A fellow from work provided this method of turkey roasting that I’ll paste in:
Preheat oven to 475 degrees, wash turkey, rub salt on the inside and out. Put celery, apple, and onion in the turkey cavity. Rub the turkey all over with the melted butter. Put turkey in roasting pan, add the 1 quart boiling water, cover the pan and cook for 1 hour. DO NOT TAKE LID OFF FOR ANY REASON! Turn the oven off then and DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN FOR 8 HOURS! Take turkey out of the oven after the 8 hour period
You must use a regular old fashioned steel covered roaster for this to work.
Has anyone tried or heard of this method? Is it likely that the turkey temperature could fall into the danger zone before it’s removed from the oven and served, assuming that it’s cooked to an internal temerature of 160 or better?
True, but if the temp drops too low, say 140, and it’s not completed the 8 hour thing I guess I’d have to crank up the oven again.
I was explaining it to my Mom and she said she’d never eat a turkey cooked that way because it might be spoiled. I countered with, “how do you know you haven’t already? If you go to someone’s home or eat at a restaraunt you don’t know what they’ve done”.
Nope, and I wouldn’t (knowingly) either. That’s going to be way too low a cooking temperature for way too long for even me to feel safe about bacterial growth - at the end of your 1 hour, the bacteria on the inner cavity of the turkey won’t be dead yet, and that 8 hours is simply 8 hours in a petri dish inside an incubator.
A roast? Sure, if it needed that long. There, as long as you kill the bacteria on the outside, the inside is fine. I’ve even been known to sear a piece of beef on the outside, cut off the cooked bits and enjoy the raw inside - no bacteria on the inside of an intact piece of beef. But a turkey has an inside AND and outside, and the heat needs to get at all that surface area to kill stuff.