Check Temperature of Roasted Turkey

Daniel Traster: Hi! I am Daniel Traster and we are here learning how to roast a turkey. In this step, we are going to talk about how to know when your turkey is done.

So let's go ahead and pull it out of the oven. In a lot of turkeys you will often see a pop-up internal thermometer, although those work, we are going to use what professional use, which is an instant-read thermometer. You can buy these in just at any kitchen store and what you want to do because these read right at the tip, is insert this into the breast, so that the tip is deep into the meat in the thickest part of the breast, but not touching any bone. What do you looking for is as far as temperature goes is 165 degrees minimum for a final temperature. You need 165 to make sure your turkey is safe from any bacteria, but you can take it out a few degrees early and cover with some foil to let it carry over and continue cooking.

We are going to put it in the breast and right here we have got 164, just about, that's nearly perfect and we are going to test the thigh, the other place you want to check, is the thickest part of the thigh, again, making sure you don't hit any bone, there we go, right there, and again, looking for a minimum of 165.

Now with thigh meat, a lot of times people like it a few degrees hotter and you are looking for closer to 175, but 165 is the minimum you are looking for. And we are warming up there. It is at 157 right now, it will carry over, if we tent this with a little bit of foil, and it will continue cooking as the external heat migrates towards the center and finish at a nice 165 degrees that will keep it nice and moist.

In our next step, we are going to talk about how to use leftovers after you are done carving your turkey.