So I’m putting the sucker into a cold water bath. It’s a 15 pounder and I’m off by about a day of refrigerator thawing (recommended is 3 days, 18 hours - I put the bird down from the freezer Tuesday morning). You can tell that anything other than the breast is still hard and frozen.
How long should I leave it in the cold water bath?
I’m going to guess about 3 hours.
Do you have a meat thermometer? Maybe check after an hour or so.
What temperature should it be at before I cna start coking?
35 is the average temp for refrigerators, so I’d think you’d want to get to as close to that as you can, but I’d personally be okay with a little lower. I’ve cooked turkeys that were a little bit frozen before and it was fine. It’s the finishing temp that matters, I think.
Hope it turns out good for you.
Thanks!
If the turkey is at all frozen in the middle, you may need to add more cooking time than usual, and make sure you test the temperature close to all the joints at the thickest part of the thigh. It’s the slowest part to thaw and slowest to cook. Sometimes that means the breast is a little overdone by the time everything else is good. It’s not insurmountable problem, though.
I know it’s not recommended to use warm water, but if you have a lot of thawing to do, it’s a good idea to do it anyway. Just do it with an thought toward the below 40 F safe zone. Check the temperature after half an hour: If the water hasn’t reached ice cold temperatures within half an hour, then your turkey is probably more thawed than you might have thought anyway - dump it and replace with cold water at that point. This avoids a long period sitting at too high a temperature. If the water is already ice cold within that half hour, then the turkey cooled it down quickly enough to be safe, and I’d replace half of it with cold water from the tap (which is usually 50-60 F not the 32 F of ice cold water).
Depending on what else we need the sink for, I’ve sometime put the turkey in half of our sink to make the water changes easy.
I wouldn’t overly worry about bacteria, as the bird will be cooked to a 165 (minimum) internal temp, which will kill anything that may linger.