The Best Turkey: What's Your Favorite?
This is the time of the year when turkey buying panic sets in for those of us obsessed with finding the best-tasting (responsibly raised if possible) turkey to roast. There seems to be more and more choices every year, and I don't know about you, but I think there's a conspiracy afoot to befuddle and confuse us with these choices.
Just consider what we are confronted with: fresh, frozen, frozen basted, free-range, free-roaming, all-natural, heritage fresh, heritage frozen, organic, wild, kosher fresh, kosher frozen. It's mind-boggling.
Maybe that's why one year I switched to an all-pie Thanksgiving dinner. I didn't have to choose one pie. I just bought a dozen pies of every variety imaginable, including a turkey pot pie. I thought it was genius, but my wonderful mother-in-law (and my wife) could not wrap her traditionalist head around it. She thought it was too radical. So I learned the hard way that you can't mess with your mother-in-law's expectations when it comes to holiday foods.
My favorite turkey to date has been the Eberly Farms organic bird, raised in Pennsylvania in apparently humane fashion. A couple of years ago I had great success brining an Eberly Farms turkey on a friend's penthouse roof. Of course it was incredibly windy the night before Thanksgiving that year, so I was worried that my brining turkey was going to fly off the roof of the building and kill someone 15 floors below. Now that would have given fresh-killed turkey a whole new meaning. How did I choose the Eberly Farms organic turkey? I read a 1996 New York Times turkey taste test article.
But 1996 predated the resurrection of heritage turkeys, so I thought it might be helpful to all the Serious Eaters out there to gather a flock of experts to weigh in on this weightiest of all Thanksgiving issues.
I spoke to Chris Kimball, the man who has built a media empire (think Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen) tasting, testing, and telling us what the best is. In the November-December issue of Cook's Illustrated Chris and his merrily opinionated band of testers tasted eight turkeys, though not the Eberly Farms organic bird.
