Talk turkey to me

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1:08It's a finicky dry bird. Yeah, I think he gets a horrendous reputation. He brines the turkey overnight in a paint bucket.

1:18Jonquilyn Hill:You guys, I love Thanksgiving.

1:25Jonquilyn Hill:I'm what you would call a professional guest I show up to my cousin's house with a side dish my sparkling personality and a to-go container because I'm leaving here with something of course the centerpiece for most Thanksgivings is the turkey and if you're unsure of what you're doing taking on that bird can feel daunting that turkey is so lucky I've never seen such a beautiful turkey but friends this time it's gonna go great because this week on Explain It To Me will cover it all. Why we eat turkey, how not to feel disgusting afterwards, and what it takes to make a turkey they'll talk about for years to come.

2:04Jonquilyn Hill:To start, we got a professional chef. My name is Hamil Whaley and I'm a chef, a recipe developer, a video creator, and an author. And he's worked on some pretty high profile Thanksgivings. So I worked at this restaurant that was along the parade route for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Oh my gosh. We're not talking about Santa Claus. It's Kool-Aid Man presented by Kraft Foods. Well, he's left his pineapple under the sea and has traded it for flying high above the parade. There he is at SpongeBob SquarePants. So for their one year, I had to cook almost 80 turkeys. 80? Yeah, 80 turkeys. And that's not even counting the size.

2:48and the mash and the stuffing. And that was a light year. The year prior, I think it was, they needed 160 turkeys.

2:56Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah. Can you walk me through what that's like? Like, is there a point where you're just like, oh my gosh, how do I manage this? Let me pull a bear and lock myself in the freezer. And just a lot of crying yourself to sleep at three in the morning. Yes, sure. But it's all about planning. Just like Thanksgiving at home, Thanksgiving in a restaurant is all about planning. Yeah. If this is someone's first time doing the turkey or they're trying to redeem themselves from a turkey fail from a prior year. What are some tips they can use to do this successfully? Write a very solid game plan. Take a piece of paper, write out everything you need to make, write out approximately how much time it's going to take, write out if it needs to go into the oven, if so, at what temp and how long.

3:42And from there, you kind of are building a puzzle. So things come out hot at the same time and you're not stuck waiting for potatoes. There's nothing worse than just waiting for potatoes because I feel like often at home when we're just having dinner we're waiting for potatoes. And when it comes to your turkey, low and slow is your friend. So you want to cook it in a really really low oven until the different parts of your turkey are at the temp that you're looking for and then you're going to pull it out, crank your oven up, and then you're going to glaze your bird or you're going to base it in some butter and then throw it back into the oven so that skin is nice and crisp.

4:19Jonquilyn Hill:Okay. I think people discount turkey a lot. It gets a bad rap. You know, people think it's dry, flavorless. Are they just not doing it right? Like, do you have a case for the turkey? I do. Who does not love a turkey club? People are eating turkey clubs year round and no one's complaining. So I do think turkey is a difficult meat to cook because it is so lean, which means the margin for error is quite small. But if you take the necessary precautions, if you're brining your turkey, which I 100 % suggest that you do, you can wet brine, which means you put it in like a salted solution for a certain amount of time, or you can dry brine, which is a lot easier because you can just take your turkey, shower it in some salt, throw it into your fridge uncovered for up to two, three days.

5:07And then that guarantees that your turkey will be seasoned. You have a bigger buffer for moistness and tenderness. And it's just, turkey needs all the help it can get.

5:20Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, start early and have a plan. But what if things go sideways and you're stuck in the kitchen with a mess? Who are you going to call?

5:33Jonquilyn Hill:Butterball Turkey Talk Line, this is Gwen. Can I help you? Butterball, as in the company that says it sells about a third of all Thanksgiving turkeys. Don't panic. We're here to help you. What's the problem or the issue or what is your question? Because I know that we can help you solve it. Gwen Carlisle is a food scientist and she's been on the line every Thanksgiving for the last 13 years. um the wildest call i think i've gotten is these people put their turkey in the sink and they didn't realize that the sink stopper got stuck under the wing of the turkey so they roasted the turkey with the sink stopper under the wing and they called me to see if it was safe to eat how in the world it was actually a really funny call the whole family was on like speaker phone and I was talking to, you know, the whole family.

6:23I mean, we get calls about, can I thaw my turkey in a hot tub? Somebody left their turkey outside in a snowbank. It snowed and then they couldn't find it. We have 50 people here on Thanksgiving Day just ready and waiting to answer anything they can throw at us. So we do our best.

6:42Jonquilyn Hill:What do people get wrong about cooking a turkey every single year? What are the greatest hits of Turkey Issues? Well, our number one question that we get every year is... So, turns out I have no idea how to thaw this giant turkey. Thawing is a very important prep step in the process of getting your turkey ready to go into the oven. We recommend thawing it in your refrigerator on a pan with paper towels, like a sided pan to catch any of the drippings or something if it comes out of the package. Thaw about four pounds every day that you hold that turkey. So if you have a 20-pound turkey, you're looking at like five days.

7:21They can do a cold water thaw method, and that's just keeping the turkey in the packaging, submerging cold water, change it every half hour, and that'll thaw one pound every half hour. And that's just a quick thaw method that can help you finish your turkey to get it thawed or get it started and kick-started, because sometimes they take a while to get moving.

7:40Jonquilyn Hill:Hi, hi. So I've been cooking this forever, and it's still not done yet. What do I do? And I'm like, well, then, okay, let's get our meat thermometer out. Why don't you check it while I'm here? Tell me what temperature it is. And then they might be surprised that either it is done or it's got some more time to cook. But these are the types of things that we try to problem solve with people so that whatever they think they're panicking about is actually a solvable problem. What do you recommend for people who call at the 11th hour who are like, It's Thanksgiving morning and everyone's here and my turkey is ruined.

8:14Jonquilyn Hill:Everything is ruined. uh first off you know we want it to be lovely and perfect and all these things but odds are you know your turkey is fine if it's not exactly what you envisioned or it's not this you know Norman Rockwell painting of a turkey that doesn't mean it's not delicious there's some great turkeys that I've made that they just you know they weren't the most beautiful turkey but they're fine I think just don't panic

8:47Jonquilyn Hill:People want that Norman Rockwell painting of a turkey. But how did it become such a Thanksgiving staple in the first place? Why this particular protein has such a hold on us. That's up next.

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11:24Jonquilyn Hill:We're back. It's Explained It to Me. I'm JQ. So now we know how to successfully get the turkey onto the table unfrozen. But what's up with our national obsession with this bird? And does big turkey have something to do with it? To find out, I call Troy Bickham. I'm a professor of history and director of the Melbourne Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A &M University. Okay, so we know that Thanksgiving didn't happen the way a lot of us might have learned that it did in school as a kid. You know, the story isn't accurate in a lot of ways, including the food that was eaten. Did the pilgrims actually have a huge turkey in the middle of their table?

12:06No. So that's the short answer. The long answer is we don't know, really. we have two eyewitness accounts describing thanksgiving and they were not interested in describing the food so the only thing we know for certain that they ate was venison so because the um wampanoag brought a number of deer with them and that would have been a big deal for them and then be worth noting in their diaries primarily because venison was kind of royal food or the food of the aristocracy in England. So to have something like that was a super luxury.

12:45Jonquilyn Hill:When did turkey become a staple of Thanksgiving? Like, why aren't we all eating venison this time of year? Turkey's cheap is the main reason. It's a big festival bird. Pretty much any major feast or festivals, particularly that time of year when they're in abundance, if you're sort of in the forests of Maine, you can see them all over the place. It would have been something relatively cheap and easy to put on the table. Every agricultural society has a harvest festival. It doesn't matter if we're talking about the Inca, the Maya, the ancient Israelites, or whoever. They all have harvest festivals.

13:21And that harvest festival sort of percolates in different parts of the country. There are different Thanksgivings on different days as the U.S. expands west. Different states have different days for Thanksgiving. And it doesn't become a national holiday really until about the time of the Civil War. And that's largely the work of Sarah Hale. She's primarily known as Mary Had a Little Lamb. Oh. And so, yeah. Like she wrote it? Yeah, she wrote it. She was a children's writer, and she was the editor of Goatee's, which was a ladies' magazine that was very wildly distributed, sort of the Reader's Digest for Women of the Day.

13:56And so she and a number of people in the early 19th century were kind of looking around for days to celebrate traditional family values. So the idea that Americans were Christian, family-oriented, and also the idea of Thanksgiving being a holiday of unity because the country's increasingly divided. It now needs national recognition and authoritative fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution. She starts a letter writing campaign. Women start writing in to their congressmen to try to make it a national holiday. It doesn't really get going. Until the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signs it into law in 1863.

14:36To set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. That's really when Thanksgiving, the way that we might imagine it today, really starts, really takes off, like I said, after the Civil War. And that's the same time. It's not until 1870 that Christmas and the 4th of July become national holidays, too. So Thanksgiving's first. And by that time, the turkey had become the major celebration bird. It placed itself really well. And so you could read a newspaper, say you're in Charleston in 1870, and you have this holiday Thanksgiving, you're not familiar with it.

15:18So you read in the newspaper and it's sort of, you know, what do I do? The turkey must be wisely chosen, well cooked, and properly served. And so there's packed full of recipes for people from New England saying this is how you make stuffing.

15:29Jonquilyn Hill:Soak baker's bread in water and milk for 15 minutes or until soft. And so people start reading about these other kind of common experiences. The same thing with the 4th of July, Christmas, everything else. It's about nationalism. And it times itself really well because it's also about the same time that we start seeing the industrialization of food production. And so once that's in, it's kind of over because the companies take over very quickly, the idea of promoting turkeys. Flavorful golden brown turkey is the crowning glory of your holiday dinner table. Thanksgiving is no time to fool around.

16:05this year better buy butterball or you could get a turkey of a turkey and side dishes really took off during the great depression because meat was more expensive right so what do you do well you know let's all have pumpkin pie let's get out potatoes all the different kinds of casseroles all the stuffing becomes a beforehand there was stuffing it wasn't unusual to have stuffing but it really takes off during the great depression because bread's cheap and you kind of you don't want to stretch it out as much as possible. Libby's wants to sell its condensed milk. And so in the early 20th century, it starts promoting pumpkin pie recipes.

16:45Then it buys a pumpkin pie canning company and then it promotes the pumpkin.

16:56Jonquilyn Hill:That's very American. Like, okay, let's make a supply chain to support this holiday. Absolutely. And then Macy's jumps in with its Thanksgiving Day parade because it's trying to kick off shopping. The Macy's 56th Annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, a holiday treat for children everywhere. So like, when does Christmas start? Well, you know, now it starts sometime in July. But back then, Christmas was, you know, marked by the Macy's Day Parade. And it's like, okay, let's go and shop. Why do you think this glamorized image of a full golden turkey on Thanksgiving has lasted this long? I don't know. I mean, it looks good.

17:34I was looking at some data. And from according to the Food and Drug Administration and the government statistics, about a fifth of our turkeys are eaten. A fifth of turkey is eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, wow. I have to admit, when someone pulls out this enormous, think of that Norman Rockwell picture of Thanksgiving. It's this enormous bird, comes rolling out, puts it down. It's pretty impressive. And it takes on the flavor of stuff. And plus, you get all the side dishes.

18:03It's also an adaptable holiday. I think that's what makes it work. It's a bunch of people getting together and bringing food and breaking bread with each other once a year. I mean, it doesn't have a religious connotation. They've tried. It doesn't really stick with it. Any culture can be grateful to eat for family or friends or whatever is in your life. and then fall asleep and watch football, I guess, or whatever it is we do.

18:28Jonquilyn Hill:Ah, yes. The great Thanksgiving tradition of falling asleep in front of the TV. But there's something about this quintessentially American ritual that always leaves you feeling kind of gross. What if I told you that it's possible to have a Thanksgiving without feeling terrible afterwards? That's next.

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19:55When I scraped my car in their parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim