Hope you all are as excited about Thanksgiving as we are! We figured this might be a great opportunity to show you all how we roll, as our garden has a huge play for our Turkey Day!
Our prep always starts 2 to 3 days before hand. Brining a turkey is the only way to roll in our opinion. Once we learned about brining, we went from just liking turkey to absolutely loving it. A well done brine is the literal foundation of a fantastic turkey, we can hardly keep from slicing our bird for pre-dinner snacks on the day!
Our brine is always heavily influenced by our garden! We of course add in our carrots, lots of onions, leeks, celery and garlic, much of which we preserved using “blanch and freeze” techniques over the summer. Our dried herbs also come to the table with whatever we’ve got, usually thyme, sage, rosemary and sometimes others. If we’ve got some fresh herbs, like we do this year, that’s always welcome too. A good citrus component is also a winner here, typically lemons, orange or grapefruit which are in season this time of year. Our goal is to make a highly concentrated, extremely flavorful base that we’ll then dilute, typically by simmering our ingredients with water for about 10 minutes.
One of the tricks to an excellent brine is to dilute your concentrated brine with something other than water. Traditionalists will often use beef, chicken or vegetable stock, but even a broth will work here. Our preference is to use beer, which makes for a dynamic umami flavor with your turkey. Delicate flavors like hops really don’t carry through, but that malty backbone of beer definitely gives the bird an amazing, deep flavor. We’re kind of curious about cider, which should also work, so maybe we’ll try that one of these years.
We brine our turkey in a 5 gallon bucket, dedicated to the purpose. It’s important that the bird sits for at least a couple days to let all that salt soak in. We usually try to rotate our bird once during the process, just to get a nice and solid infusion. It’s best if you can keep your brining turkey cool, so a fridge or even a cool garage will do nicely. If your turkey is a bit frozen still, the brining process will also help to thaw it out a bit faster.
The great thing about going to all this effort is that a well done bird is going to have amazing impacts on the turkey stock that we’ll make from its carcass. Our turkey stock is always a favorite of ours, plus we like using every bit of the bird we eat every year. We’ll take you along with that process, which we’ll be doing over this coming weekend.
Anyway, if we don’t see you before then, we wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving! Hope you eat well and get to use some of that garden that you worked hard for over the summer!
