Stuffing your turkey

[FlightlessDuck]

That is really interesting.

Honestly, though, he's kind of a nut.

 

[_19disnA]

^^ I agree, Alton's show was more about being quirky then providing useful information. I honestly think he just makes up much of what he says.

 

[ahutton]

I think of him more as a mad genius/scientist. His recipes have never done us wrong.

 

[NotUrsula]

Alton Brown is a food chemist; it's that science geek thing.

I guess I must just have phenomenal luck, but I've always found making roast turkey to be dead easy. I've been doing it for over 40 years and I've never had one go bad yet. Sometimes I brine it, but not always, and I always buy the cheapest frozen bird I can find. I *do* cook the dressing inside the bird. The two things that I always do that seem to ensure the cooking goes well are buying small birds (no more than 12 lbs.), and rubbing down the entire bird very thoroughly with cooking oil slathered on my hands. I roast it in a heavy pan with a rack, and I cover the breast with foil an hour in, but that's about it.

The safety issue with in-the-bird dressing is primarily about the presence of eggs, which are notorious for breeding nasty things when left warm but not hot in the presence of raw poultry.
I never include eggs, and I completely cook all of the dressing ingredients before mixing them; you could safely eat it raw, straight out of the bowl if you wished. As long as I make sure that the turkey is fully cooked, the dressing is just fine ... and quite tasty.

When you are only putting a few veggies/fruits in for flavor, you're using things that are fine to eat raw, and you're not usually actually serving them; they get tossed when the bird leaves the oven. No one will get sick.

PS: the PP who noted that oranges tend to make pan-dripping gravy taste odd has a point; they do. In those situations, I use stock from the giblet cooking for the gravy, not the pan drippings.

 

[Sweettears]

IMHO one of the toughest cooking jobs, if not *the* toughest, is getting the turkey right. It's made of different types of meat which are done at different times. Cooking the dark meat to the right temperature means you're at great risk of overdoing the white meat. Taking the turkey out when the white meat is perfect probably means the dark meat isn't done yet. There are things you can do to even things out a bit, like (my favorite) spatchcocking the bird and/or brining so the white meat doesn't get desert-dry while the dark meat continues to cook, but it's a trade-off.

Now throw in another level of difficulty: stuffing an intact turkey and cooking the stuffing so it's done all the way through. That's just too much for me--bless those of you who can do it and still get a bird that has both juicy white meat and dark meat. I just cook our dressing separately.

If I were going to try it, I'd probably invest in a Thermapen, the best digital instant read thermometer out there, to check the temperature in the middle of the stuffing before removing from the oven.

If you're just putting aromatics in the bird for taste and not intending to eat them, then it's not a problem.

Brining the turkey helps with this as well as it keeps the white meat moist.