Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Review: Jennie-O Turkey Store Oven Ready Turkey
Ever try to get ready for a holiday turkey dinner only to find that you had to plunge a partly or completely frozen bird into cold water baths so you could cook it? Jennie-O Turkey Store claims that its oven ready frozen turkeys can go right into the oven with no thawing and no cleaning after. I was a skeptic, but have to admit that it largely works.
The company sent a test bird in a completely frozen state, and I put it directly into our chest freezer, so it was hard as a rock when I cooked it yesterday. Oven went to 350 degrees, I tore open the package (easy to do), and placed the turkey, sealed in a cooking bag, into a roasting pan. I cut a couple of slits and pulled the bag away from the bird, put it into the oven, and waited about four hours.
I checked the temperature a couple of times with an instant read thermometer, but let a little too much time go between the last reading and taking the turkey out, so it over-cooked a bit and was a little dry. There is a pop-up indicator, but I've found that trusting those is often a mistake, and they don't help if you aren't looking often enough. Even slightly dry, the taste was reasonably good - not as good as, say, a properly brined thawed or kosher bird, but the whole freezer-to-oven trick makes up for that.
You do have to be careful about pulling the bag away from the skin before it goes into the over, otherwise the bag sticks, as happened in a couple of spots. The skin is decently browned, but not the deeper shade of a traditionally roasted fowl. Because a few cups of liquid get trapped in the bag, the turkey ends up a cross between roasted and steamed, but even the pickier members of my family didn't find that off-putting.
A few other considerations: You aren't going to be stuffing this bird, so you'll have to cook that dish on the side. The skin seems to have some kind of rub on it, but I didn't find it unpleasant. Oh, and you'd better hope that you can find these birds at a local grocery store, as an 11 to 13 pound one from the web site will set you back $57, which would let you buy a fresh bird, forgetting the entire freezer experience. (The one I tested seemed closer to a 15 pound or heavier bird, and the packaging suggests that they do come that large.)
If you have a critical dinner, one possible approach, if you can find one of these turkeys locally at a reasonable price, is to keep one in the freezer just in case something goes wrong with the main bird. That way you can still recover and serve dinner with no one else the wiser - and I promise not to tell.
The company sent a test bird in a completely frozen state, and I put it directly into our chest freezer, so it was hard as a rock when I cooked it yesterday. Oven went to 350 degrees, I tore open the package (easy to do), and placed the turkey, sealed in a cooking bag, into a roasting pan. I cut a couple of slits and pulled the bag away from the bird, put it into the oven, and waited about four hours.
I checked the temperature a couple of times with an instant read thermometer, but let a little too much time go between the last reading and taking the turkey out, so it over-cooked a bit and was a little dry. There is a pop-up indicator, but I've found that trusting those is often a mistake, and they don't help if you aren't looking often enough. Even slightly dry, the taste was reasonably good - not as good as, say, a properly brined thawed or kosher bird, but the whole freezer-to-oven trick makes up for that.
You do have to be careful about pulling the bag away from the skin before it goes into the over, otherwise the bag sticks, as happened in a couple of spots. The skin is decently browned, but not the deeper shade of a traditionally roasted fowl. Because a few cups of liquid get trapped in the bag, the turkey ends up a cross between roasted and steamed, but even the pickier members of my family didn't find that off-putting.
A few other considerations: You aren't going to be stuffing this bird, so you'll have to cook that dish on the side. The skin seems to have some kind of rub on it, but I didn't find it unpleasant. Oh, and you'd better hope that you can find these birds at a local grocery store, as an 11 to 13 pound one from the web site will set you back $57, which would let you buy a fresh bird, forgetting the entire freezer experience. (The one I tested seemed closer to a 15 pound or heavier bird, and the packaging suggests that they do come that large.)
If you have a critical dinner, one possible approach, if you can find one of these turkeys locally at a reasonable price, is to keep one in the freezer just in case something goes wrong with the main bird. That way you can still recover and serve dinner with no one else the wiser - and I promise not to tell.
