hunnymonster said:
Turkey (in fact any poultry) - dry tasteless crap.
I may not know much about shaving, but I know a lot about meat. There are two main reasons for turkey (in fact any poultry) being dry and tasteless.
1) Overcooking - it's a simple fact that the leg meat takes longer to cook than the breast meat. Therefore by the time the legs are cooked, the breasts are overdone. If you add to this your traditional stuffing inside the cavity of the bird, it's going to take even longer to cook, and the breast meat will be even drier.
There are ways around this. Cook the stuffing separately, i.e. in a different container and not inside the bird. Also, bard the bird with decent streaky bacon (bacon with lots of fat on it), as the fat will lubricate the meat as it cooks. Plus stuff herby butter up under the skin of the bird; again, it will lubricate as it cooks.
2) Crap birds - something like 95% of all the chickens reared in this country are intensively farmed. This means they spend their entire lives living in a space about the size of an A4 piece of paper. "Free range" birds are allowed a little more space than is, perhaps 4 times as much - not a great deal. So unless your bird has the word "organic" on it, and preferably the Soil Association symbol, it's probably one of these intensively reared birds. Words like "Farm Fresh" and pictures of smiling farmers on the packaging are meaningless. (Not sure if the figures are similar for turkey, but I'd be surprised if they weren't - probably worse.)
These birds don't get to move around much as you can imagine, therefore their muscles don't develop properly. Under-developed muscle = lack of taste. Think about beef - a fillet steak is tender as anything because it doesn't do a lot of work during the cow's life, but it doesn't have as much taste as, say, sirloin or rump steak.
These birds also don't get outside, so don't develop any fat on them at all, which contributes to the overcooking problem outlined above. Add to this the amount of antibiotics pumped into these poor creatures to prevent the spread of disease in such confined conditions, and you have a product that's cheap, but not a very good starting point if you want a delicious meal.
There is only one solution - don't buy these birds. Go organic. They're more expensive, but they really do taste so much better, plus if you use the carcass for stock you can make risotto or soup or something, thus getting more meals out of the one bird, and increasing its value for money.
Man alive I feel better for that. HFW has something to answer for. If you want to become a raving meat-preacher like me, buy his book "MEAT". It'll change the way you buy and prepare meat forever.
) or a leg of pork (with loads of crackling, maybe even extra crackling). But we have that all year around....
