TURKEY TIME Words by Chef Nathan Schoenfeldt
A utumn is poultry harvest and preserve food for the coming winter. The reason we get into turkey in autumn is dependent on what foods can be stored the longest. season. Why? Because in the north, autumn was our last chance to We feast on the most perishable of our harvest season, the humble turkey, both first and last. We celebrate the noticeable transition into autumn with Thanksgiving and, in December, the end of autumn and our trek back to longer days. So that brings me to this season’s hottest question, “How do you cook a turkey, chef?” Segment your turkey Cut it up into pieces, remove the white meat and dark meat from the internal bones. Legs and breasts get packed into a roasting pan, rubbed down with canola oil and seasoned with salt, pepper and the PEI classic, summer savory. This meat gets roasted at 175C or 350F for about two hours. After the first hour: Check your meat every 20 minutes with a probe thermometer. When it reaches 80C or 175F it’s done. You can turn your oven down and hold it there for another hour without issue. A segmented cooking technique has several advantages for handling poultry. First and most obviously, it simply cooks faster. This mitigates the drying out of white meat, as it spends less time in the oven than if it were an all- day-roasting affair.
mass that looks similar to wet sand. There is no loose flour, nor any liquid fat left in the bottom of the pan. Continue cooking this until it smells like warm, buttery toast or roasted nuts. Add a splash (about a half cup or so) of white wine to your roux, whisk it in until it’s smooth. It’s going to look like paste. Add two cups of stock and continue with the whisk until the roux dissolves completely. Boil it and reduce the water volume by half or so, until it thickens enough to be pourable, but not gelatinous. Be cautious though; over heated demi-glace will boil over, so don’t walk away from it! Once the desired volume and viscosity is achieved, adjust the flavour until it tastes like gravy. Add salt, pepper, savory or thyme. Just like the harvest, a turkey feast is a lot of work. But the only magic here is our passion for good food and love for family and friends.
Second, there’s no guess work about whether or not the stuffing has become hot enough to sufficiently kill salmonella, as the stuffing doesn’t actually touch raw poultry at all in this process. Third, a segmented turkey can be prepped in advance, and held in the fridge in a much smaller size. It also fits in plastic food bags for overnight marinating or freezing. Fourth, a segmented bird grants access to the bones, which, in the culinary world, are the raw materials or reagents, if you will, of our most prestigious kitchen sorcery. Making sauce/gravy After removing the meat from the turkey’s torso structure, the bones get boiled up with all the vegetable trimmings —carrots, onions, celery, bay leaf, herb stems; a classic mire poix mixture, which varies in composition, dependent on the desired derivative— to make stock. After three hours at a simmer, the stock is strained and returned to the stove on high heat to boil out more than half of its liquid, reducing the volume and compounding the flavour. This is the essence of our turkey demi-glace. In combination with another touch of magic, the roux, our stock transforms from a watery, salt brine into something all together different, and far more interesting to the palate. The roux is a precise combination of equal parts by weight of fat and flour and used as a thickening agent to add both flavour and viscosity through the emulsifying properties of gluten. Here’s how it works Melt an entire stick of butter in a sauce pot over medium heat and stir in a quarter cup of flour. The two ingredients come together to form a
Stay warm and happy cooking.
CHEF NATHAN SCHOENFELDT
Saskatchewan trained and PEI polished, Chef Nathan Schoenfeldt moved to the Island ten years ago and fell in love with the culinary community.
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