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I have found locally reared fresh organic turkeys to be very dry and stringy and chewy.... much like you describe. My thought was that it was because the birds get too much exercise so the muscle is too dense to make good meat.

I have found freezing the bird (seems to somehow break up the tissue) and cooking it in the Nigella Lawson brine (soaked overnight in water and spices - before being roasted) the most reliable way to get nice meat.


Sorry you had such a bad experience hope it didn't spoil your dinner too much.

Oh Susie

Sorry your Christmas dinner wasn't so good.

I've no idea how to answer your question so I'll leave it to others.

have you tried cooking your normal choice of turkey that way? cos it could be the method i spose?

we always get a FR turkey and its lovely. dunno how much space that have to run around though.. or how old they are.

11 lbs is quite small - so it might be that it did not get big enough to put on fat

thats such a shame your xmas dinner didnt work out, i dont usually eat turkey, always found it dry and inedible 90% of the time so i didnt bother this year. brought a FR chicken instead

11lbs is small that's about 5kg. We're still battling out way through our 2.6kg one!

I've asked this question before but never got an answer - how do people roast huge birds unless you have some sort of industrial oven or two? Even if it fits in a normal oven with the shelf taken out, where do you roast your spuds and chipolatas and everything else that needs to be roasted?

I've done a huge bird, biggest I could buy.... pretty sure it was over 20lbs. (big family of 25+)

We ate at my brothers flat, which was about a mile from my flat.... we put the turkey in our oven, took everything else round to my brothers, stuck them in the oven there.... then came back and transported a fully cooked turkey on the back seat of our car.... up 4 flights in a lift.... it came through the door just as the potatoes were done in my brothers oven....and it was still lovely and hot.

It would have been do-able in a double oven (but a bit of a juggle) but I wasn't about to try to get my brother up at 7.30am to get his oven on...

This was also the year that on boxing day I found out I was pregnant...... happy days

Millymollymandy wrote:11lbs is small that's about 5kg. We're still battling out way through our 2.6kg one!

I've asked this question before but never got an answer - how do people roast huge birds unless you have some sort of industrial oven or two? Even if it fits in a normal oven with the shelf taken out, where do you roast your spuds and chipolatas and everything else that needs to be roasted?

I think at 2.6kg i would have bought a chicken instead.

we have a 14 lb one. still eating it. which we love. it fits in my oven just fine. i gather tht if you have a huge 30 lb one, you might have to cut off the legs and wings, or even bone it out. i dont like the idea of huge bird though.

But we can't get chickens over 1.6kg here (and that's quite a big one) and we are always eating roast chicken anyway so I don't want that for Xmas! You can't buy silly size turkeys here as a big one is about 3.5kg. Turkeys are only available at Xmas in France (sadly just like boxes of chocolates ).

I couldn't get anything much bigger than a 3kg turkey in my oven if I want to use the shelf above for all the other things that need roasting and my oven is a normal size one. I don't think a 10kg one would fit in it at all minus the shelf!

Millymollymandy wrote: I couldn't get anything much bigger than a 3kg turkey in my oven if I want to use the shelf above for all the other things that need roasting and my oven is a normal size one. I don't think a 10kg one would fit in it at all minus the shelf!

a cooked turkey needs to rest anyway, sitting in the juices.. so we take the turkey out of the oven, cover it with a bit of foil, and then turn the oven up to do the roast spuds etc. The turkey will stay hot for hours.

Gosh that's clever Susie how do you manage to keep the bird in one piece and get all the bones out of it? I have enough trouble jointing a chook, all goes well until I have to try to get the breasts off then I end up whacking pathetically with a knife and getting all sorts of bits of broken bones. Ditto splitting the two breasts.

My husband does the thwack really hard with a chinese cleaver but he once did it on top of a glass hob and broke it.

Red's post has just popped up - so that's how everyone does it, roast everything else afterwards! Aha!