Good morning. While this edition focuses on our top turkey tips, the recently released potato deep dive video will help you for pick the perfect spud for any holiday dish, whether you mash, scallop, fry, or roast.

TECHNIQUE FEATURE 🤯

Last-minute turkey tips, based on science

Everyone makes a fuss about brining, basting, and buttering, but those don’t make nearly the impact on the final bird as temperature.

After a few videos and significant testing on the topic, here are the three high-impact techniques you can focus on to nail turkey this year:

1) Spatchcock or quarter the turkey

Without doing this, a turkey’s natural shape almost guarantees the breast will overcook and go dry, while the dark meat is still underdone.

Spatchcocking flattens the bird and brings the dark meat into contact with more heat, allowing the breasts to stay juicy.

For an even more foolproof cook, you can pre-quarter the turkey, and cook the white and dark meats on different sheet trays for different amounts of time.

• Learn how to do each with this video

2) Cook the breasts to no higher than 150°F, but the dark meat to 175°F+

Cooking the white meat to the USDA recommended 165°F will almost certainly dry it out. Thankfully, you can cook it to 150°F/65°C and still ensure bacteria has been eliminated.

Dark meat (especially on sinewy turkey legs) needs to be taken to much hotter temperatures to break down the connective tissues.

• With a spatchcocked or quartered bird, the exposed dark meat can get more heat anyways in the oven

3) Use fat on the skin for a golden brown, crispy finish

Fat conducts heat to the skin, which helps dehydrate it and promote the Maillard reaction. No need for constant basting or brushing!

Instead of a dry rub, mayo marinades, compound butter, or even a light oil brush work better to season the bird while still achieving browning.

Notes

• When spatchcocked, you can roast at a higher temp of 450°F/232°C, which will crisp up the skin better and cook the meat through in just 80-90 mins!

• If you have time, dry brining is still helpful: it evenly seasons the meat and dehydrates the skin, leading to extra browning for a more appealing final product.

Check out our recommended bird recipe below:

RECIPE RECS ✅

Thanksgiving classics

If you want to make Ethan’s mayo marinated turkey along with other Thanksgiving family sides, we’ve put together a collection of recipes all in one place:

READER Q&A 🧠

Cutting board size: Is bigger better?

We’ve thought about this question a lot over the past few years of making food content, and especially over the past year of designing the Foundations cutting board.

We wanted to make the only cutting board that you will need to cook well for the rest of your life, and we landed on 24x18x1.5” as the optimal size cutting board size for comfortable prep work.

While a larger wooden board takes up some counter space, it's worth it:

• You need ample room for proper knife skills and to mise-en-place everything without crowding your workspace. There's nothing worse than diced vegetables falling off the sides of a tiny cutting board.

• A sturdy board creates a stable surface that won’t rock or slide on you, especially if you stabilize it with a wet paper towel underneath.

• A flat, smooth surface also doubles as a dough-kneading, shaping, or rolling workspace.

Because of this, we feel strongly about a flat edge-to-edge surface, and think juice grooves are an interfering annoyance. We intentionally omitted a juice groove to maximize space and make for easy wiping, scraping, and cleaning.

How do I transfer ingredients to the stove?

Use a metal spatula or bench scraper to transfer ingredients to the pan. When maintained with a wood conditioner, it will develop a near-watertight seal that can easily be wiped or scraped clean.

A butcher block-style board is meant to live on the counter — 24x18” can fit horizontally or vertically on standard counter depths.

• If you have smaller boards around the house — you don’t have to get rid of them. You can use those for raw meat or for when other people help you prep food.

• That said, we’ve designed our board to be reversible so you can reserve one side for meat, and the other for vegetables or general prep work.

If you’re interested in picking up one of our boards, we have some left in this batch.

FOOD TRENDS 🚀

Rice paper croissants

Can this be the solution to recreating croissants at home?

Croissants are a great example of a product that seems humble but is incredible difficult to replicate, especially in a home setting.

• Its flakey layers are created by lamination, a process of rolling dough and folding sheets of butter into exponentially more layers.

While you can do this tediously by hand, most bakeries have a sheeter, an industrial machine that laminates pastry dough by the yard.

Enter the rice paper TikTok trend, where enterprising home cooks realize you can replicate the flakey layers with rice paper stacks dipped in egg wash. When baked, the rice paper absorbs the egg and results in a surprisingly similar texture to dough & butter.

• Amazingly, this happens to be a gluten & dairy-free option to laminated pastries.

Does it really taste the same?

Reviewers seem to say that it doesn’t have the same butteriness and flakiness of an actual croissant, although the layered textured effect is still satisfying.

Our take: Texture is a major element of flavor, and finding ways to replicate satisfying textures at home in clever ways is a key unlock to better enjoying your own food.

WINNING READER SUBMISSION 🏆

High protein pizza

This week’s dinner winner is Troy T., who made Ethan’s high-protein pizza dough topped with chicken and roasted red peppers.

Reply with your best home-cooked food photos for a chance to win & be featured!

EXTRA HELPINGS 🍽️

A read: The Most Memorable Restaurant Reviews from Pete Wells

In a minute or less: Hong Kong Style French Toast

What we’re watching: What Your Grocery Cart Says About You

Food science: Food reactions 101: Maillard

Shop our products: The Foundations Cutting Board

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