"frozen turkey" news and stories

It happens to the best of us. We get so caught up in the planning of a grand Thanksgiving feast fit for a Pilgrim king -- we've got spreadsheets, project plans, timetables, shopping lists, guest lists, lists of lists -- that we forget one of the most basic things about the preparation.

We forget to thaw the frozen turkey.

Hey, don't worry. It's not your fault that you were running around like a turkey with its head cut off, and we'll only make fun of you until three years from now, but all is not lost. You don't have to worry about whether you can safely cook a frozen turkey because the answer is "Yes" according to food safety experts at the Mayo Clinic (and trust me, I trust the Mayo Clinic).

The full explanation is on the Mayo Clinic's website, but I'll summarize for those of you panicked folks here.

What you CAN do:

• You can safely roast a frozen turkey; it just takes longer (duh).The USDA recommends that you add 50% of the normal cooking time for a thawed turkey to the total cooking time. Of course, we all know that cooking time is a very bad way to roast a turkey, so use a trusty thermometer and make sure that sexy inner thigh reaches a hot 165 degrees F.
• If the turkey was frozen, that little paper packets of creepy turkey innards was probably stuck inside the body cavity under a glacier's thickness of ice. Don't worry about it when you first start roasting the frozen turkey, but make sure to jiggle it out of there as soon as the turkey has defrosted enough in the oven.

What you CAN'T do:

• Roast only. You cannot grill, smoke, deep-fry or microwave (wait, who the hell microwaves their turkey?!) frozen turkey.
• If the creepy turkey innards were in a plastic bag and you foolishly didn't get them out in time and the plastic has melted all over the inside of the turkey, you're done. You can't eat that turkey that might have plastic chemical-y stuff all up inside it. You're also banned from ever making Thanksgiving turkey again because Mayo just gave you a second chance and you blew it with the plastic giblet bag.

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Last week, I found myself shopping for a turkey the day before I needed to cook it. Finding a fresh bird a month before Thanksgiving was something of a challenge but we managed to do it (although the guy at Whole Foods gave Scott attitude when he called to ensure they had a bird). We got lucky with the fresh bird, but there are times when you won't be so lucky and all there will be at the grocery store is a sea of frozen birds.

For those of you to whom this has happened the night before Thanksgiving, take heart. Jennie-O has created a bird that can go straight from freezer section to oven. You don't even have to clean or season it. Over at the Epi-Log, Michael Y. Park took this Frankenbird out for a spin and over all has good things to say about it. It seems a little suspect to me, as it gets cooked in a plastic bag (a practice I've never really trusted) and I don't totally understand how it could be safe to cook a frozen turkey, but apparently it is.

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