• Share:
  • Send to Reddit
  • Send to StumbleUpon
  • Send to Facebook
  • Send to del.icio.us
  • Send to digg

Taking turkey's temperature

I have more thermometers than I care to admit. But where do I put the darn things? Yes, I know about the meatiest part of the thigh, but can someone point me to a picture of what that means? Is the thermometer vertical or horizontal? Angled? Between breast and leg? In front or behind the knee? Seriously, just a picture. That's all I need.

9 Comments:

I temp Alton Brown's way - 161 in the breast. Period. End of (nerdy) story. It's never failed.

I've seen people stick the thermometer in all sorts of spots on a bird. I always go for the fattest part of the breast, far enough in that it's taking a temp of meat and not in the body cavity/hitting bone.

Angles, away from bones into the meatiest portion of the breast.

i tend to go to the thigh area.... that takes the longest time to cook.... but i've got to try alton/chiff's way next time.

I was watching an old ep of Jaime Oliver the other day, the one where he cooks in that odd apartment and invites people over? At any rate, he was roasting a whole chicken and he cut into (but not through) the leg and thigh meat at about one inch intervals, arguing that b/c these cook the slowest, scoring it thusly would mean that the cooking time would be equal to the breast and that the meat would get sort of 'fall off the bone and sweet'.

I'm very curious, has anyone tried it? Doesn't it dry out the dark meat?

@2qrs - thanks. I don't know if @larkspurkc will find it helpful, but I sure did. I just bought an electronic thermometer (always cooked by the pound) and will be using it this weekend. Now, is there a site which lists the various temperatures for meat - I thought there would be a sheet in my meat thermometer but there wasn't.

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/index.asp

Download the "kitchen companion" PDF....the temp charts start on pdf page 11....but...I find the whole document, as well as some of the other resources on that page, to be very helpful....

Add a comment:

Comments can take up to a minute to appear - please be patient!

Previewing your comment:

 

HTML Hints

Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>

Comment Guidelines

Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.

If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.

Start Talking!

Need a question answered? Have advice to share? Start a Talk topic now!

Sign up to start a talk topic

Sign up to get your questions answered and share advice.