by Jenise » Thu Nov 27, 2008 11:55 am
Maria, that old post about the cheeseclothed turkey? Here it is:
Date: 24-Nov-2001 17:24
Author: Jenise Email
Subject: Turkey, interrupted
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The 18-pound stuffed, fresh, all-natural turkey went into a 325 degree oven at ten minutes to 1:00 on Thursday afternoon. It was draped in a butter-soaked cheesecloth, the first time I would try this method of turkey roasting.
A little over two hours later, my buddy Annabelle and I were taking a break and trying to talk ourselves into popping cork on that Gosset champagne--after all, this was a holiday--when my one-year old Viking oven suddenly went eerily quiet. The fan had stopped. We stared at each other, brows furrowed, and before we could make a move either in the direction of the Gosset or the oven, an alarm I didn't even know the oven had started beeping furiously. We rushed over to it and found that the digital display no longer announced the temperature, but read "F2".
This was bad. The oven had turned itself off and was swearing at me. So what does a girl do? Goes and wakes her husband up from another one of those post-surgical naps and instructs the buddy to meanwhile open the Gosset. After all, we now had a crisis of considerable magnitude on our hands, and we were going to need help staying calm.
We got out the manual and pored over it, all three of us, and determined (sip, sip) that the oven had overheated. Well, GREAT, maybe we can live with that but we can't live with the beeping. We couldn't even think with that going on. So Bob went and cut power at the circuit breaker which helped a lot. In the new relative quiet we could ponder what to do. Bob, ever the geek, suggested we go online and see if we could find a FAQ about overheating on the Viking website. Annabelle, ever the nurturer, suggested we call the Buttterball hotline--they couldn't help but maybe they'd CARE. I, ever the pragmatist, poured more bubbly.
Thus libated, my cook's instincts finally returned to the fore and I opened the oven door to assess the damage. After all, if the oven didn't come back on I would need to try to finish the bird at a neighbor's and I'd need to estimate the duration of inconvenience. "Call the Pope, it's the Shroud of Turin!," somebody said, on gazing at our bird. Not laughing, intent on my mission, I whipped out my instant-read thermometer. Horrors! The thermometer read 160 degrees! It had only been in the oven just over 2 hours, but Henrietta was done! I read both breasts, both thighs, with the same results. How could this be? So no wonder I got F2'd--regardless of what the digital display said, THE OVEN HAD INDEED BEEN WAY TOO HOT.
So we pulled the turkey, tented it with foil, and drained away the pan juices, already disturbingly dark, for the au jus. Bob tried the oven and indeed it now came back on, so we returned the turkey to it to rest at 200 degrees for the duration of it's expected 4-5 hour cooking time.
When we carved the turkey around 7:00, we were all quite amazed because this was indeed the very best turkey we'd ever roasted. The dark meat was done perfectly, and the breast meat was so moist, it carved like ham. Whew!
Of course the question remains, what made my oven do that and, though it now operates just fine (an oven thermometer confirms that it's heating and holding temperatures properly), when will it do that again? Yes, that sacred bond of trust between me and my equipment is broken and all the reassurance from Viking in the world (when they finally come back to work and answer my email) won't restore my faith.
What's the moral of this story? Probably isn't one, except maybe--buy analog. Digital's fine for alarm clocks, but not ovens.
My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov
) I removed the breast and legs from the turkey. I will roast them separately. I already made my stock, so most of the carcass is already headed for the trash. I'll give the legs about half an hour head start, then put the whole breast in, which should result in everything being done at the same time.
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