John's Traditional Roasted Turkey

In our house, John is the turkey master.  He has turned roasting a turkey into an art that will bring people in droves to our door.  His turkey is featured several times during the year, but never more specifically than at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Thanks to his being a part of the Half-Baked Heritage team, we talked him into giving up his recipe for roasting his yummy turkey.  It is a pretty simple recipe, and so wonderfully tender and delicious when you get to eat it!

Johns' Traditional Roasted Turkey
Ingredients:
18-22 lb. frozen turkey (about 15-20 lb. fresh turkey)
2 Tbsp + 1 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp + 1 Tbsp butter (not margarine)
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp rosemary
1/2 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4-1/2 tsp black pepper (to taste)
1/4 c warm water
2 cubes chicken boullion

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Prepare a fully thawed, cold turkey for cooking (remove giblets and such), and place in roaster.  Grind kosher salt, black pepper, fennel seed, rosemary, and sage together in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder.  Mix the 2 Tbsp oil, 2 Tbsp butter, and balsamic vinegar together and baste the turkey.  Spread the spices over the top.  Put the boullion cubes in the cavity of the turkey, then add the water to the turkey as well.  Cover with a lid or tented aluminum foil (do not allow the metal to touch the bird).  Bake in the oven at 450 degrees for 15-20 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees and roast for about 3 to 5+ hours depending on the size of bird (read the distributor's instructions).  When the turkey reaches 130 degrees, remove the lid or foil tent, drizzle the remaining butter and olive oil over the top, and continue baking uncovered until the bird reaches 165 degrees (make sure you are reaching the deepest part of the bird: the meat right next to the breast bone in the back.  If you need to, test more than one place!), then remove from the oven.  Let rest for 20 minutes before carving.  Enjoy!

Please note: I know that there are a lot of hard-core stuffed turkey fans out there.  But to help guarantee the food safety of your turkey, our recommendation is to bake your stuffing separately using the turkey drippings while the turkey meat is resting unless you have a great deal more experience.  No one wants an attack of food poisoning during their Black Friday shopping! Besides, the contents of most traditional stuffings are such that they will often dry out your turkey meat by drawing away flavor and moisture.  So prepare it instead as described in our Stuffing post, and then simply serve it with the turkey to the delight, and possible confusion, of your friends and family.

Another piece of information for all of you that you have probably already heard or seen: America is not the only country to offer a national holiday just about offering thanks.  And we are not even the only ones who do it through putting ourselves into a food coma!

For centuries, even millennia, man has been celebrating his good fortune by feasting himself into a stupor.  The Celts did it with their Samhain celebrations (yes, this was a feasting time to celebrate a plentiful hunt and harvest preparatory to a long winter), the Chinese with their harvest Moon Festival, The Seneca Indians with the "Green Corn Dance", the Iroquois their "Great Feather Dance", the Hebrew "Feast of the Tabernacles", the Greek's 9 day harvest feast honoring Demeter, The Romans' "Cerealia", the...do you really want me to go on?  If you want proof, please simply google "harvest festivals" and read up yourself (it makes for fun reading, but you aren't checking out this blog to read an anthropology textbook).

So, Americans aren't the first to have harvest festivals or thanksgiving feasts.  We weren't even the first to have turkey's happily consumed.  But with the colonization of the "New World" bringing in British Christians who quickly...shall we say 'culturally overwhelmed' the native inhabitants, the new locals began to celebrate the own anniversaries through adopting some native common sense.  These 'early thanksgiving feasts' did not really resemble our modern traditional assumptions, but there were a few things that everyone would recognize and chief among these was, of course, good ol' Tom Turkey!  So when you are drooling over that amazing bird this Thursday, remember that you are also joining in with a large population of ancestors and previous citizens who were more than happy to celebrate the same as you!

One other fun trivia note for you die-hard fans out there: (and this one I'm quoting directly from www.brownielocks.com/thanksgiving.htm) "The custom of snapping the turkey's wishbone, to bring good luck or make a wish come true to the person who gets the largest part goes back to the Romans.  When the Romans conquered England, they introduced it.  And by the time the Pilgrims brought it to the New World, it was an established custom in England for years.  Many word origin philosophers feel that the bone-snapping of the wish bone is the source for the common expression, "To get a lucky break."  The person who gets the shorter end when it breaks will not get his/her wish.  Gotta love carrying on traditions!