Bested by the Brine

For the holidays this year, we were unceremoniously nominated to host the Thanksgiving feast. Last year, we fried a turkey and managed to get through it without burning ourselves or the house down. (The stories you hear about turkey-frying catastrophes are mind-boggling.) This year, I wanted to go with traditional baking of the bird, stuffed with bread crumb goodness. But I feared what all turkey-bakers fear most: the dry turkey. Nothing like chalky consistency to ruin a holiday meal.

So I read up and decided that we would brine our turkey this year--insurance against a moisture-deficient bird. I found a great brine to use--the requisite water and kosher salt but also a few added ingredients designed to rev up the ultimate taste: garlic, Worcestershire, black pepper, onion, etc.

The recommendation was to let the bird sit in the brine for 24 hours or so before baking. And of course, you had to keep the raw meat cold. So, how to do that with an 18 pound previously feathered beast? With all the other food items I had prepared, I didn't have the sort of vacancy needed to accommodate the bird in my frig. But I read that folks had success using a clean cooler. Bird and brine in; then set it outside overnight in what is typically cool enough weather at the holidays. But in the south, you aren't guaranteed that level of cold so I decided to modify the storage by using a turkey-sized plastic oven bag. I'd place the turkey and brine in the bag, close it up, place all in the cooler, and then put ice around the outside of bag in the cooler to ensure it's kept at an appropriate temp. Even better, you could simply slit the bag in the morning to drain out the brine.

I told John I was mixing this all up and getting the bird going while he ran up for a couple bags of ice. "Just put the turkey and brine in the bag," he said. "Don't put it in the cooler yet because I'll put ice underneath it first." Made sense. However, attempting to hold the large, thin plastic bag with an 18 lb turkey in it and then trying to pour gallons of water in with it didn't work at all. I needed a couple more hands to have pulled that off. So I stuck bird and bag in the cooler anyway and then poured in the brine with the aid of the cooler walls keeping things upright and intact.

I explained all that to John when he returned and said that ice around all sides would work just as well. "When it comes time to lift this out in the morning, we'll definitely need all four of our hands to pull it off," I told him. "Between the bird and that amount of water, it's really heavy and unweildy." No problem since we both were getting up at the a$$crack of dawn to put the bird in the oven.

That's the part I hate most about cooking for Thanksgiving--in the south, the favored time for eating is noon or 1:00 for some reason. And when you have a 5 hour cooking time, that means getting up at 6 a.m. just to prep and get the thing started. I don't even like turkey THAT much...and I'm just not a morning person. But we said we would, so the alarm clock was set.

Bright and early the next morning, we stumbled out of bed to get the turkey baking. John brought the cooler with said turkey inside while I began mixing up the stuffing at the stove. All of a sudden, a loud commotion, a thud, and a cold spray of something wet all along my back and down my legs startled me. This was followed by a sting of expletives that would have impressed George Carlin, Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, all. I spun around to find the naked turkey in the sink, the cooler on the counter, a busted plastic bag dripping in my husband's hand and gallons of brine with bits of garlic all down John's front and all over the kitchen floor. His face was the only part of him not saturated with garlicy, worchestershirey goodness. As he stood there red-faced and with smoke pouring from his ears, I could see him trying to maintain control, the thoughts whirring--what to punch, what to stomp, what other colorful words might spew out?

And all I could do was laugh. You couldn't have scripted it all better in a sitcom. "I told you we'd need both of us to lift that thing out," I sputtered through tears. "That light plastic bag couldn't hold the weight."

As normal color seeped back into his face, John couldn't help but crack a smile then at the hilarity of it all. "I thought you just meant that you couldn't pick it up yourself--I wasn't thinking about the bag being the problem."

At 6 a.m. the kitchen now reeked, the floor was a sticky, puddled mess, and we were both soaked but at least the turkey had landed in the (clean) sink and not the floor--the up side of it all. Although, I thought, if it had, none of our guests would have been thus informed.

In the end, everything cleaned up spotlessly (including us), the turkey turned out wonderfully and we'll have a story to tell at future holiday celebrations of the year we were bested by the brine.