My bird started out a respectable 22 lbs. It should’ve taken close to 5.5 hours to cook, I checked on it at 3 hours, and the skin and meat were all shrunken back, the drumsticks looked like lollipops, with like w.t inches of bare BONE showing and all the meat balled up at the top of the drumstick. And the opening to the back cavity where I had needed to quarter my onion to be able to fit it inside, had ‘expanded’ and would have easily accommodated a softball.
Most surprising of all—
it was cooked! Yup in just
three hours @ 320 F!!
But, of course, it was still sadly, white, because it had been covered with foil.
Well, I hadn’t even assembled my stuffing or green bean casserole yet at that point, because I had timed out when to do each thing, and I was planning to put those things in the oven ~45 mins before we ate. I still needed to get the huge pot of potatoes going, which I had also expected to take about 40-45 mins. My son, who was bringing his awesome homemade rolls, wasn’t coming for an hour yet either.
I panicked a little. Turned off the oven, and began getting the stuffing and casserole ready to go in. Turned the potatoes on, and began getting the gravy going.
So then 20 mins before the stuffing was finished, I turned the oven back on at 365 on Convection to brown the skin, and make sure it was still warm enough. Once it came out of the oven though, I realized it just looked so sad and deformed, I made DH carve it at the counter, and served it sliced on a platter. I probably didn’t need to worry about browning the skin.
It was all yummy, and somehow the turkey wasn’t too dried out— drier than usual, still not bad. But man, that bird was strange.
And, I always,
always have at
least a gallon sized baggie of meat left over. Sometimes I even send some home with the kids and still have almost a full gallon baggie left. This time I have
3/4 of a QUART-sized baggie, that’s it!!
(plus the wings which I sent home with my son because dgd wanted them)…
So I think this turkey was really, *
really* fatty— much more so than it seemed when it was raw. I was very disappointed. I’ve never had a bad Butterball before… but this year I feel jipped, for sure. I couldn’t even bring it to the table whole. It looked like some sort of mutant alien bird. bird.