Roasted Turkey

Phil Anderson: Hi! I'm Harris Teeter's Executive Chef Phil Anderson and we're going to do a roasted turkey. This is about 22 pound turkey and we've got some seasoning that we are going to mix altogether and put it all over. First we are going to pre-heat our oven to 450 degrees. Any large piece of meat you want to sear off at a high temperature and then about one-third of the way into it, you want to turn it down and then slowly roast it. So first thing we're going to do is we're going to tie these legs together with a little bit of a butcher's twine, and this is to make sure that the turkey cooks evenly. So we are just going to tie this lady up. Now we've taken everything out of the center of this turkey. So all of the giblets and the neck and all that is taken out. Let me take this, we don't need that. Okay, then we're going to take two tablespoons of Extra Virgin olive oil, we're going to make a little paste. So a tablespoon of pepper, a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of onion powder and a tablespoon of garlic powder. We will make a little paste here. I'm going to take this and rub it all over this bird, every little nook and cranny, yeah. Now you can also do some stuffing but you want to make sure that the stuffing is cold, you don't want it to be hot because that could cause some food poisoning and you don't want that. Okay, so we've got all those nice seasonings on this bird. We have our oven temperature at about 450 degrees for about -- preheating maybe 10 minutes. So now we're going to put this baby in there and we are going to roast it off for about 20 minutes. I will be back in 20 minutes. Okay, we have had the turkey in 450 degrees oven for about 20 minutes and then we lowered the temperature down to 325 degrees. Now we're going to cook that turkey for two-and-a-half, three hours at that temperature. The most important part is the internal temperature. When we insert the thermometer in the thigh area of the turkey, it should read about a 180 degrees. We will know that the breast meat will about a 165 degrees. There is going to be some carryover cooking but that the safe way of cooking the turkey. So we're going to remove it from the oven now.

Oh, that's smells good. Right there. Okay so, right in the thigh area between the two bones, yup, yup, 180. 180 is exactly what we want. Now the important part here is before you slice it, you want to let it rest because all the juices, they don't know where to settle yet. So you give it about 10 minutes and then you can go ahead and start carving. Okay, there you have it, a delicious roasted turkey. Enjoy!