Brine and Dine

By popular demand, I've decided to talk about my Thanksgiving turkey. This was the first one I ever made. It's one of those things that I've seen my mom do a million times, (well, probably not a million, probably around 34 times actually) but I've never done it myself.

I was going to go the traditional route and roast it just like my mom had always done, but then I saw Alton Brown from the Food Network do a brine, and I thought I'd try it.

Basically, you make this solution out of a gallon of vegetable stock, salt (a lot of salt), peppercorns and a couple of other things. Then you mix that with another gallon of water, put it in a container and soak the turkey in it for several hours (mine wound up being around 12 hours). The funniest part about all of that is that the stuff for the brine cost about twice as much as the actual turkey!

Another one of Alton's tips was to start the roasting at a really high temperature for 30 minutes, and then turn it down. I also got one of those probe thermometers and roasted it to the proper internal temperature instead of by time.

It came out of the oven looking beautiful as you can see:



And it tasted wonderful! It was the most moist turkey I can ever remember having. My dad even thought it might be slightly undercooked when he started to carve it since it was so moist, but it wasn't. I highly recommend the brine thing if you are making a turkey (or I'm guessing it would work with a whole chicken too).

To round out my almost completely Food Network-inspired meal, we had Paula Deen's corn bread stuffing recipe that my mom made, Paula Deen's cranberries (sliced cranberries with cream cheese and pecans slathered on it), rolls, mashed potatoes and the other big hit of the day - sauteed broccolini from the Barefoot Contessa. If you want any of the recipes, let me know.