Has anyone cooked a turkey on really low overnight?

[TheTinselsTheWrongColour]

I have to work christmas eve & dh is out all day visiting with dc and as we are all going to be pooped and would actually like to feel relaxed on christmas day I thought of putting turkey in on the eve.

Has anyone tried this and if so how low temp on an electric fan oven and what were the results like ?

I haven't but 1st thoughts were it will be very very very dry if you slow cook it. I don't think poultry lends itself to being slow cooked...does it?

Can you not prepare it on christmas eve morn so you can just bang it in the oven the next day?

My Mum always used to have to work on Christmas eve and would put it in the oven to cook overnight when she arrived home. She always soaked it for 24hrs beforehand in herby water with syrup so that it didn't dry out.

That was 25 years ago - long before Nigella 'introduced' her turkey bath .

We'd wake Christmas morning to the aroma of cooking turkey and it was always gorgeous!

I did this last year and the smell drove us crazy all night. we ended up eating turkey pieces at 5 am

I cooked mine overnight last year (first year doing a turkey too) and it was lush, v moist and fell off the bone. not to mention the smell christmas morning...

I put 2 halves of a lemon in and rubbed between the flesh and the skin with herby butter. covered with streaky bacon, cover with foil and cook overnight on 80 (iirc)

Reminds me of my childhood, my mum always slow cooked the turkey overnight, we never came to any harm and it was always delicious. She did however add water to deep tray and tinfoiled and sealed it shut, it was always moist. Since a child I'v always had turkey/stuffing/cranberry sandwich for breakfast..

My mother used to put it on when she came back from midnight service on something like Gas 2 and then turned it up at breakfast so it was ready at lunchtime. I am going back 40 years, and it was a gas oven, so no fan. I would have thought that a fan would run the risk of drying it out unless you tightly cover it with foil or pop it in a roasting bag.

We never cooked ours overnight (it went in about half eleven ten, which is why Christmas Dinner in my parental house happened at about 3 and was accompanied by much swearing ) but my mother used to do the Nigella Bath of Moistness decades before she told us all to! The wretched thing would recline in a baby-bath filled with water, bay leaves and a couple of halved lemons. My mum did it because she was told to by her Portuguese MIL, and apparently really used to resent the 'waste' of lemons.