Is my homemade turkey better than a fancy 300 turkey? A portion of today’s video is sponsored by Typhur. In the red corner, we have the cheapest turkey dinner that we could possibly find. This is the roasted, carved, white meat, Hungry-Man turkey TV dinner that costs about $4.49, depending on the store you go to. Over here in the blue corner, we have Harry and David’s. Choose your own adventure turkey dinner that costs about three hundred dollars with all the sides, but yet to be seen is, my that’s a heavy bird, yet to be seen in the middle is my homemade turkey that I am going to use precision culinary technique to achieve the absolute juiciest bird you’ve ever had. And we will have a judge blind taste test all three to see if they can spot which is the cheapest, which is the most expensive and which was made with love. There’s no love in that. Love costs extra. Before we get to turkey cookery, we have to first talk about turkey math. Now, many people think that turkeys are 10 percent luck, 20 percent skill, 15 percent concentrated power of will, 50 percent pleasure, 50 percent pain and 100 percent reason to remember the name. However. Thanks. However, I’m here to tell you that turkeys, I would say they’re about 12 and a half percent. Some sort of brine. That’s the only way to get seasoning all throughout the turkey. If you put a turkey right in the oven, you can baste, you can do whatever you want, but you’re not seasoning all the way through the bird. That’s why we’ve opted for a wet brine. So we put a heck of a lot of salt and some sugar along with lemons, onions, uh, and garlic and some random herbs that you have. You also have leftover herbs, throw them in there. And we let this sit in the fridge for two full days. It can also dry brine it, but dry brining gets you good crispy skin. I’m not too worried about that. I want the moistest flesh possible. 87. 4 percent of that. We’re leaving 0. 1 percent for miscellanea, just in case. Rosemary’s 0.1 percent of turkey math. Uh, but 87.4 percent of that is going to come from internal temperature. You have to nail the internal temp of a turkey. And the only way to test for that truly is with a very accurate thermometer, but there are some tips and tricks. Ooh, God, I still have one. Like catfishing in the Ozarks! Except this one don’t bite you back, there’s so much stuff stuck to it. This here’s a paradox. White meat turkey, they say you should get it to 160 degrees, which is the internal salmonella kill temperature. Uh, however, if you get it to 155, as long as it’s there for 30 seconds, it is safe. But 160 is what the USDA recommends. Speaking of salmonella, just wash everything. You don’t have to wear gloves. Really scrub down like a freaking surgeon when you cook this in your house because water droplets do spray everywhere So 160 for the breast, dark meat, however is much better at higher temperatures all the way up to 185. What I’m going to shoot for is pulling this bird with the breast of 145 to get 15 degrees of carryover cooking Up to 160 and then I’m going to pull the dark meat at 160. You see the problem here. We need this to be 15 degrees colder than that. So what we can do is we can try and get this warmer with this colder before we ever put it in the oven. Check out this ingenious method. I call this the turkey kuzzi. That’s right, it’s a portmanteau of turkey and jacuzzi. How many times a year do you cook turkey? Right? Like you might as well put in the extra stupid effort to get it as good as possible. You know what I mean? So we’re going to take this. Put this into the 120 degree water. You want the legs and the thighs to be in warm water. So we need to prop it up on a bowl there to leave the breasts out. See, the legs aren’t covered yet. So I’m going to take some more warm water here, pour it in. This is like turning on the jet. Someone turn a knob that is broken because it never actually works. There we go. There we go. Get this up the legs, get this up the legs. Some of the legs are still a little bit exposed, but again, having that warm water right there is still going to get that up to temp the higher it is in the oven, generally the more it’s going to heat. So we need to get this cold ice packs. I tried using a method. I called hot ice. Where I microwaved the ice to get the cooling power of ice, but the heat of water and it did not work. So that is how we developed the ice pack method. That joke is stolen from a movie. If you comment what movie it is, I’ll give you ten dollars. Next year. Next year, not this year, next year. So the idea is, this breast is going to get down to about say 35 degrees. We want to bring the dark meat up to about 50 degrees. That way it has a higher starting point when it goes into the oven. Meaning, it will end at a higher finishing point. I need a, I need a full shower. Do we have one of those chemical showers like they have in high school chem labs? The turks out of the turkuzzi! And we got the breast cold. We got the dark meat warm, uh, now what we’re gonna do, I’ve already, I’ve just kept a little truss that’s already on the back of the legs, that’s just gonna keep them kinda like, I’m gonna have to do it up here, it’s gonna keep, like, you know? Um, and then, we need to keep the wings inside, that’s gonna help it cook evenly, so I’m just gonna take a toothpick, there’s ways to actually truss it with string, I don’t know man, toothpicks always been good enough for me, and so I’m just gonna pin the wings in like that, right through the skin. into the breast. Now what we gotta do, we gotta make a compound butter. You don’t have to, but I love rubbing the entire turkey down in super flavorful butter. So I’m gonna take a ton of chopped garlic, put that in the softened butter, lemon zest. The idea here, all of these things are incredibly fragrant and they’re going to perfume your bird. That’s like, that’s the 0.1% That’s the 0.1% is the perfuming of the bird. It kind of really is though. It’s like the thing that separates a great turkey from like a greater turkey is having the actual aromatics in there. So. Zest this here lemon. You don’t really need to salt the outside of the turkey. We’re going to add salt to the butter. But the salt from the brine should be all through the meat and all through the skin right here. I’m going to add a whole lot of fresh cracked pepper into this as well. I think black pepper, lemon, garlic. Come on, that’s a good flavor combination. Keep it going. Yum! Alright, we’re using unsalted butter here cause I believe in adding your own salt levels to it and you want to make sure it’s soft enough to be able to gently mash with a spoon like that. That way, we need the butter to be malleable so we can get it all around the skin and all underneath the skin flaps of that bird meat. What a laborious process. It all comes together in the end though, man. Cause you know why? Cause you’re cooking with love. And you’re cooking with thanks in your heart. There we go. Perfect. Remember when I was talking about needing like a real hot shower earlier? You’re gonna have to do it again because you’ll see. Well, no, check this out. I’m gonna, I’m gonna put the aromatics in here first because then I want to be able to just get real schloppy with the butter. Um, there’s a Tom Hardy movie where he gets naked and covers himself in butter and that’s, that’s, that’s, this is an homage to Tom Hardy. I think you’re a fantastic actor. Uh, Especially that scene in Bronson. No CG in that. I forgot I was gonna stuff one of the, that’s going to the hole. So like I said, what we’re going to do is we’re gonna stuff the turkey with some of these here herbs, and then we’re gonna put a lot of the aromatics and all that underneath. Those are going to go, yeah, hold on. There it is. What that’s going to do, the steam is going to rise through the herbs, and then it’s just going to perfume the bird from the inside out. Heck yeah. And then here, we’re going to roast the bird on top of all of these aromatics, and then all of those drippings and steam are going to sort of condensate down there. And then we’re going to use that into our gravy. So you don’t got to peel nothing. We’re going to be straining this off, turning that into our gravy. Oh, mushrooms. Mushrooms are fun. They’re like nice and earthy. Roasting rack. You don’t need a fancy roasting dish for your turkey. You don’t need a roasting rack. You can put this directly on top of here, but I like keeping a little bit of barrier. You want to make sure it’s nice and even. There we go. I like keeping a little bit of a barrier. And that way when your turkey’s done, you can just lift this out. It’s nice. They sell these, break it out once a year. If you want to make like a prime rib, you can also do that. So. Butter, baby! It’s time to do it. Ain’t nothing to it but to do it. Hand! You’re not gonna like what’s happening next then. So we’re gonna take that butter, there’s a membrane that holds the skin to the meat so what you have to do is kind of like jimmy your hand under there. This is it, cooking is beautiful and cooking is disgusting and that can be a truth that you hold simultaneously. Not only that, you want to get, you want to get in there. So you want to get to the dark meat, too uh, and then now, you’re just gonna smear the butter all over the turkey and then we’re gonna lift it into that Anybody got like a good, good song you can play while I’m doing this. Nothing too sexy. Well, you see, you know how you don’t have to wash your legs because the soapy water runs down that it I’m serious. Like, okay. For legal reasons, wash your legs. People are weird, but, uh, the butter is going to run down. It’s going to all pool there and it’s all going to be great. So like, you don’t have to be too particular about it because all this is just going to melt into the vegetables down there along with the turkey juice. And we’re going to rebase it with that. So it’s like, uh, it’s like the water cycle, right? But it’s uh, uh, percolate, percolate, we, we, percolate, evaporate, condensate, precipitate. Oh, oh, he listened in third grade. Perfect. And then the only good way to transport it. Oh, I found an onion. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Shuzh that so it’s nice and symmetrical. I’m gonna go wash my hands. And here’s the most important part. Like I said, 87.4 percent of your turkey is going to come down to this. And I have been preaching the values of instant read digital meat thermometers forever. And now we finally have a sponsorship. Let me introduce you to the Typhur Sync Gold. This thing is actually really, really cool. We’re gonna turn it on. Check this out. What you have are two remote probes. And we’re gonna put one of them into the white meat of the turkey. You want it in the thickest part of the white meat. You got a little line right there that you’re gonna put it up to. Don’t get it all the way up to the black. I’m gonna take this thickest part probably right there. Beneath the keel bone. Get it in. Perfect. So we’re going to release probe number two, and I’m going to put that into the thickest part of the dark meat of the turkey, which is going to be right into that depth of the thigh meat. So now that we have our temperature probe set, we’re going to pop this into the oven. We’re going to wait for that breast to get up to exactly 145 degrees and then pull it to get that carryover cooking. And we’re going to wait until the dark meat hopefully is at about 160. If we did our prep properly, it should get there. But there’s no more guessing game. Everybody knows that when you open an oven, you’re letting all of the air out. But, you don’t want to just leave it up to chance, and hope that you pull it out at the right time. Uh, that’s why these digital probes are so cool. You can take this thing, you can, I’m gonna walk away, and wash my hands over here, and it still stays hooked up, up to 3, 000 feet. I could go wash my hands at my neighbor’s house. I could just walk into their home. That’s the power of the Typhur Sync Gold. You can walk into your neighbor’s homes without even asking them. No, they’re not legally liable for that. Don’t, don’t, don’t do that. There’s also a predictive algorithm that will tell you when your bird is going to be done. So say you want to go play a two hour game of tee ball while your turkey’s safely in your oven. You can figure out if you can do that with the typher. It’s actually really, really sick. When people say like 15 minutes per pound, they don’t know what kind of airflow your oven has. They don’t know how much heat carryover is happening inside your vessel, but when you have the actual information of the temperature hooked up to the Typhur Gold you can just give an accurate reading all the time, there’s also an app on your phone but you don’t need to download it because you got this handy little dude right here. Not just for turkeys if you’re making prime rib for New Year’s or something, if you want to make a rack of lamb if you’re smoking brisket and you want to get that perfect internal temp, you can use this, I am really stoked on this product. I’m gonna use this at home, cause I make, like, low and slow grilled chicken all the time. And I generally make it during Sundays when football’s on. And it’s really annoying to have to, like, miss a play to go out and temp check my chicken. And now all I have to do is glance up here, and then, boom, birds win again. We’re undefeated. I assume when this comes out, we’ll still be undefeated. You know, haven’t lost in the last six weeks. Come on, anyone? I’m gonna pop this in the oven. All right, let’s go. Oh boy. This turkey get bigger and I get weaker. And that’s a big old thank you to Typhur for sponsoring this portion of today’s video. Uh, also if you want to become a better, more accurate cook, get the Typhur Sync Gold. It’s a really, really awesome product. All right, we’re at 144 and 167. We said 145 and 165. I think this is perfect now. Like you don’t have to hit it dead on the numbers. I’m gonna pull that turkey right now. I’m gonna pull that turkey. I’m gonna bare hand it. No, I need baseball mitts. Where are the baseball mitts? Can I get a pull that turkey on three? One, two, three. Pull back turkey! Cooking in front of a live studio audience, what a joy. Uh, you guys get your day rates? No, checks, don’t, don’t cash the check for another week. I just need, I just need time, I’ll have the money though, I swear. Look at that bird! Gorgeous, gorgeous browning on it. Pull out. Probes, there we go. So you’ll see some dark spots on here. That’s from the butter browning into it. All those dark spots there are flavor. This is incredible. Why did I take the gloves off? Do not touch that with the gloves off. Uh, what I’m gonna do now, I mentioned lifting the turkey out. So we’re just gonna take this. Yeah, buddy. And then you see the liquid gold, the Texas tea down there. Beverly Hillbillies opening anyways, we got all the pan drippings down there, we’re gonna use that as the base of our gravy. Some people will say use an extra turkey carcass to make turkey stock which in an ideal world you would do that You can buy pre bought turkey stock to supplement your gravy because a lot of this is fat and there’s already going to be some fat In the roux. I’ll just use a little bit of bouillon or something and some water to thin it out if I need to, but I want to get this strained off because I want all that flavor to stay in the system, yeah, look at that gorgeous and then secret technique here Call it the ol whiskermash. Just gonna take that. This is real, man. All that juice is trapped in the vegetables, and you wanna press it out. Yeah, that’s that homemade gravy. This is that gravy that, like, you eat it, and you’re like, there’s no way it’s good for your health, but it’s real good for the spirit. Alright. Mash all that gravy through. Now. Sorry. So now we’re going to get a classic roux going. I want to take this a little bit brown. I’m going to toss in the butter right there. I’m going to take equal parts butter and flour. I always like to go a 7 to 6 butter to flour ratio. Does that track with any of you guys for a roux? You know what I mean? Like a little bit more butter than flour. Just a skosh. That’s almost one to one. It’s almost one to one, but it’s like 13 percent more. Uh, I think sometimes when rouxs get like clumpy, it just makes it hard to like emulsify in. So I want this to be a little bit more buttery. This is perfect. Like I mentioned you can cook this for about 30 seconds, but I want to get this to be like a nice brown. You don’t want to cook it too far because then the flour actually denatures and doesn’t absorb that liquid as much. But you do want to cook the roux to sort of like get a little bit of toast on it. Alright, while that roux’s cooking, I’m gonna crack in a lot of black pepper. I wanna go black pepper and sage. To me, those are like the most Thanksgivingy flavors. And then sage. And while the roux’s going, you can toast up aromatics in it because that’s just fat and flour cooking together. So you’re gonna get a little bit of toast on that black pepper. That’s always a good thing. There’s essential oils in there. Hey, did you know that they replaced the word snake with essential and people started buying the oils again. Shout out to my favorite comedian, Jared Casper. Now, some say I’m gonna switch this to lefty. I’m switch hitting right now. There we go. A little bit of brown on that root. That’s what we want. We’re gonna add that in. I’m gonna whisk it until it kind of becomes a paste. We’re rocking and rolling. Keep whisking through it. No clumps in the gravy. No clumps in the gravy. If you do get clumps in the gravy, throw it in a blender, man. You throw it in a blender, you can pass it through a strainer. Don’t serve a clumpy gravy on Thanksgiving. There’s no excuses. Boom. There we go. Now we see the gravy’s a little bit thin. You can thicken it. You can almost add a little bit of cornstarch. Uh, or you can just let it cook and reduce. Water is going to evaporate out of the system and your gravy’s going to get thicker. There’s the bones of our gravy though, man. That is going to be flavorful. Another thing we could do. What do you guys think? Do we do it? Yeah, this is the secret to so many delicious restaurant dishes called kitchen bouquet browning and seasoning sauce It’s mostly caramel color. It makes brown sauces brown or if you ever see that super super dark brown gravy, that’s generally just caramel coloring a kitchen bouquet, but you add a couple drops of this. I’ll just pour it into the cap first Couple drops of this. It’s just gonna like take away that paleness from it. Do it gradually. Yeah, and then it’ll look like that nice, robust turkey gravy. I’m just gonna check this gravy for seasoning right now. Ooh, ow, hot. Ow, hot. Dude, there, there tastes like there is MSG in there and there is no MSG in there. That is, I think, the mark of a really good gravy. I’m going to season it up a little bit, but I’m also going to let it reduce. Otherwise, this gravy is good to go. We got that beautiful bird right there. That, to me, is good. Start to finish, nuts to bolts. That is how you make the best brined roasted turkey with gravy from the natural pan drippings on Thanksgiving. I am so excited to eat this right now. And I hope our judges too. We’re gonna plate these all up. We’re gonna serve them up. See what they think. Gwynedd Stuart from Sporked.com! Hey! That’s my turkey dance. That was a very good turkey dance. Thank you. You’re dancing in front of their corpses incredibly disrespectfully. It actually is. Like pissing on their graves. Yeah, yeah, super messed up. You have three turkeys. In front of you with accompanying gravy. One of them is the cheapest we could find about four dollars fifty cents The other most expensive we can find about three hundred dollars in the entire meal And then the other is the one that we cooked ourselves. Okay, are you ready to get eaten? I am, eat me baby I will not Alright Gwynedd This is turkey number three. I will be serving you white meat. You can request dark meat I will be submerging all the turkeys in the gravy. Here’s what I think, if the turkey is good then the white meat should be good. I agree with that. and flavorful. Yeah, dark meat’s for soup and burritos. Ahhhh. Okay. Mmm. Is it good? Is it nice? Yum. What sort of flavor notes are you getting? How’s the breast cooked? Is it well salted? Very salty, yeah. But I mean that in a good way. Salty gravy. But a well brined turkey. Very good. Okay, okay. We’re gonna go in. Just gonna carve this fresh off the bird for you. Hold on, give me one second. One second. Got a spirit. All right, all right. Are you ready? Gnawing on that breast meat. Do you want a diet? All right. What are we thinking? Well, I think that this is probably not, like, a very expensive turkey. That said, I actually think it kind of tastes good. It’s like I think the gravy tastes good. It’s very nostalgic tasting. I got you, I got you. Alright, now the final turkey coming in. You ready for it? I was born ready. Yes, you were. Alright. Hold on, hold on, hold on. We’re coming, we’re coming. What is Thanksgiving, your favorite holiday? Uh, Arbor Day, actually. My god, that was invented in Omaha, Nebraska. Was it really? I like how you just opened your mouth right after you said Omaha, Nebraska. Full disclosure, I did drop the turkey all the way in the gravy, so you’re getting a wet bite. I’m shaking it off though. Ooh! But I think it’s like fun. The wetter the better! Mmm! Ah, she’s doing the turkey dance again, right in front of the corpses! Look at her go! Take that! The meat is very tender, and it’s very flavorful, and that gravy is delicious. I love it. It’s very flavorful without being extremely salty. It was not relying on salt for flavor, and I think that’s awesome. Gwynedd, which turkey was your favorite? Um, I think that the last one I tried was my favorite. Which one do you think that was? Cheap, expensive, or homemade? I want to say that one is homemade because the gravy has a wonderful homemade flavor. And really, really, I don’t know. I don’t know where you would get a turkey that would be that well cooked. It’s really good. Quinn, remove your blindfold. That is the homemade turkey. That’s the homemade turkey. We did a lot to get the dark meat up to temp and get that white meat to still stay at that perfect, like, 145 range to get up there, so I’m glad you found that really juicy. You did it. All of the drippings went into that gravy. That’s what makes it so good. I know. Oh, the drippings. You really care, and I love that. I also love the lemon crunch, too. Listen, you eat with your eyes first, but don’t eat the lemons with your eyes. It will burn. Uh, then we had the Hungry Man TV dinner. That one was the cheap option. I feel like you clocked that immediately. We didn’t even give you the red goo. Uh, and then this was the expensive turkey, the one that it is really, really salty in a good way. This is still a really great turkey, though. It’s delicious, yeah. I, I, it’s very, very good. Very well brined. But a fresh homemade turkey cooked to the perfect tent, man. Nothing can beat that. I have taste tested a lot of turkey dinners at Sporked, but I feel like these this style of microwave meal is just like, it is, it’s like what you ate when you were a kid. I love the brownies that come in microwave dinners, too I like how the outsides get a little bit burnt from the radiation Gwynedd, thank you so much for stopping by. What are you thankful for this year? Oh my god, I didn’t know you were gonna ask me that I’m thankful for you Oh stop and I’m thankful for you and I’m thankful for all of you out there. Thank you so much for liking, commenting, and subscribing. Uh, tell us how your thanksgiving was See y’all next time. Get 30 percent off everything for Black Friday and Cyber Monday at mythical. com and use code BFCM2024 through Monday, December 2nd for 20 percent off all plans at mythicalsociety. com.