendies? I just really am curious, like what are you going to do with this recipe? What seasonings are you going to put inside of it? What sandwich are you going to make out of it? I have to say the thing I like about this, a lot of people don't like this, but I love this because it's like playing. Like who doesn't want this? It's time to fry. This is 350 degrees. It's half full of oil. All right, it's going to be bubbly. Like that sound is the whole reason, the reason for the season. I have to say the first time I deep-fried anything I was a little bit nervous. The thing you want to do is you want to just get really low, you want to really avoid splashing. You know these are done because on the thermometer they are 170 degrees, so they're not going to be done while they're in here. You move them onto the sheet pan when they're just golden brown. It takes about 10 minutes to really get them to be very, very well cooked and crispy on the outside. They'll be partially cooked, not cooked through the middle. The other thing that you want to know about deep-frying, not all of the oil goes in. If it's the right temperature, the steam on the inside of your piece of food presses the oil out and that's why you want to cook at a pretty high temperature because you want to vaporize the liquid inside of what you're cooking so that the oil doesn't like go in and sog everything up. I just want to like share this with you. Look, this is going to be your dinner. So these are mostly cooked, but I'm going to finish them up in the 350 degree oven. Here's what happened today. I made three different turkeys. I made a classic roasted turkey, the perfect Thanksgiving style bird, whole bird. I made a spatchcock turkey. This is a fast turkey that is actually, in my opinion, so delicious and perfect. Every part of it is perfect and I made a deep fried, crunchy country turkey, juicy in the middle, crunchy on the outside and now I'm going to eat. I think I'm going to try the breast meat of this one first because it really is like it's the beginning. This is like a journey and the journey begins here. I mean, if all the turkeys could be this juicy, we'd just eat turkey all the time. It is so delicious. It was very, very simple to follow the instructions. You season it, you roast it, you take it out at the right temperature, let it rest, carve it. It is so juicy. Everybody at your table is going to love it. Here's the spatchcock. This is like an advertisement for why to make the spatchcock. This platter looks so much like this platter. This turkey took maybe like a third of the time to cook as that one because of its shape. I'm going to try a little bit of it. It's so juicy. I can taste the butter in it and I can taste the herbs in it, but that's really up to you. The flavor, it's so clean and it's so good. They're really not that different. Mm-hmm. So much turkey. I just actually need to share some of this. I need to share some of the deliciousness and that's exactly how you want to feel when you're serving turkey is like, you just need to share it. Todd? Hello? Do you want to taste some of this turkey? I have so much. What a magnificent spread of turkey. I was hoping that I could share some of it with you. Absolutely. That's what Thanksgiving is all about. It is actually. This is the fried turkey and I haven't tried it yet and I thought maybe you would want to try it with me. Fried turkey? Like fried chicken? Yeah, it's exactly like fried chicken. Looks like it's cooked nicely. Oh, pretty good. Look, it's so moist inside. Oh, look at that. That's incredible. It's better than fried chicken. It has more flavor on the inside and the buttermilk fried. Can you taste it? I actually need to have a little bit. That's quite so tangy. Yeah, that is why. Tender, juicy, crunchy, crispy. PJ, tender, juicy. Yeah, it's so good. What's happening over there? Very sneaky. Almost invisible. Here's what I learned today. I learned that cooking an incredibly delicious turkey is not very hard. All of these turkeys are delicious. All of them have different qualities that are really great. This one's just beautiful and grand. This one is delicious through and through and very easy and fast and this one is like just incredibly satisfying, crispy, crunchy. It's a little bit more difficult and totally worthwhile anyway. So we've been through a lot of turkey time together. We learned a lot. We laughed, we cried and now you know what makes turkey turkey. It's elementary. 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