This is the single most improtant piece of advice. Brine, brine, brine.
It really does make it hard to screw it up. Then, for added scrumptiousness, cover the turkey with between 1 and 2 lbs of bacon, depending on size. This adds great flavor, and provides a good treat for the carver.
This is very, very good advice! I will brine the turkey and make sure there are no giblets anywhere inside of the bird. I will also not use the oven bag. I’ve made at least a billion whole chickens in the last several years (okay, maybe not, but still!) and I’ve got the process down pat. I assume a turkey is just like a really big chicken, right? Right?
Okay, off to look up the Alton Brown information!
Another brining-related tip I picked up from Cooks Illustrated years ago is to air-dry the turkey in the fridge overnight after brining. This allows the skin of the turkey to shed excess water without really affecting the moisture content of the meat, so that the skin browns better and is crispier. It does mean that you need to plan your week so that the brining is complete in time to put the bird in the fridge the evening before you plan to cook it. Just take the bird out of the brining solution, put it on a roasting rack in your roasting pan, use paper towels to blot the excess solution from it, and put it in the fridge – you obviously want to exercise caution about allowing the bird and other items in the fridge to come in contact, to prevent possible contamination.
I’m a purist when it comes to brining – salt and sugar only, no other herbs or spices. I haven’t done laboratory testing to confirm this, but I suspect that a lot of the herb/spice advocates are fooling themselves (no offense to anyone who does), since in many cases the compounds that give herbs/spices their flavor/aroma are oils, and unlike salt and sugar, they’re hydrophobic, not hydrophilic. Others are potentially not able to pass through the cell membranes in the muscle tissues of the meat. That means that unlike the salt and sugar, they don’t permeate the meat – at best they sit on the surface, which you can accomplish just as readily (and probably more reliably and predictably) by seasoning the bird before cooking.
Also, while it should be obvious, if you’ve never done it before you may overlook it: if you’re using a frozen turkey, you need to allow time for it to thaw before brining, and it may take a couple of days in the fridge for a large bird to thaw completely. That means possibly beginning your prep up to three days before your target date – two days to thaw, another to brine, and then overnight to dry the skin before you roast that sucker.
I agree that a lot of the herbs and spices added to the brine don’t really translate to a appreciable difference in flavor, but I tried a soy sauce based brine last year, with some peppercorns and lots of sage that worked really well. The bird did not taste like soy sauce at all. The umami in the sauce just really enhanced the “turkiness” of the flavor and the sage as well. The soy really seemed to work as a booster for the other flavors, similar to how MSG behaves.
This is what I do; soy sauce, bourbon, brown sugar. It definitely enhances the flavor over just straight sugar, salt and water.
Also i let my turkey thaw in my brine. I bought a special 5 gal insulated cooler. I fill it with the frozen turkey and brine and then top of with ice every day. It stays cold and after a week in there I can pull out a defrosted and brined turkey.
This brings up an interesting question: Brining, how long is too long?
Bacon!!!
BACON!!!
It is literally impossible to over add bacon to a turkey. And the yummy fat will impart flavor to die for.
Excuse me if someone already said this and I missed it, but if you have clean up concerns (and if your NYC kitchen is anything like mine, you do) there’s no shame in a disposable roasting pan.
Roasting is not one of those things like pan frying where having a nice heavy object between the food and the heat source is key. If you use a roasting rack, the turkey won’t even be touching the pan anyway. Buy a couple sizes ASAP before the stores run out, it will be the best $3 you ever spent. 
Only word of warning is, be careful taking it out of the oven, because the aluminum can buckle when you hold the pan by the edges.
I have never tried baconing a turkey. Does the bird still get brown?
Actually for safety, I’d strongly suggest putting the pan on a cookie sheet.
One loses the traditional look, but I sacrifice that for having two pounds of bacon to eat while carving, and the taste of bacony goodness in the breast.
You could also take the bacon off for the last half hour I suppose.
If the salt content is right, I think it would keep indefinitely (I wouldn’t try it for more than a few days, though), but after more than 48 hours or so it starts to sort of “pickle.” It gets salty and mushy.
If you put the bird in frozen, it takes longer for this to happen.
I’m open to trying a new brine this year. I smoke the turkey (I get invited to a friends for the day itself, so smoke one for a leftovers party on Thursday), and I use hickory chunks as my smoking wood.
Any ideas?
How is the gravy when you do this? Do you do this when brining (and so would the drippings be far too salty)?
We use an outside-the-bird stuffing recipe that calls for quite a lot of bacon, so it might be overkill in our case, but it sounds like a tasty option.
I’ve never noticed an issue with the gravy, to be honest. I should add I am English, and English gravy and US gravy are different things. I also stuff the cavity of the turkey with oranges with the skins cut through in multiple places, and that might help lower the salty taste of the juices.
Here’s the one we always use:
It’s sweet, so I wonder how it’d do with hickory (which I think of as imparting a sharper flavor). But I bet it’d be faboo with maple or applewood smoking.
I’m thinking that offsetting the smokiness with apples roasted in the bird would be good too.
Yeah, pretty much. Your thawing/brining/cooking times are increased because of the size, but the process is pretty well identical. Brine it if you’re going to do that (I often don’t bother with chickens for everyday dinners because I’m lazy like that), dry the skin so it will brown nicely, season it, put it in a roasting pan and bung it in the oven. Pull it out, tent it, let it rest, then cut it up and nom. No sweat.
Dio, how well it browns depends on how much you cover up with bacon. I’ve never done it with a turkey, but I’ve roasted many a chicken with crumbled up bacon over the breast and it browns just fine. If you’re festooning the whole thing with whole pieces of bacon I’m sure it’s a different situation. I suppose if you wanted to get the best of both worlds, you could slide bacon under the skin like you do with herbs and such–the drippings would be right on the meat instead of sliding down the skin, and you wouldn’t have anything to interfere with browning.
Interesting side track about smoking the turkey. Smoked turkey is awesome, but I smoked a turkey once at holiday time, and it just didn’t taste right with the other normal side dishes, especially the gravy.
We had the exact opposite experience, but I suppose a lot would depend on your brine, the wood you smoked with, and the exact recipe for your side dishes and gravy. Most of our side dishes involve traditional baking spices, or cumin or paprika, all of which tend to work well with smokey flavors. But if you leaned more toward the sage/thyme flavor profile, I could see it not really working all that great.
As it is, though, we don’t bother roasting turkey at all. We usually do two small birds instead of one huge one (more drumsticks for snacking and more carcass for stock-making), and the first year we smoked one and roasted one. Nobody ate the roasted one because they were all too busy snorking down the smoked. So now we just smoke both of them, which massively simplifies the whole oven ballet.