A Line Cook's Christmas Notebook 2025
Tips to make things easier, and recipes to change things up a bit.
Hello and welcome to a very full edition of The Recovering Line Cook.
This is the week of the year (in my long 3 years of newsletter writing) that I share how I do all my Christmas cooking. I’ve updated this labour of love for 2025 so I have all my advice and recipes in one place for you.
I have 1 goal with this post: to give you a few tips and ideas to help make your Christmas-cooking easier, more straightforward and maybe even a little different from the usual.
Below you’ll find:
How to joint your turkey, and reliable ways to cook it beautifully
Things to prep before the day to make your life easier
My Christmas Day time-plan to get the job done with zero stress
Loads of really lovely dessert recipes
And for the non turkey-eaters and vegetarians among you, please bear with me. Next week I have an all vegetarian post for you featuring a recipe I’m absolutely in love with.
Wil
PS
If you want to give a really unique gift this Christmas (maybe even to yourself), consider a 1-to-1 online cooking class with me. Click below or reply to this email for more info!
Lessons from a Finnish (and restaurant) kitchen at the Holidays
Nothing makes you feel further from home as an immigrant than the moment you realise something weird about your new country is utterly mundane to a local.
And there’s nothing like Christmas to bring out something weird about a place.
Here in Finland, the big day is Christmas Eve (?) and a significant chunk of the day is spent in the local graveyard.
(I’ll be covering this in my ongoing diary in due course, I promise.)
And that’s not to mention the food Finns eat at Christmas…
There is no a la minute whole-roasted turkey. Instead, there’s a Christmas ham cooked the day before.
There’s no encyclopaedia 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, deeply comforting dishes of mashed then baked root vegetables that, like the ham, are prepared the day before and reheated for service.
Oh, and the all-important roast potatoes (that need first boiling then roasting in various types of animal 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 distinctly Zen-like Christmas menu, so much less stressful than the UK version I grew up with, 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 then paid subs can find the recipe below. It is an absolutely great side dish.)
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 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, in the fridge.
Step 3: The next day, heat your oven to 120°c/250°f. Meanwhile, melt 500g of goose fat or butter (or just use oil). 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 the day of serving we reheat the legs in the fat, remove them, and then crisp them up out of the fat (see below time-plan). And you can be absolutely sure that the butter/oil/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 don’t bother covering mine in foil/tea towels as I find it only serves to make soggy skin). 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 (paid subscriber extras)
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(s) before.
If you’d like to get access to my “get ahead” recipe sheet (inc. stuffing and sauces recipes), and my Christmas time plan that makes the entire cooking day simple, please become a paid subscriber by clicking below. Absolutely no hard feelings if you buy a month for all this content and then go back to free, it still really supports my newsletter!
Also under the paywall, access to recipes for…
