Food Theory: You're Cooking Your Thanksgiving Turkey WRONG!

[Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that's given thanks while wearing spanx that's right theorists here in the u.s it's time for thanksgiving where tradition dictates that we take time to pause and reflect on all the good things that have happened in our lives and also stuff ourselves with an irresponsible amount of food we're talking pumpkin pie sweet potato pie yams stuffing gravy cranberry sauce some casserole or another and of course turkey go ahead name a more iconic duo than thanksgiving and turkey i'll wait see a roasted turkey is the undisputed centerpiece of the thanksgiving feast not only is it huge and stunning to look at if it comes out right that is but it's also a huge undertaking the first time i hosted thanksgiving the turkey was this harsh intro into adulting everything about cooking the turkey is hard for one thing it's just a huge time investment first you have to purchase the bird at a time of year when everyone else is looking to purchase the exact same item then the mere act of thawing the bird takes literal days then you've got the brining and the cleaning and the seasoning to worry about before you even start cooking it and that is also gonna take a huge amount of time the general rule of thumb for a turkey is 15 to 20 minutes of cooking per pound of bird that means a 15 pound turkey translates to about five hours of roasting and then once it's in the oven that's when things actually get hard because roast in a whole turkey is a high stakes proposition it would be one thing if you were just cooking for yourself but at thanksgiving there's an entire group of people eagerly awaiting the turkey the moment it comes out of the oven screwing up your thanksgiving turkey is not an option and yet it's highly likely that you will screw it up because we're talking about a huge fickle piece of meat that's actually two different types of meat sandwiched together white meat and dark meat which it's worth noting cook very differently from each other which leads me to the question does it really have to be this hard thanksgiving is supposedly about family coming together and yet thanksgiving requires at least one member of the family to devote pretty much the entire day focused on the turkey i get that it's a tradition but wouldn't it be great if there was a way to emphasize the non-stressful traditions of thanksgiving instead like watching the thanksgiving day parade or even better the dog show that comes immediately afterward i mean there has got to be a better way we are in the year of our lord 2020 why have there been no advancements in turkey technology and yeah there are certainly other ways besides roasting a full turkey every year plenty of people across this great land cook their turkey in a variety of ways from smoking to sous-vide to deep frying to stuffing it with a duck that's stuffed with a chicken to create the abomination we call the turducken but most of these methods involve even more work if i may speak for my fellow americans and also for canadians who celebrate thanksgiving in october what what we all want the classic thanksgiving turkey experience but we sure wouldn't mind if the process was just a wee bit easier well theorists what i'm about to tell you might very well change your thanksgivings forever apparently a turkey shortcut does exist and it is significant all you have to do is take the dang turkey and spatchcock it i can say that word right youtube please don't demonetize me it is a cooking term and if nothing else it's the holidays after all so strap in your turkeys today's food theory is myth-busting the supposed thanksgiving hack and i do mean hack spatchcocking also known as butterflying if you're boring and hate funny words is a fancy word for a simple process you cut out the bird's spine or you ask your butcher to do it for you then press it down until it's flattened out before you shove it in the oven everything else can still be the same if you're used to brining it you can still brine it along with any other seasoning method that you've been using over the years but by doing this one small thing not by changing our cooking method but by changing its shape before we put it in the oven we can actually cook the turkey at a higher temperature which cuts way down on the amount of cooking time needed reportedly by about 75 percent let me say that again one additional prep step can turn a four hour turkey into a one hour turkey now the concept of spatchcocking has been around since at least the 1800s but as google trends clearly shows the term has really only caught on in recent years and searches spike early november mark bittman of the new york times who published his spatchcocked turkey method back in 2002 deserves the credit for popularizing this specific method you have to take out the backbone the idea here is to get the surface area of the bird bigger than it was before then you want to flatten this thing there we go you have been slaving over unevenly cooked turkeys that took four hours to do this is 35 minutes and it's good so let me just tap on the breaks here for a second am i supposed to believe that this is actually the first major advancement in turkey roasting since the 1800s if spatchcocking is such a long-standing method of preparing foul am i supposed to believe that society just overlooked the fact that this outrageously efficient method could be applied to turkeys when all along they were using it on ducks and geese and other sorts of birds until like very recently like humanity what are you doing with yourself one possible explanation for why society might have been slow to catch on to the ways of the spatchcock is that we want our norman rockwell moment when the thanksgiving turkey gets presented at the table rockwell was an artist famous for painting americana and his 1942 painting entitled freedom from want famously depicts a huge fully intact bird and encapsulates abundance and americana and thanksgiving perfectly there's definitely a presentational aspect to thanksgiving dinner after all there's a group gathered and the meal takes a tremendous amount of effort so why shouldn't it be a big show of course there's other potential explanations for why we might not spatchcock our turkeys and these are a bit more concrete maybe it doesn't work maybe it's not actually more efficient at all because it produces a lesser bird drier meat less crispy skin i mean let's be honest that it can reduce cooking time by 75 is a massive claim seems too good to be true like there's got to be a catch right sure the cooking time is shorter but maybe the taste suffers maybe the texture suffers however spatchcock enthusiasts online seem to be suggesting the exact opposite many people swear that spatchcocking actually gives you a more even bake and in fact improves the bird in addition to saving copious amounts of time when i hear a claim this bold about something so simple you know that i gotta put it to the test the scientific test that's why i enlisted the help of stephanie the undisputed turkey master in our household to help me pull off a head-to-head matchup or i suppose i should say a headless to headless matchup between a spatchcocked turkey and the classic roasted turkey that our family's been enjoying for literal years nearly a decade it also helps that stephanie knows cpr i figure it can only help us when we get to the part where we have to crack the ribs against the counter first we bought two identically sized 13-pound turkeys then we prepared them the exact same way including a 48-hour brine and butter under the skin i can't believe i have to do two of these this year the only reason you started this channel was so we could have more turkey on thanksgiving it was my master plan the entire time and then it was time for our two turkeys to take two very different paths one was selected for spatchcocking and was named spatchcock the turkey and the other was named sherman because that was the only other good name that we could come up with at the time so we're in the final prep stages for both of these birds uh we have the regular one we have the spatchcock one these two methods are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing which is an even cook but this one involves a lot of temperature up and down a lot of fancy stuff and this could change thanksgiving forever yeah the spatchcock layers everything out so the meat is all on the same playing field so presumably it cooks one faster and two more evenly so you're not getting the breast done while the dark meat is and things like that exactly so i think we i think we actually have to do this now i think we have to like like butcher this bird are you are you saying that that bird is spineless i should also mention both turkeys are getting cooked with the neck that i don't know if spatchcocking is getting us censored but you holding up that that definitely isn't turkey now i'm so secretly this is my favorite part of the entire thanksgiving birthday man this is the video that launched the thing i know [Applause] man my like inner country bumpkin doesn't come out very often apparently only at thanksgiving so we went about cutting out the spine with kitchen shears okay stephanie went about cutting out the spine with kitchen shears i cheered around from the sidelines i know mark bittman opted for the boning knife but shears are another option that many spatchcockers suggest this is actually really difficult is it do you want to give this a shot okay here please get in get in this let me uh let me take off my great gt live merch oh just get in the turkey all right let me take off this amazing game theory signature jacket buy that merge it wasn't easy but between the two of us we eventually got the spine out there we go there we go okay yes we did it there's there's the backbone you know our cuts weren't necessarily as clean as some of those online cooking channels but for a first timer i think we nailed it i right totally nailed it oh you touched my hand with your dirty turkey hands i washed my hands while we were cut thought we were high-fiving for the next step we had to let the knife quote glide through the collarbone we're gonna let the knife glide glide light stuff it's gonna oh it's kind of glowing it kind of glided a little bit it did it did a little gliding and perfect okay that's great all right oh yeah there you go open we let the knife glide look at that all right now now we perform the cpr cpr ready wait hold up stephanie before you do cpr you know you have to do the abc's survey the scene survey the scene scene is clear everyone back away matt make sure you're clear call 9-1-1 you call 9-1-1 airway his airway is clear yes but he's not breathing he's missing a large chunk of his top he's not i'm not getting any breaths check his pulse certainly no pulse beginning cpr crack the ribs ready ready and one oh would you crack my dick crack six seven eight nine ten breath breath okay i think we did it i think he's sufficiently dead all right we have it we have he's he's spatchcocked he's ready to go so this is it this is the finished bird all arranged spatchcocked ready to go salted seasoned everything we're putting it in the fridge while we prep the other bird because he's only supposed to take 30 to 45 maybe an hour tops to cook whereas our other guy's supposed to take multiple hours so in an effort to get as clean of a taste test as possible we both want them coming out of the oven at the same time so sherman went into the oven first where we tended to him with all the temperature adjustments and repositionings that a classic style roasted turkey requires while it's in the oven when sherman was about an hour from being done we put the spatchcocked turkey into the second oven all right for the big reveal here is regular turkey our norman rockwell turkey he would be very proud i feel i think so too we achieved a nice golden brown this is pretty much exactly what we wanted this turkey to look like so success there so this bird took three and a half hours to cook it was flipped twice first down and then back up again it was covered with tin foil and then uncovered we did all the things and it came out pretty much exactly the way we wanted yeah this is pretty consistent to how it always looks yeah so this is pretty darn good and now for the spatchcock i feel like this is a really nice golden brown there's also this weird cleavage shot up here which is very strange but i i i can't decide maybe i'm into it i don't know whoa hey steph [Music] so in the battle between spatchcock versus traditional roasted turkey round one visual appearance what do you think i have to give this one for me to the spatchcock i do too it's beautiful it's golden brown it's super even it looks shiny it looks like the picture of a turkey should look except that it's flat right this guy even though we did our best and euro again stephanie has experienced in this multiple years in a row there's just no way that you're getting that nice even browning on every part i gotta say like visual appearance if this is showing up on the table i think i'm liking this one a little bit better i know but you know you're not eating with your eyes it's a feast for your mouth eating with your teeth the teethy parts that's right so let's eat with our teethy parts and carve this puppy up we're starting with white meat so i'm gonna start carving into the rest of this one that does look like a really nice piece of get in here with this detail shot man look at look at that juice look at look at that glisten see how glisteny that is okay so this spatchcock also looks very tender i have to say uh it's it's feeling very juicy as i cut into it yeah each getting a nice slice here and it's coming off like basically the same part of the breast it's right on the outside like this should be a very even test so from a crispiness of the skin standpoint i would i would kind of call them both even for me [Music] see i'm not much of a skin guy spatchcock they're both pretty crispy honestly had a decent crisp to it let's see let's see regular roast sherman [Music] yep pretty similar though again i would say the crispiness of this skin looks more even across the board whereas sherman over here it's crispy on top obviously and it's got crispy on the side here yeah but when it comes down to crispiness on the wing that's where you're really starting to fall off that's true so here more of the wing is crispy and more of the breast is crispy whereas here it's pretty much all focused around kind of the top and main part of the bird so to me honestly i think i gotta go spatchcock on this one it's just crispy and even throughout whereas here definite solid bits of crispy but once you get into the wing you start falling off there's just no way of creating that same surface area with the 3d bird that you get with the spatchcock so that has to be the tiebreaker the overall evenness right all right spatchcock again okay what are we tasting first i nominate sherman let's go sherman sherman first traditional roast first here we go okay nice can cut it with the fork and is that more it's really yeah you don't need a knife for either oh man that was really good i like yours that's really good turkey makes me so happy it's really moist it's well salted it tastes seasoned it's a little bit buttery it's exactly the way it should be the best we have two thanksgiving turkeys this year i'm very excited about this and both of them were a business expense yes so got that got the sherman implanted on your tongue okay let's go for spatchcock [Laughter] i think i have my answer i think i do too i can't believe this which one it's special right it is i can't believe it like i'm mind blown by this i am too and i stand by my turkey cooking method any day of the week but the spatchcock turkey tastes better it's just a little bit moister it's just slightly more delicious we did the exact same thing to both of these birds and yet this one tastes a little bit more flavorful somehow yeah this one is falling apart in my mouth that much more it has a little bit more glisten it's a little bit juicier it's a little bit moisture right yeah yeah and again for half the time less than half the time it just bears mentioning because this is youtube this is not rigged at all we legitimately did all of this all day yep i i kind of wanted my method to win because like i did too i've been wasting my time all these years this one is better i did two that sucks i know final round dark meat this is never your cup of tea but i'm curious to see if maybe you like the spatchcock one i'm into it i'm all about give me a big turkey leg with a bunch of barbecue sauce i'm all about it right after the neck again stephanie she's a bit of a weirdy poop uh we did sherman in round one first so let's do uh spatchcock first yep let's go over here [Music] i thought sherman was moister on the dark meat yeah is that because it's sitting in the juices yeah it's so moist because at the end of the cook it's face down and it's just soaking up juices it's like really marinating and it's already been crisped up for the majority of the cook so it stays nice and brown although conversely because it has been sitting face down in the juices though the meat is juicier i agree the skin is soggier again because it's just sitting in juice whereas here in spatchcock land the skin is crispier all the way through but yeah the meat is slightly less juicy i will say sherman is a little bit better on the dark meat also it is fair to say that three out of four tests went to special oh yeah final verdict in the turkey battle 2020 are you cooking your turkey wrong clickbait challenge i think we are cooking our turkey wrong i think steph and i have been cooking our turkey wrong since how long we've been doing this thing eight years ten ten years since the decade that i've known stephanie we've been doing it wrong i think spatchcock is the way to go i am literally gonna cook my turkey this way next year unless of course you wanna deep fry it in which case all of this is moot so there you have it theorists spatchcocking made believers out of us and it might just make a believer out of you too but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit thanks for watching theorists and in the spirit of the season let's give thanks to our sponsor for today's episode bright cellars steph and i have mentioned this in past food theory episodes but we absolutely love trying and learning about different sorts of spirits and wines we're what we call educational drinkers where we like learning about alcohol and taste testing a lot of them and learning about the history and being able to like identify interesting things and the flavors of them and that's what makes bright cellar such a great choice for us as casual drinkers all we had to do was take a super simple seven 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Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,243,675

Rating: 4.9533224 out of 5

Keywords: thanksgiving, turkey, thanksgiving turkey, food, recipe, holiday, thanksgiving recipe, thanksgiving turkey recipe, recipes, holiday food, holiday recipes, best way to cook a turkey, cook, cooking, recipes thanksgiving, thanksgiving leftover, food theorists, food theory, matpat, game theory, film theory, binging with babish, stump sohla, rosanna pansino, eat the menu, without a recipe, thanksgiving dinner, thanksgiving recipes, thanksgiving 2020

Id: 18gAmfhDqT4

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020