A Line Cook's Christmas Notebook
Part 1: Turkey tips, make-ahead recipes, my Christmas time-plan and more!
Hello and welcome to a very practical (and slightly busy) edition of The Recovering Line Cook.
This week it’s all about making delicious Christmas dinner in a way that’s calm and organised. Below you’ll find:
How to joint your turkey and ways to cook it “perfectly”
Recipes I cook ahead of Christmas Day that hold really well
My Christmas Day time-plan to get the job done with zero stress
I really love this time of year. As an immigrant, I’ve experienced a lot of movement and change in my life. But somehow Christmas always seems to feel the same. And I’m so happy to be sharing a few words of advice with you about a meal I treasure.
Whatever you celebrate this time of year, I hope you are doing so with joy and good health.
Wil
Lessons from a Finnish (and restaurant) kitchen at the Holidays
Have you seen that Christmas dinner episode of The Bear?
No, I’m not about to say the Christmas dinners of my childhood in England were exactly like that…
… but they were a tiny bit like that… from time to time.
My mother struggling in the kitchen, somehow refusing help while simultaneously lamenting the lack of it. The arguments over who bought just a half bottle of Baileys. The trauma of getting roast potatoes, turkey, boiled sprouts, and the many (many) sauces all ready at a single point in time.
I can’t blame my (or any) family for the occasional meltdown disagreement we lapsed into considering such an ill-designed culinary challenge.
Having got used to this Christmas Day routine for my first 27 years of life, my first Finnish Christmas was alarming in its serenity.
At least part of this calm is to do with the food Finns eat at Christmas. It’s food that seems designed to leave the day as pleasantly zen as possible.
There is no a la minute whole roasted turkey. Instead, there’s a Christmas ham cooked the day before.
There’s no encyclopedia of winter vegetables (sprouts, parsnips, carrots and so on) that need to be variably: chestnut roasted, honey roasted, cooked Vichy style in a bath of sweet butter. Instead, there is the Finnish Christmas classic called Laatikot. These are deeply comforting dishes of mashed then baked root vegetables that, like the ham, are prepared the day before and reheated for service.
Oh, and those roast potatoes (that need first boiling then roasting in various types of expensive fat?), they have no place on the Finnish Christmas table.
To the horror of my British readership, the potatoes eaten at Christmas in Finland are simply boiled.
This all reminds me of how we cook in well-run and organised restaurants. We can’t prepare everything a la minute. Out of necessity we need to prepare some things ahead and make compromises between “perfection” and getting the job done responsibly (without undermining quality where it really matters).
The ideas listed below are how I try and do this at Christmas.
(ps. if anyone is interested in the laatikot I mentioned, let me know and I’ll be sure to share a recipe for my favourite variety next time)
How do you solve a problem like dry turkey?
“Perfectionists cut the bird up and roast the legs and breast separately.”
Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking
Cooking juicy meat comes down to simple science. You can baste the bird as much as you like. You can stuff a pound of herby butter under the skin. You can manipulate it into God knows how many positions during cooking or even dress it in a fancy poncho of butter-soaked cheese cloth while it roasts. The fact is none of these techniques change the fact that heated past 68°c/155°f the breast will dry out. The leg meat, meanwhile, will still be tough unless you take it past 73°c/165°f.
I don’t believe Christmas lunch is the time to worry about perfection. There’s too much going on, too much other joy to be concerned with. But turkeys don’t come cheap. And if there’s one thing that deserves care and consideration the most, it’s the bird.
Here’s how I follow Harold’s advice to cook them separately and as “perfectly” as a line cook like me can.
First and most important of all, I “break down” the turkey. I remove the legs, the crown, and wings so I’m left with the bare carcass that I use for stock.
Because I love you guys, I’ve recorded a very quick video showing how I do this. Click below if you need some help with this.
I believe the benefits of cutting the bird up more than make up for the effort of doing so. These include:
You can now cook each cut to its optimal temperature.
You get the carcass for stock to make the most fantastic gravy.
Removed from the legs and wings, the crown will take less time to cook on Christmas Day.
A small (but important) detail for me, it takes less space in the oven, leaving you more room for the many other things that need to cook once serving time approaches.
I have been cooking the legs confit-style a day or two before Christmas for a few years now, reheating and crisping them up on the day. Not only will this give you achingly tender leg meat, but it’s one more thing ready ahead of time. Here’s how I do it.
How to cook confit turkey legs
Step 1: Weigh your turkey legs. Work out 1% of the weight and weigh out that much salt. E.g: 1kg of turkey legs will require 10g of salt
Step 2: Rub the salt into the legs and leave overnight, covered.
Step 3: The next day, heat oven to 120°c/250°f. Meanwhile, melt 500g of goose fat or butter. Place your legs in a baking dish that is small enough that the legs fit snug inside. This way they should be submerged in the molten fat once you carefully pour it over the legs.
Step 4: Put in the oven and slowly cook for 3 to 4 hours or until the flesh is very tender but the skin not browned. At this point, leave to cool and place in the fridge. You can do this 3 days ahead of eating.
Note: On day of serving we reheat the legs in the fat and then crisp them up (see below time-plan). And you can be absolutely sure that the butter/goose fat won’t go to waste. I’ll be roasting my potatoes in it on Christmas Day.
And how to cook the turkey crown
I’ll be dry-brining my crown, just as we did the legs (and as I like to do my chickens as well). Weigh the crown and work out 1% of this weight. This is the amount of salt we will be rubbing into our crown. Being careful not to tear the skin, work the salt under the skin. Leave this uncovered in the fridge for 24 hours at least.
I roast this on a few onions cut into chunks (skin on) and a few carrots maybe. This is to protect the crown from direct heat of the tray but also to give some sweetness to my gravy as I’ll be making my gravy in this pan as well once the bird is resting.
I rub some oil onto the crown and start the cooking at a high heat (220°c/425°f) for 20 minutes to get the browning of the skin, I then reduce it to 160°c/320°f. I test my turkey with a meat probe. I use this rather good Thermapen.
The general formula for turkey cooking is something around 70 minutes + 20 minutes a kilo. But I really just go by colour and temperature.
Please, buy a thermometer and cook your turkey to no higher than 68°c/155°f, then rest it somewhere warm (I cover mine in foil and a clean tea towel). It will still come up to 70°c/158°f but thanks to that lower oven temp, it shouldn’t raise much higher. With the added protection that the dry-brining offered, you will have such a nice, juicy turkey at this temperature.
How to cook less on Christmas Day
The crown needs to be cooked on the big day, there’s no compromise I’d want to make there. But as well as the legs, there’s lots more we can tick off the list on the day (and days) before.
What to get done ahead of time
Things that can be done well ahead with no impact on quality include: the sauces (cranberry and bread sauce), and the stuffing.
Click below to get my recipes for how I make these every year. The PDF details how long ahead each can be made, but it’s at least 3 days.
Next are the prep jobs I will do the day ahead:
Wrap sausages in bacon ready to be roasted
Peel and cut potatoes/carrots/parsnips then place in water somewhere cold
Trim sprouts
Make stock for gravy (using my turkey carcass)
A Christmas Day time-plan
And finally, this is my time-plan for the day itself. This is by no means set in stone, things change, but hopefully this helps if you’ve found Christmas dinner stressful in the past. With this time-plan, I think anyone can find cooking this meal calm and straightforward.
I really enjoyed putting this together. If you enjoy this type of thing from my newsletter or find it helpful, then let me know. If you’re here for my personal “memoir” stuff, then I’d be interested to know that as well.
The Recovering Line Cook is approaching its first birthday, any feedback from you would be really helpful. Please use the comments or drop me an email.
See you next time,
Wil
Wow, most excellent thank you. Of course we want the Laatikot recipe it sounds great. Happy Christmas.
Hands down, this is the most helpful explanation of how to cook Xmas dinner I’ve ever read. Almost sad we will be away and not cooking this year - but I am saving this for next year. Great stuff Will. 🙏