To dread cooking the blasted turkey every year?

[Mrswhatsit40]

It's always dry and tasteless no matter what I do. I'm generally very laidback but this is the worst bit about Christmas for me - worrying about cooking the turkey. Worrying it's going to defrost properly in time then wrangling with a beast the size of a large toddler, removing the disgusting giblets, then in and out of the oven for hours from 9am onwards basting, giving myself third degree burns in the process, stuffing inside or not blah blah.

What the the absolute BEST way you cook your turkey to avoid meat dryer than a nuns crotch? And please don't suggest that Jamie Oliver thing of smearing butter underneath the skin bc I tried it last year and it was impossible (disclaimer:I am not a great cook).

Help me please oh wise MN-er's so I can sleep tonight..what's your failsafe tip for tender turkey? Or does it not exist?

YANBU: It's a pain in the bloody arse and turkey tastes terrible no matter what
YABU: It's easy to cook a nice turkey and you are clearly doing it all wrong

Get a turkey crown

Don’t do it then, I never have. If people want a big dry or wrapped in a tonne of butter turkey that desperately they can get it themselves and cook it.

phil vickery’s method. We do put butter under the skin too mind you. We have a frozen turkey every year and it has (please don’t jinx) always been juicy and tasty. Good luck!

All turkeys are dry and tasteless, no matter what you or anyone else does. Nobody really loves turkey - if they did we'd all be eating it all year round. Ditch the pointless things forever and get a duck, or two if there's a lot of you. Can't go wrong with duck - well done and crispy or pink, it's delicious.

Rubbish.
All my family love turkey and its never been dry or tasteless.

The reason I don't eat it all year round is 1)that it's too big to eat regularly for a small family or single person as I am now, 2) I only ever buy free range fresh bronze and they aren't available all year round and 3) at 80 quid for a smallish bird I couldn't justify the expense.

If your turkey is dry and tasteless you're buying the wrong bird and cooking it wrongly.

Take the turkey out of the fridge 2 hours before it goes into the oven.
I always put a lot of butter under the skin.
Pop an orange, a lemon and a few garlic cloves into the cavity.
Put it in a baking tray with about two inches of water.
Completely seal with tinfoil, the foil must be airtight.
Put into a preheated oven.
Cook for three quarters of the suggested cooking time. Do not baste.
For the last quarter of cooking time remove the foil and baste.
When it is cooked remove from the oven and re wrap with tinfoil foil. Then wrap in a towel (trust the process 😀)
Leave for around an hour before carving
I've used this method for years and have never had a dry turkey.

He's already got one. Loads in fact.

I've never once bought or cooked one (as I don't like the stuff, plus even if I did I could never afford it), but I've had to endure them cooked by maybe ten other people, and they were all the same - surely they can't all be doing it wrong? Turkey is like white fish - just tastes of nothing at all. You can make it just about ok if you get roast potato / veg / stuffing / gravy / a bit of a pig in blanket in the same mouthful, but otherwise it might as well be a chunk of tofu - just a sort of hunk of Protein. Dense white...Stuff. Always feels to me like it could have been created in a lab for space missions or something.

If significant numbers of people actually liked it, the food industry would be making it available in much smaller pieces to make it affordable, a lot more than they do - we'd all be having turkey burgers / sausages / pies all year round, seeing the legs individually packaged etc - and we'd see it on restaurant menus a lot more (do you ever see it, when it's not Xmas or a carvery?). Your preferred variety WOULD be available year-round, if the demand existed. I mean, it'd be more expensive than chicken, but so is steak, and people keep buying that because they love it. Very few people love turkey - it's only tradition and emotion that keeps anyone who breeds the things in business.

I buy Turkey breast joints that helpfully come in foil trays just to fling at the oven, cooks in a fraction of the tie, solid meat, and doesn't dry out. Also saves oven space!

I think it's quite likely that ten people you know have cooked it wrongly or bought the wrong bird. Most turkeys on sale are cheap meat, in the same way that most chickens for sale are cheap meat. When I go to the supermarket there are shelves and shelves of cheap chicken, but only one or two with the free range birds or pieces I buy, it's the same with turkey. Plus many people buy a frozen bird. Vast numbers of people don't care about the quality of meat or poultry, they're simply driven by cost.

A high quality bird cooked well isn't tasteless at all, turkey has a special flavour of its own, it's not bland and it's not like chicken.

You've also been eating poorly cooked white fish if you think that tastes of nothing.

Maybe you've got a problem with your taste buds if you think these foods which do have a taste are tasteless.

No, it's certainly nothing like chicken - chicken has an identifiable flavour! Amazing anyone would pick turkey over a nice tasty chicken.

I'd love to see if anyone who claims to like white fish could tell the difference between haddock / cod / plaice etc if they didn't know...

I think you simply don't know enough people who know about and really enjoy good food.

But that's fine. I and my family will continue to enjoy our flavoursome roast turkey on Christmas day.

I know them and I'm one of them!

I hope you enjoy it hugely. But my advice to the OP stands - if she's not enjoying the whole turkey rigmarole, just bin it, forever.