I have always cooked my turkeys at 450 degrees and well covered with foil. Open the foil the last 30 minutes to brown. Breast is never dry or crumbly with this method. My sister uses the directions on a Reynolds over bag with similar results. The key is keeping the breast from drying out.

Cook the turkey breast side down for the first half of the total cooking time. Flip and baste at the halfway point. This allows all the juices to soak into the meat as it cooks. I've been cooking turkey this way for 40+ years and never had dry or crumbly breast meat.

Also, if you remove the two halves of the breast from the bird BEFORE you slice it, you can get nice thin slices for sammiches or you can cut it into thick sections, crosswise, which will keep it moist longer while it's sitting on the table.

It helps if you don't overcook the breast, and allow the turkey to rest for 30 minutes.

Then, forget about "carving" the breast off the bone one piece at a time. Just fuggetaboutit.

Remove the whole breast from the bone, then slice across the grain int tournedos.

Here's a turkey-carving primer that DH viewed right before breaking down our turkey and presenting it like a pro!

Also, your oven temp is too low. Try a steady 350 degrees and get a good instant-read thermometer.

20 hours? I think even at the minimum lowest temp baking a turkey, the breast, exposed to the hot air for that long would have to dry it out.

How big was your turkey?

12 lb turkey. I have cooked dozens of them over the years all about that same size and using various techniques. They all turn out very good. Upside down, tented/untented, standing up, spatch-cock,

Of course the only total failure was with a "Pennsylvania Natural" and the family was here for the ordeal.

Yes, I am sold on the 20 hour cooking. Fully tented the entire time. The breast was moist but it just would not slice.

I will be doing another one with minor corrections. I will post the results.

P.S. Has anyone ever heard that one should not baste the bird at all? I think this was the same radio "chef" that claimed to forget the gravy because "no one does that anymore". I believe that he said that only because he doesn't know how to make gravy.

The bird doesn't need to be basted if it is wrapped in foil or a baking bag.

The 20 hour baking is discouraged because it is possible for the meat to never reach a high enough temp to keep harmful bacteria from growing and contaminating the turkey.

Cook to 160 and let it rest longer. Take off the entire breast in one piece to slice it.

Way Way WAAAY over cooked!! It's not a matter of drying out., it's a matter of the meat gettings tringy and tpough. The white meat contains a different type of muscle tissue than the dark meat. I forget what the term is but it is designed by nature to provide long endurance for flying and behaves very different from the dark meat when cooked.
Try measuring with an instant read thermometer and get that bird out of the oven when I reaches 160. Doesn't really matter if you cook it at 40 or 300....just get it out of the oven when the breast is 160....no more. Remove the breast in one piece, as Marymd said and slice against the grain.
You ask whey it won't slice....it is the 170 degree internal temperature and the likely long time the turkey spent at that temperature. Your method is the problem.

Most times I have had carving problems has been not allowing a more than generous amount of time between out of the oven and slicing. Onetime it seemed like it needed maybe 45 minutes-hate saying this, but it made a difference.

I also try to let the bird rest for at least a half hour before slicing, but I can't even imagine cooking the thing for 20 hours.

I know you've been cooking turkey for years, but today's turkeys are just different than they were even 10 years ago. Most of them are the Broad Breasted White, which mature quickly and have huge amounts of breast meat. I find that the breasts take longer to come up to temp, and that the outside is sometimes dry and crumbly before the center is done.

I never baste. I either put the lid on the roaster, or I do mine in an electric roaster and they come out fine, but I also seem to break every single rule ever devised and my turkey always comes out OK and gets eaten. I've done high heat and low heat, stuffed and unstuffed, whole and spatchcocked, even did one in an oilless "fryer". It's all turkey, but I like the spatchcocked version best, it just cooks so fast so doesn't have a chance to dry out, and I put in on a rack over the stuffing, so the juices can flavor the stuffing. I should have done this year's bird that way, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't carve at the table, so that perfectly browned whole bird is not a necessary component to the meal.

Annie

Great point about turkey breeding resulting in enormous and unnatural breast size. Those birds pretty much can't walk when full size.

I cooked another turkey (in bird stuffing) and did almost the exact same method. 200d 18 hours, 12lb Stop & Shop "Natures Promise" (Free from any added ingredients) bird and it came out exactly the way I wanted it. Perfection in breast meat and perfection in thigh meat. I can only hope that next time I do another that it comes out as good.

Someone commented that I had said that I have been cooking this way for years, this is not the case. Until I designed this recipe, it was the 325d method; mostly good results but sometimes under cooked. Light meat and dark were at odds. I Probably never had them cooked just right in any one try.

After the bird is cooked and it sits on the stove until the oven is up to 400d or so. A point was made that basting was unnecessary. I beg to differ. For me, basting brings pan flavors to the skin. I do not baste for moisturizing which is probably what was intended by that remark..

I baste it while it is waiting after the slow cook. Drain and strain the juices and let it settle for gravy. Take the strained solids and mix them with some pan dripping grease and make a slurry to baste onto the bird.

When the oven is up to temperature, it goes back into the oven uncovered for about 15 - 30 minutes to crisp up the skin. It again sits on the counter for about 20 minutes or so. All temperature (instant) readings are 165d-170d

Breast meat sliced very nicely. It has now been refrigerated enough that it should slice very thin on my electric slicer.

I so want to cook another one but turkey meat is really not all that welcome at the moment (:

--------------------------------

Side note: I saw an "All Natural" turkey and just under that in bold lettering it admitted that a solution of 40% brine was injected. How can this be marketed as "All Natural"?

I guess brine is natural.
Cooking a turkey....most particularly a stuffed one at 200 degrees is unsafe.
In commercial poultry today, salmonella is endemic and many birds harbor the organism. In a 200 degree oven, a room temperature bird can stay at a temperature considered in the "danger zone" long enough to allow harmful bacteria to grow and make you very sick. If it hasn't happened yet, you are lucky.
Wondering, do you also eat raw eggs from the supermarket? Your chance of getting salmonella from a raw egg is most likely lots less than getting food poisoning from a stuffed turkey cooked at 200 degrees.

lindac, thank you for mentioning that. The lowest safe temperature recommended for a turkey has been 325 the last many years. It was an ongoing argument (that I didn't enjoy) I had with my brothers wife. She doesn't cook often, a couple of times I arrived at her house to find turkey in the oven after being there, warm, all night (my 'lecture' didn't stick the first time ;0)). I wouldn't let her serve it or the dressing to my elderly mother. SIL would tell me her mother had done it that way when she was growing up. Different turkeys, and, her mother had but one small oven, all the sides, pies and rolls to cook for a large family, nothing close to today's kitchens and their conveniences where there is no need to try to get the turkey cooked and out of the way of the rest of the meal preparation.

Definition by USDA:

NATURAL:
A product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and is only
minimally processed. Minimal processing means that the product was
processed in a manner that does not fundamentally alter the product. The
label must include a statement explaining the meaning of the term
natural (such as "no artificial ingredients; minimally processed").

Since it's a whole turkey, I think that qualifies for minimally processed. Brining is an old timey recipe, so if there aren't any hairy chemicals in the brine that you wouldn't use at home, I guess it qualifies as "all natural" too.

Basting will make a huge difference in cooking time. That is because hot liquid carries a lot more heat than hot air.

You can put your hand in a 212 F oven for a long time without getting burnt. You certainly will not try that in 212 F water.

dcarch

Yeah....right....and every time you open the door to slop some hot juice over the meat, the oven cools and takes about 5 minutes to come back to temp.

The 20 hours at 200F still makes me uneasy, although I know that foodsafety.gov says a turkey can be grilled or smoked at 225, but only for 20 minutes per pound, which would be about 4 hours...

I never could tell the difference when I basted the bird, except in the skin, which I peel off and discard anyway. I do agree that the skin seems crisper, but since no one in my family eats the stuff, it's pointless.

Annie

“If you are looking, you are not cooking”, you hear this mantra all the time. There is a fear that if you open your oven, you will be losing too
much heat for cooking.

Well, let’s take a look at the science.

A typical oven has 5.5 cubic feet of air. It takes about 0.075
BTUs to heat up one cubic foot of air one degree F. So it takes 5.5 x 0.075 = 0.4125
BTUs to raise the oven temperature one degree F.

Lets assume room temperature is 70F, and let’s assume that
your oven temperature is 350F and you lost all the hot air by opening the door
and the oven inside is now down to 70F.

350F-70F = 280F. You will now need to get all the air inside
the oven from 70F back up to 350F.

280F x 0.4125 BTU = 115.5 BTUs. It will take only 115.5 BTUs
to get 5.5 Cu. Ft. of air from 70F to 350F.

A typical oven has about 16,000 BTUs of heat capacity. So I
would not worry much to open the door to baste for less than a minute.

dcarch

If you have an oven with a thermometer that keeps track of the temperature in your oven as it rises or lowers, you would see that after opening the door to baste or check doneness , that it takes anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes for the temperature to recover.
You are talking BTU's I am talking time.

BTUs and time are related.

While what you are describing is correct observation. But that observation is partial and not complete.

In reality, what happens is this:

All thermometers have solid mass, especially oven thermometers, which are typically capillary hydraulic mechanical devices made with a lot of metal. There is so little heat in hot air (only 0.075 BTUs in one cu ft), it will take such a long long time for the hot air to overcome the metal's mass, even the oven temperature has already reached pre-heat temperature long time ago.

In other words, what you are reading is not the actual oven air temperature until much later.

dcarch

BTU is a measure of work.......as is a joul and a calorie. You cannot say that hot air contains BTU's.
Well I guess you can because you just did....but you are wrong.

From Wiki:

"The Btu/h is most often used as a measure of power in the electric power, steam generation, heating, and air conditioning industries.------. In North America, the heat value (energy content) of fuels is often expressed in Btus."

And one cu ft of air has 0.075 BTUs is a scientific definition.

dcarch

If you're cooking the white meat to 170°+ you're approaching turkey jerky. I use my remote read probe thermometer with the alarm. I set it for 150°. When the alarm goes off, by the time I get there it's still rising. I get prep'd it's probably close to 155°. I pull it and let it sit covered and it's up to 160° shortly. Perfectly cooked.

"And one cu ft of air has 0.075 BTUs is a scientific definition."
Air does not contain BTU's. I suspect your confusion is you are mixing up figures and things like pounds, latent energy, air density.
Not sure why I bother discussing with you when what you say has zero to do with any problem at hand.

In the discussion of heating and cooling, on temperature going up and down, the unit of BTU heating capacity applies relative to a heat source such as hot oven air (or in cooling, air conditioner's cooling capacity rating ie. an 10000 BTU air conditioner).

Yes, conceptually all energy sources can be convertible. Therefore:

One horse power= 2544 Btu/h=745.7 Watts=1055 joules

But we are not talking about how fast a car can go here in this Cooking Forum, we are talking about an oven's hot air as a heat source has the ability to give out BTUs to raise food ( as in turkey) temperature, and hot liquid (as in basting liquid) has much much more BTUs to give out.

It is all about BTUs, and all heating elements and appliances are rated in units of BTUs.

dcarch

I have a 1.5" thick cooking stone in my oven almost the size of a cookie pan in surface area. It retains/gives off enough heat to prevent any appreciable loss of heat when opening the door. Granted there is a lot of heat lost but the oven recovers quickly.

I have a sensor in my oven that takes readings and stored them in my computer. I can plot the change in temperature. I also placed the sensor just under the skin and it changed scarcely 1d with the door open for 30 seconds.

So much talk about the oven needing to be at 350d or so. What about Sous vide? What about making chicken soup? Neither of those styles ever get above 190, maybe 200 but that is rare.

The bottom line is that chicken held at 148d for three minutes will kill 99.99% of salmonella. At 160d it only takes 14 seconds.

Also, cooking at 325d will give you a temperature gradient from that 325d at the surface down to 165 in the deep part of the meat. That grossly over cooks the white meat. Slow and low gives much less of a temperature gradient (differential) and allows the dark and light meat cook more uniformly.

As long as you measure in many locations and the readings are over 160 (many claim 140) you are quite safe.