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.