Thanksgiving Showdown: Who Has the Best Roast Turkey Recipe?
By Matt Duckor
Each year, millions of Americans race to their electronic devices in a panic to find out one thing: How the heck do I roast a Thanksgiving turkey again?
More than 40 percent of the country types in “turkey recipe” on Google each Thanksgiving, getting a jillion results from countless food sites to figure out how they’re going to cook that massive bird. Turkey can be pretty terrifying to prepare — it’s large and inherently difficult to cook perfectly. The last thing anyone wants to do is spend five hours cooking something only to hear complaints of how dry it is from Uncle Larry.
But finding that recipe online can be daunting: There’s no shortage of roast turkey recipes on the internet. How are you supposed to make sure that overgrown chicken you just paid a bunch of money isn’t a total fail?
So, in an act of public service, we tested classic turkey recipes from some of the most respected food sites out there — Martha Stewart, Real Simple, Food Network, The New York Times, and The Kitchn — to find out who had the best classic roast turkey.
From Top: Real Simple, Martha Stewart, Food Network, The Kitchn, NYT Cooking
Recipe Criteria
When we say simple and classic, we mean it. We excluded any recipe that required two time consuming, but relatively common steps: Brining (either dry or wet-brine) and stuffing. Spatchcocking — that is, removing the bird’s backbone so it lays flat while roasting — can produce awesome results, but isn’t a classic step that everyone is comfortable with doing themselves.
Our goal was to come away from this test with a recipe that requires minimal active cooking time and stuck to the basic, standard roast turkey ingredients.
See more: 25 Coffee Shops You Need to Try
Our Review Process
We evaluated each recipe using five basic categories.
How well is the recipe written? An excellent recipe is virutally useless if it’s difficult to follow or missing vital information.
How moist was the turkey meat? Uncle Larry complains every single year about dryness, amirite? We wanted to solve that problem. We tasted every piece of the bird, from breast to drumstick, to determine whether the meat was moist or not.
How does the turkey taste? Flavor! There are so many factors in a recipe that effect the flavor outcome of your turkey. Were aromatics used in the cavity? Did the recipe call for any vegetables, herbs, or liquid in the pan?
How crisp is the skin? Soggy skin is the enemy of just about any cooked meat, but especially a centerpiece like Thanksgiving turkey. We were on a quest for crackly, well-seasoned skin.
How does it look on the table? Finally, did the called-for combination of cook time and temperature yield a bird that’s gently browned and worthy of stares from everyone around the table?
HOW THEY STACKED UP
#5: The New York Times "Roast Turkey"
There are almost too many issues to list here.
In short: The turkey was dry, underseasoned, and the skin got too dark too quickly. (The dried paprika made it look … scabby.) Our main takeaway here was that it’s critical for the bird to be seasoned on the outside of the bird as well as the cavity.
Recipe Writing: 4th
Moistness: 2nd
Skin: 5th
Taste: 4th
Appearance: 5th
#4: The Kitchn’s “Simplest, Easiest Method” Roast Turkey
We applaud the folks at The Kitchn for incorporating a detailed how-to, but our testers found the actual recipe much too wordy and difficult to navigate when it came time to actually make it. While The Kitchn often overcompensated with too much information, there were odd pockets of vagueness — they suggested you choose your own aromatics to stuff the cavity without specifying exactly what or how much to use.
The recipe requires a temperature change, but a different one than any other recipe we tested: The oven preheats to 450º before the turkey is put in and is lowered to 350º as soon as it’s added. Ultimately, it produced middle-of-the-road skin, relatively bland meat, and the untied legs made for an, um, less-than-ideal presentation.
Recipe Writing: 3rd
Moistness: 4th
Skin: 3rd
Taste: 5th
Appearance: 4th
#3: The Food Network Test Kitchen’s “World’s Simplest Thanksgiving Turkey”
Spoiler Alert! This recipe doesn’t call for Donkey Sauce. That’s because it’s from Food Network magazine’s test kitchen and not Guy Fieri or one of the TV network’s celebrity chefs.
Our biggest issue with this recipe is that it didn’t call for any aromatics or liquid in the pan. Actually it doesn’t call for much of anything. They literally do not list the ingredients. But the lack of anything in pan — even a rack! — proved to be the biggest issue. The turkey stuck to the pan, something that lost it a few presentation points when we had to scrape the bird off the bottom. They also had to tent the turkey with aluminum foil near the end of the cook time (something that the recipe doesn’t call for) because it began getting too brown.
Recipe Writing: 5th
Moistness: 5th
Skin: 4th
Taste: 3rd
Appearance: 3rd
#2: Real Simple’s “Basic Roast Turkey”
From a visual standpoint, this turkey was practically perfect — lightly browned skin with a slew of carrots, celery, and onion in the pan. And, while all of those ingredients created great flavor, the prolonged high-heat cooking period (it’s lowered after about 45 minutes) resulted in uneven breast meat. The target end temperature of 180º is higher than any of the other recipes we tested and a possible culprit for the occasionally dry meat.
Recipe Writing: 2nd
Moistness: 3rd
Skin: 2nd
Taste: 2nd
Appearance: 1st
OUR WINNER — #1: Martha Stewart’s “Herbed, Roasted Turkey”
For the amount of effort required, this turkey is just about perfect. It ranked in the top spot in most categories, a show-stopping bird in just about every way. Our testers found that the recipe was the most clearly written of the bunch, with all the important information and procedures included.
But the key to Martha’s recipe is the herbed oil mixture. Chopped parsley, rosemary, sage, tyme, and garlic is mixed with olive and rubbed underneath the bird’s skin before cooking.Throw some lemon and rosemary in the cavity and a bit of apple cider in the pan and you have the best turkey we tested in terms of flavor, skin, and moistness.
Put simply, if you’re not using an Epicurious recipe, this is the turkey you should be putting on the Thanksgiving table this year.
Recipe Writing: 1st
Moistness: 1st
Skin: 1st
Taste: 1st
Appearance: 2nd
See more: Quick And Healthy Fall Breakfasts For Kids
What We Learned
It doesn’t take much to make your turkey a whole lot better.
If you have a rack, use it. If you don’t, a bit of crumpled aluminum foil or a layer of chopped vegetables will do the trick.
We discovered that cooking your bird 13 minutes per pound produces the best results, not the 15-minute ratio that’s conventionally recommended.
What did we learn from Martha? It’s worth taking five minutes to put fat and herbs underneath your turkey’s skin — it makes the skin delicious and flavors the meat. The same goes for a bit of aromatics in the cavity — turkey is subtle, but an empty cavity leads to epic blandness. Adding liquid to your pan is a critical move, keeping the turkey moist and helping it hit the table looking perfect.
This year, if Uncle Larry has a complaint with the turkey, tell him to take it up with Martha — but he won’t.
More from Epicurious:
10 Tasty Ways To Upgrade Your Iced Tea
Know Thy Pits and Sauces: A guide to barbecue, state by state
photo: Rolland Bello; David Cicconi
