The Nourishing Gourmet

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Archives for November 2019

Why I’m Spatchcocking My Turkey This Year

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This method has many advantages, including a super fast cooking time, and moist, delicious meat.

Turkey is the centerpiece of most Thanksgiving tables, yet it’s also the hardest to cook correctly. If you undercook it, food poisoning is a possibility, but if you overcook it, the breasts can be dry and unappetizing. 

My solution for the past five years or so has been trying out different forms of brining. My go to is this dry brine – I love not having to deal with a lot of liquid (as well as not having to find a large enough container for said turkey and brine). A dry brine still gives you the flavorful benefits of a brine as well as a juicy turkey. 

However, I think spatchcocking makes my recipe even better. Spatchcocking is when you remove the spine of the turkey, and roast the turkey flat. This has significant benefits, the biggest that it cooks very fast. I cooked a 16 pound turkey in a little less than an hour and a half. Wow! But it also gets the turkey’s skin delicious, crisp and brown, and even better –roasts the turkey evenly – so the legs and breasts get done at the same time. 

While you won’t be able to stuff your turkey this way (an option that many experts say not to do anyway), the benefits far outweigh that fact. 

But before I send you all scurrying to try this out yourself, I do want to honestly share our experience testing this method out. 

  1. It’s not at all hard to spatchcock a chicken with a sharp knife or kitchen shears. I had a harder time with a turkey. My husband, with his stronger hands, ended up helping me out with this part. I prefer kitchen shears, but do expect to have to use some oomph on this part. 
  2. When I pressed down on the turkey to flatten it after the backbone was removed, a large squirt of turkey juice sprayed across the kitchen floor. Oops. 
  3. Most recipes I found used a very hot oven for this method. This ended up causing a lot of smoking. For Thanksgiving, I plan on turning the oven down a bit after the first 20 minutes, and also adding water to the bottom of the pan to hopefully prevent that from reoccurring. 
  4. Our turkey was hefty at 16 pounds, so it just barely fit on our sheet pan once flattened. I would say it needs to be 16 pounds or less, so this method won’t likely work for larger birds unless you split the turkey in half and roast on two pans. 

Despite those disadvantages, our “test” turkey turned out so well cooked and delicious we all decided this was a method we simply had to do again. Paired with the salt brine? Amazing. 

I don’t want to give my own directions yet, as I still want to experiment with this method, but here are a couple of recipes showing how to spatchcock: Example one, two, and three.

And here is my dry brine recipe! 

Autumn Roasted Vegetables (with Sweet Potatoes, Cabbage, Squash, Cranberries, and Potatoes)

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This delicious side dish can easily be made into a main one, and has many Thanksgiving and Christmas flavors in it. Yum!

As the holiday season encroaches on our fall schedule, I’ve found myself often making sheets of roasted vegetables for dinner. I love this simple process of cutting up several types of vegetables and allowing a hot oven and time to produce tender, slightly caramelized vegetables. 

This version was especially delicious, and so I had to share it. Really, it’s almost like having Thanksgiving flavors on one sheet. You don’t have to use the cranberries – our kids didn’t like them as they are quite sour – but my husband and I loved the sour punch they gave when eaten with a bite of sweet potato. I really adore the mix of vegetables in this dish, plus, you can make it a main dish, by roasting some chicken thighs or breasts with them as well. 

This recipe is highly adaptable, so don’t feel like you have to follow it exactly. That said, this mix of vegetables was so delicious, I am going to be making it again soon. Here’s a thought – why not add some fresh green beans to it as well? That would be delicious too!

This makes two full sheets of vegetables. For our family of five, it fed us twice. At first, we ate it with beef patties and a salad, and the second time we fried eggs and placed them over the reheated vegetables. Delicious! (It would make a wonderful breakfast or dinner!) 

You can use whatever type of sweet potato you like best for this recipe. I cover some of our favorites in this post. 

Autumn Roasted Vegetables (with Sweet Potatoes, Cabbage, Squash, Cranberries, and Potatoes) 

  • ½ green cabbage, cored, and thinly sliced into ½ inch pieces
  • 1 delicata squash, washed, cut in half lengthwise, seeded, and then cut into ¼-½ inch slices 
  • 2 largish yams/sweet potatoes, Washed,(peeled, if desired), cut into thin slices, and then halved or quartered
  • 1-2 pounds of potatoes (I used small yukon gold), washed (peeled if desired), and either cut the same as the yams, or if using small potatoes, cut into thin slices lengthwise 
  • 1 onion (white, yellow, or sweet), peeled, cut in half, and then thinly sliced
  • 2 handfuls of fresh cranberries (optional)
  • Oil or melted fat of choice
  • Salt and Pepper
  1. Preheat oven to 425F. Prepare vegetables as listed above.
  2. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper (optional) 
  3. Evenly mix the vegetables on the two pans and then toss generously with oil/fat, and salt and pepper. You want all vegetables to have a light layer of oil on them so that they roast correctly, without drying out. 
  4. Put vegetables in preheated oven, and after 20 minutes switch racks the pans are on for even heating (I didn’t bother stirring them, but you can). Cook for another 15-20 minutes, or until vegetables are tender, and lightly browned. Serve and enjoy!