DRUNKEN TURKEY

DRUNKEN TURKEY image

Number Of Ingredients 20

Ingredients

turkey
3+ bottles of inexpensive red wine (sufficient to cover at least 1/2 of bird)
onions
butter
lemon
1 bottle white wine
soy sauce
apples*
small handful or so of each of the following:
bay leaves
thyme
cilantro
pepper
garlic cloves
HELPFUL TOOLS:
bucket
garbage bag
turkey turner utensil set
flavor injector / syringe
meat thermometer

Steps:

2-3 DAYS AHEAD: Make a marinade by grating the onion, bay leaves, thyme, cilantro, pepper, and garlic together and mixing with the wine. Marinate the turkey for 2+ days in the refrigerator, leaving it well covered. Turn it twice a day. (Personally, I like to put the bird in a garbage bag in a bucket for this step.) Remove the bird from the refrigerator to clean it. Dry it and then leave it to warm to room temperature. Preheat the over to 350 degrees. Inject the bird all over with a mix of soy sauce and white wine, the proportion of which should be agreeable to the taste - not salty. Mix together salt, pepper, melted butter, and some lemon and baste the bird with it. If you choose not to stuff it, you must nevertheless fill the cavity with white onions and/or apples cut into big pieces to keep the bird moist. Or, use the stuffing that you normally do. Strain the red wine marinade and set aside so that you can use it to wet the bird several times during the cooking. Cover the bird with tin foil and put in the oven, breast down. Wet the bird with the strained marinade every 30 minutes. Cook until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees. Towards the very end - more or less 45 min before it is ready- turn and uncover the turkey and grease it with more butter so that it turns brown. However, if it starts to brown too much, re-cover it with the foil. (I don't put it on broil because it burns when I do this.) Leave it to cool to room temperature, bathing it often with the hot broth it released during the cooking, but having removed the grease beforehand so that it is not too fatty. Carving should be done in such as way so that the knife is perpendicular to the carcass - that is, each slice should contain meat close to the outside and to the bone. Drizzle with either the juices from cooking or gravy as you carve, to keep it moist.