Why You Should Never Cover Your Turkey With Foil After Cooking It.
There are several great ways to cook turkey (or any bird for that matter) – classic braised and fried , baked or even smoked. There are many ways to flavor a bird, such as brining it or stuffing it with herbs and other aromatics. But there’s one surprisingly common practice that ruins turkey’s crisp skin: covering the turkey with foil after cooking.
Every Thanksgiving, I watched my mom cook, roast, and carve the turkey. The bird came out of the oven bronzed, shiny, with noticeably crispy skin. She warned me to be careful the turkey was hot and then surrounded it with a whole wrapper of foil to keep it warm. Well, it was very hot – hot and smoking . So, it was a long time before I discovered the magic of crispy turkey skin. Please don’t think that I’m unnecessarily criticizing my mother on the Internet – this is a cautionary tale.
Why don’t you put the turkey in the tent?
If you or your parents have put turkeys in a tent in an attempt to keep them warm, I implore you to stop. Sure, foil may retain some heat, but it’s much more effective at trapping steam and creating a surface for condensation to pool and drain. Drip where? As you may have guessed, back to ol’ Birdie. More precisely, all that moisture and liquid gets trapped right on the turkey’s skin, quickly turning it from crispy, crunchy joy into limp, rather unappetizing mush.
As it turns out, only Reynolds Wrap wants you to cover the turkey after cooking it (I can’t imagine why or who even spread this advice). In fact, your turkey doesn’t need to be covered at all to keep it warm. Large cuts of meat, not to mention whole Thanksgiving birds, retain heat very well without assistance. So, it’s actually recommended that large birds sit for at least 30 to 45 minutes before butchering them. This gives the juices enough time to redistribute into the muscle tissue so you don’t lose it on the cutting board, and allows the turkey to really cool so you can carve it without getting hurt. I let the turkey rest for 45 minutes before carving, and I still had to stop and shake my fingertips out of the residual heat.
What to do instead of a tent
When you remove the turkey from the oven, fryer, grill or combi oven, simply place it on the counter on a cooling rack or a raised roasting rack without a lid. This will allow air to circulate around the entire roast, cooling it and allowing moisture to escape from the precious skin. In the meantime, get busy plating the side dishes and pouring a glass of wine. When you’re ready to carve and serve, your turkey will still be hot on the inside and the skin will be irresistibly crispy on the outside.