Below, New York City’s intellectual elites admit that they’re not capable of setting an oven to 325, sticking a $20 supermarket special turkey in, and walking away for a few hours. These are the folks whose advice we’re supposed to follow on complex economic, scientific, medical, and political topics. Wall Street Journal:
If you picked up a 99 cent/lb. turkey at Costco (below, from Stuart, Florida) or an 84 cent/lb. turkey at Walmart and managed to get it into the oven that therefore makes you one of the cognitive super-elite.
How about the intellectual elites at Harvard and MIT? Maybe they are more capable than New York elites? The answer seems to be “Yes… at setting their houses on fire.” Recent email from the City of Cambridge:
My technique, which I hope won’t burn down our concrete house with tile roof:
- steam roast at 275 for about one hour on maximum steam (to prevent the finished product from drying out)
- roast at 325 with light steam until internal temperature hits 125 (another 45 minutes or so if it’s a small turkey)
- roast at 400 with no steam to crisp the skin until internal temp hits 165
Here’s our oven: LG WSEP4727F. This doesn’t produce anywhere near as much steam as the KitchenAid range that we once had (plumbed to the sink), but I think the steam does help prevent dry-out and the oven has a much larger cavity for turkey roasting and all other purposes than, for example, Miele ovens that are 5X the cost and literally half the internal size. Unlike the KitchenAid, which ran flawlessly from 2015 through coronapanic in Maskachusetts, the LG’s steam pump failed after just one use. After months of phone calls (cue the person in India who asks, after being told the model number and that it is a wall oven, whether it is gas or electric) and multiple house calls we finally got the necessary parts replaced and the steam feature has worked ever since that replacement.
So… happy Thanksgiving to everyone, especially to the undocumented migrants who enrich us with their multicultural Thanksgiving traditions from around the world.
(I would be delighted to get comments from anyone who does any steam cooking today and hear what was done and how it worked out!)
Lacking a short enough job title to impress any women, the lion kingdom never had occasion to cook an entire turkey. For someone so “set to the task”, its surprising Lincoln created 1 of our few holidays.
Turkey report: the turkey was 11 lbs. and cooked in less than two hours. It cost $44 from Whole Foods as an organic, fresh product, which https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/590-everything-you-need-to-know-to-make-the-perfect-thanksgiving-turkey says is inferior to a frozen $9.25 Walmart turkey: “When turkeys are commercially frozen, the process is quick, which prevents large ice crystals from forming and damaging the meat. Turkeys labeled “fresh” may be chilled to as low as 26 degrees, meaning that even though the entire turkey will not freeze, tiny ice crystals can still form in the meat. If these crystals melt (which can happen if the temperature fluctuates during transport, even driving home from the grocery store), they can merge with neighboring crystals, refreeze when the turkey is returned to the freezer, and puncture the meat, allowing juices to escape during cooking and the meat to cook up dry and tough.”
The LG steam oven worked well in the sense that the turkey wasn’t dry. On the other hand, I’m not sure how it worked because only about half of the (smallish) reservoir was consumed. Perhaps two cups of water was turned into steam over 1.5 hours?
(The temperature probe built into the LG oven also worked well, which surprised me because I remember it previously being inconsistent with a Thermapro handheld meat thermometer. This time, the LG’s set-and-forget thermometer was within a few degrees of the Thermapro.
Looks like all of Dr. Greenspun’s product research is paying off, hahaha!
I am not a costco fan but I got a membership after they opened up location in Stuart. I am very impressed with their hot dogs, that’s probably the only thing I buy
Why bother with turkey is you can use this time to go on vacation with kids? Flight to Cancun from Miami is probably just one hour or so?
Does it still count as steam cooking if you’re using dry steam in turbines to cook thousands of turkeys (and surely some pizzas, too) in customers’ ovens all over the service area?
Isn’t putting water in an over proof pan in the oven during cooking a simpler option, especially if you pre-heat the oven? if true you could get a cheaper oven that has fewer parts and fewer chances of breaking.
F; that’s a great question. Intuitively it should work. Grok: Water in a roasting pan or a separate pan only produces a tiny amount of weak, uncontrolled steam once it hits 212°F/100°C, and almost all of it immediately vents out the oven exhaust. You typically get <5–10% actual humidity in the oven — barely measurable. ..: Steam transfers heat about 4–5× more efficiently than hot air. In a steam-assisted oven the entire cavity is extremely uniform in temperature. In a conventional oven with a pan of water, the top of the turkey can be 50–75°F hotter than the bottom.