How to cook a Turkey in the Ninja Foodi Pressure Cooker & Air Crisper

hi there and welcome to the salt and pepper where we cook for real life using real food and we keep it real simple and today we're gonna start our Thanksgiving turkey prep and we're going to start with making a brine now if you have never brined your turkey before you either roast it in the oven or like we're gonna do we're gonna pressure cook and air crisp it in the ninja food II I really urge you to give it a try just once it really makes a big difference in the moisture and the flavor of the turkey meat so I love to do it I use a recipe from the Pioneer woman for her turkey brine and it is absolutely fantastic it works perfectly every single time so one thing you do want to know when you're picking out a turkey is that you want to get one that has eight percent or less of sodium in it already so some of them are injected with quite a bit of sodium and if you get one of those then this brine would leave your turkey just a little bit too salty now I guess you could probably go down on the salt in the brine and be fine but I usually try to find one that's eight percent or lower and the lower the better but they're hard to find at the regular grocery store so today I'm using the 8 quart ninja foodie but that does not mean you cannot do this in the six and a half quart you can and I have done it the problem is is that I overcooked the turkey when I did it in the six and a half quart and then when I went to the grocery store I could not find another eight pound turkey so for the six and a half quart you will want an 8 pound turkey for the 8 quart I got a 10 pound turkey and that fits in just fine but you could do an 8 & 8 pound turkey in the 8 quart as well too so an 8 pound turkey is probably the best size so anyway let's get started with making the brine what we want to do is for this recipe you can turn the ninja foodie on and start the sere sautee right now and that's just gonna help heat up the 8 cups of liquid so that it comes up to pressure quicker I don't always recommend that because sometimes the time to pressure is built into the cook time and you can throw off your end result by preheating the liquid but for this recipe it's perfectly fine so I'm gonna add in eight cups of just plain tap water and then I'm gonna add in one cup of apple cider now I made this apple cider from scratch and if you're interested in that recipe it is in my fall cookbook which you can get on my website which is the salted pepper calm it's a digital cookbook and it's full of fantastic recipes including this apple cider however if you don't want to make your own apple cider you can certainly purchase the kind in the store that comes in a jug it'll be perfectly fine next we're gonna add in 1/2 of a cup of sea salt this is fine grind sea salt and I know that seems like a whole lot of salt but we're not gonna be using this liquid for anything but brining and we're gonna rinse the salt off at the end so you don't have to worry you're not gonna be consuming this amount of salt and then we're gonna add in 1 teaspoon of minced garlic 1 tablespoon of peppercorns whole 2 bay leaves and 2/3 of a cup of brown sugar then the last thing I'm gonna add in is some rosemary now you could use dried and I think I used about I think I use 2 teaspoons when I used dried before but I have some fresh so I'm gonna go ahead and use that this is about 2 sprigs of rosemary so just throw those in give this a little stir now the only other ingredient that we're gonna put into our brine is an orange peel however because we're gonna go under pressure you do not want to put that in yet you want to wait until after we're finished the pressure cooking the problem with pressure cooking with orange rinds lime rinds and lemon rinds any kind of citrus grapefruit anything like that is under the pressure cook heat it tends to get really bitter and it leaves that flavor all throughout whatever you're cooking and in this case it would be our brine so we don't want to do that but I will be cutting it up and we will add it right after the pressure cook time so we will get the orange in the brine alright so this hasn't had time to heat up much but you know if you took longer to get your ingredients together it might be a little bit hotter but that's not gonna matter for this at all either way you don't have to preheat it all then we're gonna put on our lid here the pressure cook lid and make sure you go to seal because we are gonna go under pressure and so I'm gonna go over here and hit the pressure high is what we want but the time we're gonna take it down to zero minutes I get a lot of questions about that when I recipe calls for zero minutes you know what does that mean well it means zero minutes so you're not actually pressure cooking for any time what you're doing is allowing the pot to come up to pressure as soon as the valve pops and the timer would ordinarily start counting down it'll just go to done and then keep warm then we're gonna do an immediate release but because this pot is pretty full it's gonna take a little bit of time so I would say probably about 15 minutes or so for the pot to come under pressure and I will let you know how long it took after after I time it for you so as soon as that's done we'll do an immediate release and then we will get the brine cooled down you can't put your turkey into the brine when it's hot so we do need to cool it down and there's a couple of ways that you can do that and I'll get into that just a minute all right so the red pin has popped up meaning that the pressure is built in the pot however we haven't started the countdown yet and that took about 12 minutes I'm guessing within two to three minutes we're gonna see the countdown it'll pop to zero and then it'll just look flip over to the keep warm button so in the meantime to get ready I have about three cups of ice here because I'm gonna pour that in to the hot liquid just start to cool it down and I also have my orange here so I'm gonna go ahead and peel that now this orange is pretty stable but if you have one that doesn't sit flat just take a little piece off the bottom like that and then you will have a good flat bottom to cut safely with then what I do is I just take my knife and go around and I'm using a nice sharp knife and I'm trying to get as much of the peel but not so much of this white pith that it's that's what it's called the pith because that tends to be a little more better so I'm just trying to take just the orange peel off and if you get a little bit like there is some in there it's not gonna make a difference but I just try not to get too much of it so just go around the orange here does not matter if they're in small pieces or if you get a nice long slice like I did the first couple times it doesn't matter then I'm gonna flip it over now that's a little Rolly so I'm gonna go ahead and take a little piece off so I can get a better flat surface there to cut and I'm just gonna do the rest of it here now of course you can eat this orange too and I advise you to do that I don't like to waste food so I will cut it up and have it for lunch today alright so there we go we've hit our zero and it's done so no pressure cook time and now we have our orange cut up and we can do the immediate release alright so the pin just dropped it's been about three minutes so expect that it'll take two to three minutes to release the pressure so a lot of steam built in there alright so now we're gonna open the lid do that away from you so that you do not get any kind of steam burns we are really boiling in there alright so now while it's still hot let's add in our orange peels and just give that a little stir then we're gonna add in our ice and start bringing it down in temperature now from here there's a couple things you can do you can obviously just let it cool down naturally just turn the ninja foodie off and just let it cool down naturally or if you want to speed up the process like I do you can fill your sink with some cold water and some ice and sit the pot in the ice bath and then it will cool down much much quicker so what we're gonna aim for is about a room temperature about seventy degrees or so now it can be colder that's no problem but you don't want it much hotter because when we put our turkey in we want it to cool down in the refrigerator pretty fast because we don't want to have it at a temp that could breed bacteria or anything like that but getting it down to about room temp will be fine and then we will put our turkey in and let it brine and you want to brine it for 16 to 24 hours so as soon as this cools down I'll show you how to get your turkey in so the brine has now come down to about 70 degrees and so we are good to go with getting our turkey in and getting it into the refrigerator for the turkey to brine for 16 to 24 hours so what I did with the turkey is I took it out of the packaging because you know it comes in like that vacuum sealed bag so I took it out of that and put it in the sink and I like to rinse my turkey and chickens off in the sink pretty well and including inside the cavity I know there's some controversy about that and they're saying that don't do that because it'll spread Salmonella I bleached out my sink and I'm not worried about that but you don't have to clean it out but you do want to get the insides out if you have a turkey that has the giblets in the neck in there you want to get those out before we go into the brine so I have my ten pound turkey here and I've got the 8 quart remember you can do this in the six and a half quart but you need to make sure you have an 8 pound turkey or less or it's not gonna fit and I also have the sling that I'm gonna use this just makes it easy to pull the turkey and the chicken out of the pot when it's done you do not have to use it you can certainly just put the turkey right in without it but it just kind of gives you some handle so I'm gonna do that so what I want to do those cuz the brine I really want on the breast meat mostly so I'm gonna turn my turkey over and I'm gonna position it because when it sits in the pot it's gonna lift up some so I'm gonna go ahead and position it so that the breasts are right on the bottom of this trivet or sling and then I'm just gonna lift it into the pot here and get it as far down as you can get it and you might have to push it down some and now you know what let me push this forward I don't want to set the bottom of my pan or my pot in there so now what we need to do is fill it up the remaining of the of the way with some water and that's what I have right here it's just just regular tap water I made sure it was cold so it's also gonna cool down our liquid and I'm just gonna pour it in a little messier until it gets almost to the tippy tippy top now this would actually sit better in this pot when I did it before with a six and half quart I did not use the sling and you know what I'm gonna change my mind because I really want this submerged so even that little bit of raised area is just gonna not allow the brine to get all over so I'm just gonna pull it out you know things happen right I'm gonna pull it out make sure it kind of drain out most of that brine pull this off I'm still putting the breast side down put back in you could smell this already it smells so good I'm gonna put back in all the seasonings and put the turkey in without the sling it's fine to cook it with the sling which we probably will do but I want to brine it without it because I want it to be as as submerged as I possibly can I still even with using the 8 quart I would probably try to get an 8 to 9 pound turkey but we are gonna do our best to make sure this works all right now I've got a silicone lid you do not have to use this you could put the pressure lid on top but make sure if you do that that you clean your seal bleach your seal and wash it in the dishwasher and clean your lid really well but I'm going to use the silicone lid that I have because it will pop right on and even though the the turkeys sticking up a little bit it still goes right over so this is a perfect way to store food that's in your inner pot if you want to you know store it in the fridge and then and then heat it up later on so but it's gonna work great for our turkey too so that's what I'm gonna use and this is available on in my Amazon store so I will link to that below for sure it's just a silicone lid and it works it works really well all right guys so now we're gonna get this in to the refrigerator for about 16 hours and then we're gonna cook up our turkey all right so our turkey has been in the brine for about 16 hours now you can brine your turkey 16 hours or up to 24 hours but you don't want to go much longer than that or the meat can end up too salty so definitely just about 16 to 24 hours is all you want the turkey to sit in the brine for and even if you're not gonna make the turkey in the ninja foodie you certainly can do the brining process and then cook it in the oven like you usually do I guarantee you you will love the outcome it is so moist and tender and delicious when you brine your turkey all right so now that it's been brined it's been sitting in there almost completely submerged for the 16 hours now I'm gonna take it over to the sink and I'm gonna dump out the brine and give the turkey a good rinse you want to rinse off all of the excess brine that's there so that you don't have a salty and Turkey so we're gonna do that and then I'll bleach out the sink of course and then we will get the turkey stuffed with some aromatics and then we'll get it in to the ninja foodie to pressure-cook so I rinsed the turkey really well inside the cavity and outside on the skin and then I just sort of let it dry a little bit so it's pretty dry right now to the touch and that's what you want when we put our seasonings on even though we're going into a wet cooking environment you still want to season the turkey before you pressure cook and we're also going to stuff it with some aromatics like I said before and some celery and onion and a little bit of citrus I'm gonna go ahead and use an orange since that's what we used in the brine which you could use a lemon or even grapefruit and you know any kind of citrus you wanted or you could omit it too so what I have here is to just they're small stalks of celery here and I'm just gonna stuff them into the cavity now it's important when you're stuffing the bird that you don't stuff it too much we don't have a lot of wiggle room even in the 8 quart with this big 10 pound turkey so you don't want to stuff it to full so I'm just gonna put it in until I think that it's not like like raising this any I don't want to raise it up and make it even bigger I have four cloves of garlic that I just peeled you don't need to even smash them or anything like that and I just have half of an onion I'm gonna try to fit in there and some of these orange slices and if I don't get a volley and that's fine let's no no big deal but I'm gonna try and then if you get it into the pot and it is too big too full which this doesn't seem like it's doing anything to increase the size so I think we're good but you can just always take some out all right that looks good and I'll just set this right here all right I think we got it all in that's perfect just set those right in there you also want to put some rosemary in and I'm gonna use the rest of this package since first of all my hands are dirty but it's not that much here so this is about two sprigs of rosemary and I'm gonna put those in I think the rosemary is really important and it should be fresh that goes in the cavity I think this really really makes a great flavor of the year turkey and but if you don't like rosemary if it is time time would work as well or a combination of rosemary and thyme now I removed the citrus because I really want that rosemary in the cavity and I don't want it to like fall out into the broth because that is one thing that you don't want is you really don't want the rosemary to fall into the broth it's gonna probably overseas in your broth that we're gonna make or I guess you could for gravy or whatever you wanted to use it for soup whatever one little piece okay there we go alright so let me get my hands washed up and then we're gonna talk about the rub that I'm gonna put on the turkey all right so before we get the rub on the turkey I am just gonna take a little paper towel and any place where I see there's some moisture still I'm just gonna go ahead and get that off that is really gonna help the season adhere to the skin and better flavor the outside of the bird and even the inside because this seasoning does help flavor the meat as well all right so let me wash my hands again and then we're gonna talk about the rub that we're gonna put on okay so for the turkey rub I blended up my own seasonings they are fantastic however you don't have to use them you could use salt pepper you could use you know dried thyme you could use dried rosemary you know whatever you want to use is fine on the outside of the turkey but you do want to season it so I have a seasoning blend you're welcome to try it out it is delicious but again you can you know make it however you want it I do recommend though that you only use dry spices for the outside so don't use fresh rosemary and things like that just isn't gonna work out as well all right so what I have here in my seasoning blend is four tablespoons of paprika 2 teaspoons of poultry seasoning 2 teaspoons of garlic powder four teaspoons of sea salt 2 teaspoons of red pepper flakes one teaspoon of rosemary leaves which are crushed and two teaspoons of black pepper which is the coarsely ground black pepper that you can either buy it's call I think it's called restaurant pepper or you can freshly crack your own pepper or you could use regular fine grind pepper it's not going to make that much of difference so that's what I have in here now that is a lot of seasoning we're not gonna use it all right now so what I'm gonna do is just mix it up so that it's all blended and I'm gonna only reserve half and save half for later we may not use it all but it's always good to have a little extra on hand you don't want to run out and have to blend it back up again it's also good this is a great seasoning really and don't worry the red pepper flakes are not spicy they just add a really nice flavor all right so let me just jump 1/2 into here and we're gonna get our hands dirty again that looks about right there's a little more in here but that's okay we'll use less the second time around anyway so alright here we go time to get get our hands dirty what you want to do is just sprinkle the seasoning all over and then Pat it down and definitely go into the area where the wings kind of flap get that nice and seasoned in there all right so that's good you do want to season the underside not quite as important as the breasts but I do want to get it seasoned and I'm just gonna sprinkle it I'm not as worried about this side at all but you do want to get it seasoned and that looks good alright let's flip it back over and finish up let's get the legs all seasoned up here I love the smell of the seasoning gosh it reminds me of Thanksgiving for sure alright that looks good we're well-seasoned now it's time to get the bird into the pressure cooker I'm not even gonna worry about washing my hands because I'm still gonna have to hold on to the bird so what I have here is a little sling you don't absolutely have to use this you could set the turkey right down into the water but I don't want to do that I want to raise it just a little bit and we're only gonna use 1/2 of a cup of the thin liquid in the bottom because we're gonna get a lot of juice from the turkey itself and we don't want the whole turkey just submerged in liquid because it's just gonna get it's just gonna start to fall apart so just 1/2 of a cup in there and then this is optional but I'm gonna put in the neck and the giblets that come in that little packet on the bottom here because I like to use that to help flavor the broth for the gravy or stuffing or whatever you want to use the turkey broth for basting the turkey later all right so let's get our turkey on this here that looks good and then we just go in to an inch of 30 now this is the 8 quart ninja fruity I think I mentioned that before you would not be able to put a 10 pound turkey into the ninja food you the 6.5 chord it will not fit but you can do an 8 pound turkey in the 6.5 so if you're lucky enough to find an 8 pound turkey you are good to go I'm gonna give you some guidelines for cooking based on my experience and my mistakes because I've overcooked the last turkey that I did so I'm gonna give you those in a just a minute but let me wash my hands first and then we'll get the pressure lid on and get this baby under pressure all right so what I'm gonna do here is just sort of tuck these down underneath the reason why I'm doing that is because when I put the lid on I really don't want these to flap over and touch the breasts because I don't want it to have the seasoning rub off on it or anything like that so definitely want to do that and then we put on our pressure lid and it fits so that's a good thing that means we're in business we can go under pressure all right so we're gonna put the valve to seal and we're gonna turn that into foodie on we're gonna go to pressure high is what we want and we're gonna go for 25 minutes can you believe that 25 minutes and it's gonna take probably about 10 minutes or so for the pot to come under pressure and we are gonna natural release for 15 minutes but this turkey is gonna be fully cooked in under an hour and that is incredible what you can do also is if you wanted to pressure cook the turkey and then just put it on a roasting pan and put it in the oven to roast you certainly can do that so you could make the turkey you know the morning of Thanksgiving or even later in the day in the pressure cooker and then roast it up in the oven but I'm gonna give it a try to roast it up using the tender crisp lid because you know that's the beauty of the ninja food is we can go from pressure cooking to air crisping so we're gonna try that with this bird and see what kind of results we get so let's talk about timing because this is a this is an interesting thing and how I came up with it and really I'm guessing I mean I'll be completely honest with you I'm guessing based on experience so the eight pound turkey I followed the same rule of thumb as I do for my chicken which is four minutes per pound and so I went 32 minutes and it was extremely overcooked and this was with a 15 minute natural release which is what you want to do with your poultry whole chickens or the turkey and it was so overcooked like all you could see all the bones the meat was just pulled back it was delicious it was moist it was flavorful but it was so overcooked I could not even try to roast it up so obviously that was a fail I mean it's gonna be turned into all kinds of turkey left over so it's not really a fail but it wasn't something that I would want to present at Thanksgiving or present to you guys as a recipe so then I went and of course we scoured the stores all over I would think we went to four or five of them looking for another eight pound turkey so that I could do this in the six and a half quart and we couldn't find one so we did a 10 pound so I have been thinking for the past three days how long am I gonna cook this 10 pound turkey so after thinking back of all the chickens that I've made and that one you know sort of failed turkey attempt I thought you know I think after a certain amount of pounds we need to really decrease the time per pound so what I did was I went for half of the weight of the turkey so it's 10 pounds so for 5 pounds I went ahead and did the 4 minutes and then for the other half I just did a minute and you know what it could be undercooked and that is ok because under cooking is much better than overcooking because we can always finish cooking either in the oven or with the tender crisp lid or if it's really super undercooked I could go under pressure for another minute or so but once you overcook something you can't reverse that so I'm gonna err on the side of caution and we're gonna go just for 25 minutes for this 10 pound bird and fingers crossed that it doesn't overcook this time all right so we just came under pressure and I wanted to talk about this a little bit because it took a good 23 to 24 minutes for us to start the countdown now the red pin popped up at about 18 minutes or so but then it still took an additional several minutes for the countdown to start so this is different from the six and a half quart the six and a half quart came under pressure quicker and I think you know obviously this is bigger more room in there that has to build the pressure so I think that's the reason I'm not sure though exactly and so but now I have a decision to make do I still want to go 25 minutes because that longer time to pressure is cook time so I need to make some decisions here and because I always want to err on the side of undercooked I am gonna drop this down by 4 minutes so it's already cooked a minute so it'll be a total of 21 minutes so I'm gonna drop this down to 20 minutes it's already done one minute and see what happens with the 15 minute natural release at the end because I just do not want to overcook this turkey so I urge you guys when you're cooking something for the first time and it takes longer to come to pressure than you expect or or maybe it doesn't take as long to come to pressure as you were planning adjust your time so you can do that mid cycle you know you can just up and down the arrows to adjust the time of the pressure cook all right so it's smelling good in here though I will tell you that so let's see if we can get this turkey perfectly cooked so we went under pressure for 21 minutes and remember I adjusted the time because it took so long for the pot to come to pressure I wanted to compensate from that because the time to pressure is cook time guys always remember that and now we've gone natural release for 15 minutes and I'm just gonna open this up I don't expect there to be a whole lot of steam and pressure built up and it doesn't look like there is so this shouldn't take very long to release when the pin drops we'll open the lid and we will check a temperature and you know I have my fingers crossed really oh I hope I made the right decisions here in timing and I just hope it's underdone and not overdone because we can fix underdone I do also advise that you invest in a kitchen thermometer this one is not an expensive model it's a thermo pro I got it on Amazon during a prime day or something like that it was under $20 it's worked fairly well it's pretty accurate as far as I can tell but I didn't have to change the batteries already once so I think I'm gonna invest in a better one soon but this one's working really well for now okay here we go we're gonna open the lid all right it looks good now I can see a bone coming out here and I could see some of the leg bones which tells me it's probably fully cooked um let's let's take it out though and see so I'm just gonna um I'm gonna use gloves to get it out but I just want to pop these so I can so I can grab ahold of it better so let's bring it out onto our cutting board and then we're gonna get the juice out I'll take a temperature but I can pretty much tell that just air crisping it is gonna finish it up because it looks like it is pretty much cooked so that's pretty good so the still we're doing this in under an hour which I'm excited about I might have even dropped the time down a little bit more and this sling is working perfectly absolutely perfectly to get that out so that is that makes me very happy that I decided to put that in there I would not advise just putting it in the bottom I mean you could but I wouldn't advise that because it's gonna be so hard to get out I mean you can use something like this but you're most likely going to you know kind of break up your turkey a little bit alright so we are gonna do a temperature and we're gonna go in right beside the breast into the leg area you don't want to take a temperature where you're hitting the bone that's very important because the bone will be hotter and it will read a higher temperature than the actual meat so we want to go in right about there and get a good temp and we are completely cooked we're at 186 this is amazing I think that I would do a 10 pound turkey I would take that time down to 18 minutes guys from 21 because we are completely cooked and I and I'm liking the look of it I mean I wish this wasn't exposed of course but you know what all in all I'm loving it it looks beautiful so alright so let's get this strained out and I'm gonna put it into here and then I'm gonna decide how I'm gonna crisp this up a little bit because I do want to crisp up the skin some that's optional you don't have to do it but I do want to try to do that and get it oh like a nice golden-brown and baste it a little bit I think that's gonna be perfect I'm really excited it smells so good and this broth looks great really really good all right I'm gonna give the pot a rinse because there's some stuff down in the bottom and I don't want the turkey just sit on that I'm gonna give it a rinse and what I'm gonna try to do honestly and I don't know if this is gonna work but I'm gonna try to sit the turkey on this to give a little a little raise up off the bottom so hopefully the air crisping heat will go around and do some cooking on the bottom although we don't really need to cook this it is done but let's let's see what happens if we crisp it up a little bit after giving it a lot of thought and kind of going through the different ways that I could put this back in to the ninja foodie to do the air crisping mode I decided to skip it and the reason is is because this turkey which is 10 pounds just sits too high and I don't want to run the risk of it falling apart because it is really already cooked in fact it's a little overcooked still believe it or not and I just thought by lifting it in and out it was just gonna fall apart and I didn't want that so I decided to skip it if you have a smaller turkey that is you know 8 9 ounce you probably will be able to do the air crisping with the ninja pity but I would suggest pressure cooking the turkey and then putting it in your oven just before you're gonna serve it and do like a high heat roast on the top to crisp the skin up if that's what you want for me I'm gonna skip it now I'm gonna get into how to carve this beautiful turkey in just a minute but let me take a little bit of the wing meat here and give it a taste Wow that is unbelievable [Music] Wow that's all I can say hmm it is so moist and so tender and so flavorful is that's definitely the best piece Turkey I think I've ever eaten in my life Wow that was good I am so excited to carve this up and try some of the breast meat I'm gonna do that in a separate video for you guys so right when this video is over click right over there and you can see how to carve up a perfect turkey

Channel: The Salted Pepper

Views: 71,815

Rating: 4.8025889 out of 5

Keywords: Ninja Foodi, Ninja Foodi Recipes, The Salted Pepper, Thanksgiving recipes in the Ninja Foodi, ninja foodi thanksgiving, How to cook a whole turkey in the ninja foodi, how to cook turkey in the ninja foodi, Turkey recipe ninja foodi, ninja foodi turkey, Ninja Foodi turkey recipe, Turkey brine recipe, How to brine your turkey, How to pressure cook a turkey, can you cook a turkey in the ninja foodi, thanksgiving recipes, thanksgiving recipes 2019

Id: IPkgYDAQVqE

Length: 34min 39sec (2079 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019