Here’s the report on the brining of the Thanksgiving turkey bird: it turned out great, very moist and delicious. We followed Alton Brown’s recipe for roast turkey on Foodnetwork.com. Apparently, the recipe is the single most popular one on Food Network’s website. The recipe also comes with a couple of very informative videos which demonstrate how to cook the bird. The videos are well worth the nine minutes it takes to watch both of them.
A couple of points about the cooking process: First, I bought a fancy battery-operated digital meat thermometer like the one Alton has in the video. It was worse than worthless–it declared the turkey to be done after half an hour of cooking. I left the digital thermometer in place while the bird continued to cook, but I carefully added my trusty old-school thermometer to the other side of the turkey and just peered through the oven door window to watch the thermometer so the bird didn’t overcook. Second, the bird cooked quickly. Our 10 lb bird took only about 1 ½ hours to cook (20 mins at 500 degrees F and just over an hour at 350 degrees F).
All in all, the next time you’re needing to cook a turkey, I highly recommend the Alton Brown recipe.
Yikes Money 