Trust Me! Take The Spatchcock Express!

Here's a great memory of my very first time roasting a spatchcocked turkey, and my case for spatchcocking your Thanksgiving turkey...  Norman Rockwell was a painter, not a cook!

I know it looks like road kill but...

It's happened...  I've drunk the Kool-Aid...

I will quite probably never cook a turkey any other way.

Yesterday [Thanksgiving morning!], I spatchcocked the Thanksgiving turkey!

All that actually means is...

I cut out the backbone, then made a little slit on the membrane covering the keel bone, flipped the bird over, pushed down until I heard a fairly loud snap... and then roasted it on a cookie-cooling-type rack set in a sheet pan at 450 for 85-90 minutes.

And that, as they say, was that.

Crisp mahogany skin, juicy dark AND white meat... with no basting, no flipping, no nuthin'.

Does it look like Norman Rockwell?  Absolutely not.  It looks a little more like Norman Rockwell ran it over with his car... but I've never been a fan of carving the bird in the dining room anyway.

We had mashed potatoes, peas, cranberry chutney, sage dressing using my homemade bread (seriously... it's as big a revelation as fresh sage), and quite possibly my finest gravy to date (partly because the base was my homemade chicken stock simmered with the neck, backbone, and giblets... except the liver).

A wonderful evening by the fire... a 12-pound turkey cooked in 90 minutes... How lucky can you get!

 Originally posted on November 29, 2014

Leave a comment