Gilligan's Gourmet: How to deconstruct your Thanksgiving turkey - recipes

How professional chefs dissect and cook their turkeys

This Thursday is Thanksgiving Day, and I have just realized that I’ve been giving you guys’ recipes for a roast turkey for over 10 years!

But this year we are going to do it different, I am going to show you how we in the restaurant business make our turkeys for the big day.

If you go out for your Thanksgiving meal this week you will notice that the slices of turkey are all perfect and all look the same. The stuffing is in a perfect square slice or even a quenelle!

The reason is that most Chefs don’t roast the bird whole like you do at home, we don’t need to do the big show of carving at the table, what we need is consistency and uniformity.

So what do we do? We take the turkey apart.

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The reason why I personally take the turkey apart is because each part of the bird cooks at different temperatures. If you have the legs that are perfectly cooked then the breast is overdone. If the breast is cooked to a juicy perfection then the legs are undercooked, that’s just the nature of the beast. Plus if you have the legs deboned and the breast removed it is so much easier to carve.

I would ask your butcher to debone the turkey for you but as the local butcher is sadly becoming a thing of the past here is a quick rundown on what to do.

Remove the giblet and neck of the turkey.

With the help of the kitchen shears or the boning knife, cut the backbone of the turkey. Preserve the backbone, as well as the giblet and neck for the turkey stock

.

Use your boning knife to carve the right side of the turkey’s ribcage. However, take care not to cut through the backside of the breast skin.

Remove the wing joint from the breastbone of the turkey, and make a cut that goes through its cartilage.

Move your boning knife around the wishbone. This will separate the meat from the ribs right till the thigh joints. Make sure the knife does not go through the skin that connects the two breast halves.

Take hold of the leg, and find the spot where the thigh joint connects to the breast of the turkey. Press your thumb on the joint, and pull the bottom of the leg forward.

Remove the bone from the leg by cutting or tunneling around it. Also remove the hard cartilage ‘bones’ as well.

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