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Ask Slashdot: Geekiest Way To Cook a Turkey?
First time accepted submitter almostadnsguy writes "There seem to be a lot of ways to cook a turkey the geekiest ones are probably out of the realm of possibility for normal geeks. However, Within the limits of normal society (or outside if you wish) what is the geekiest way to do it? Do you use a special brine, cook it in an inventive way, or raise genetically modified turkeys with extra legs?"
I would share my method, but it only works for a spherical turkey in a vacuum.
The geekest turkey recipe first starts with creating the Universe.
Gather ten of your friends, remove all of your glasses, concentrate the rays of the sun, creating a spectacle oven. Voila.
Really? What self respecting geek doesn't go home to be pampered by Mom?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
step 1: assume a perfectly spherical turkey...
let's have a conversation! let me know what you think.
Some people feel the need to extend their geek persona into everything (including family stuff).
Personally I'm not so inclined. Christmas (I'm Canadian so that's our next turkey day) and (our) thanksgiving are occasions when I like to put down the tech and spend the day hanging out at my mothers place with family. But I guess if someone wants to make an arduino controlled stuffing management system or something, to each their own!
Put it in the freezer, thaw and eat by yourself on Thursday, watching re-runs of Star Trek?
Gently reply
This being slashdot, the correct answer is mine BitCoins. Place turkey in GPU exhaust, wait until golden brown, serve.
Have you seen a commercial turkey farm? They shovel the dead out daily - it's like something from the Matrix. Do you really want to eat that?
FUCK YEA! Turkey is so yummy.
Step 2: Create startup with Elon Musk or Richard Branson, to launch turkey into the heart of the sun.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
YES! Have you tasted a dead turkey?
Dunno what options their are down there, but here in Canada lots of places where you can get a free range turkey.
Funny story: first year I did this I placed my order for 2 turkeys (one for thanksgiving and one for Christmas). Picked up the one for thanksgiving and was great, just the right size. Picked up the one for Christmas and it was huge! Like a complete idiot I asked why this one was so much bigger than the first one, to which the farmer replied of course that "it grew..". Kinda funny what a life time of buying stuff from grocery stores does to your brain.
Take the turkey.
Pour a bit of the vodka on it.
Drink a bit of the remaining vodka.
Prepare to put the turkey in the oven.
Pour some more vodka on it.
Sip some more of the remaininng vodka.
Put the burkey in the oben.
Taek anohter brink of the vokda.
Tuern om the onev at 200 degrees.
Whihle waithtng for durkey the to beacome reday, fiinsh the rest of the btotle.
Remuove teh rurheyk orfm eht oaven.
Clal am aumbuleance to treat yoru bruns.
At least that's how I'd do it
I don't get it.
Are you cooking the turkey to eat it? Because if you are, there's only a handful of time tested methods to do so (in the oven, on the BBQ, sometimes deep-fried in a giant vat of cooking oil or grease). I've watched a lot of cooking shows on TV and I'm by no means an "expert" on this stuff, but every time I see someone working with turkey the formula is always the same- apply heat until cooked, add something else, then consume.
So I'm really not sure what "within the limits of normal society (or outside if you wish)" means. Are you looking for an answer like "I hoist my turkeys 200ft into the air, then shoot at them with improvised rifles fashioned from recycled microwave magnetrons and a focusing coil/antenna I built in my garage"? Or are you looking for an advanced culinary technique that few people use, but can otherwise yield amazing results? That "or outside if you wish" really gets me, because I'm sure there's a civilization somewhere out there in space who cooks their turkeys by loading them into a trebuchet, setting them on fire, then launching them into a volcano where a lone volunteer must venture to retrieve the cooked bird after a set amount of time as some sort of ritual/right of passage. That's outside normal society, right?
I'm trying really hard not to say "just fucking google it", but that's the best advice I can offer. Just. Fucking. Google. It. I'm not even sure why you think most Slashdot folks would know how to cook a turkey- unless you want them to venture out of the basement and go ask their moms.
Cooking involves complex chemistry and physics. Learning to cook consistently good food is a very difficult, geeky achievement.
I can't vouch for the edibility of the finished product, but....
Take 1 frozen turkey, and remove plastic wrapping.
Place on a ceramic or glass pedistal.
Plug in your 5000v induction heater charge controller.
Wrap a coil of 10 gauge or thicker copper wire around a large stockpot to a height suitable for the intended purpose. Remove from stockpot, and attach coil to the charge controller.
Carefully lower the coil over and around the frozen turkey, taking care to assure that the coil does not short, and does not touch the turkey.
Turn the charge controller on, and observe carefully. A mysterious orange glow eminating from the frozen turkey is normal. It may be necessary to throttle back the voltage of the induction coil to avoid incineration of the turkey. Using a frozen turkey improves chances of first time success.
Keep children, pets, and the elderly away from the induction heater at all times, and always wear appropriate protective clothing and safety goggles.
Walk over to the replicator and say "White meat Turkey, Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes w/gravy & gelled cranberry sauce" Oh and 'Earl Grey Tea please'
Sigs are for losers
You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."..
And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The right way for geeks to celebrate christmas or thanksgiving day is to not celebrate them at all. Geeks are supposed to be smart enough to not believe in imaginary friends in the sky and to not celebrate the biggest genocide in history eating turkey.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
If these aren't the geekiest ways to cook a a turkey, I don't know what is:
http://gizmodo.com/5962516/nasa-scientists-show-four-ways-to-cook-your-turkey
Because I imagine "geeky" can mean much more than that. A history buff who researches the traditional cooking methods and ingredients used by the pilgrims, and then sets out to replicate it with a wild turkey that he shoots and cleans would be doing it in a geeky way. A gardening buff who dries his own herbs and spices, and makes his stuffing from scratch with the leftover rosemary bread he baked last week would be doing it in a geeky way. And, of course, the science buff who levitates his turkey with magnets and blasts it with a high powered directed energy canon (dialed down for juiciness) would also be doing it in a geeky way.
Honestly though I'd rather prefer the garden geek's turkey, though it may be too late to plant your herbs now.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Hang it above my EICO HF-87 vacuum tube amp and play the LA Phil recording of the music from Star Wars *real loud* Trick will be to catch the drippings so that they don't gum up the EL-34 / 6CA7 tubes. Good thing my AR turntable and HF-85 preamp are well away from the power amp. The result is the clearest sounding turkey possible.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
The right way for geeks to celebrate christmas or thanksgiving day is to not celebrate them at all. Geeks are supposed to be smart enough to not believe in imaginary friends in the sky and to not celebrate the biggest genocide in history eating turkey.
Fun at parties, are you?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This beats all.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrI91J6jOw
Vi Hart (previously featured on /.) has posted a geeky turkey video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrI91J6jOwm, which I found rather amusing!
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
The science of cooking would be chemistry and food chemistry is every bit as geeky as electronics hacking these days.
Yes, it's geeky - it's an artificial imitation vaguely-turkey-like product that can only exist because of a combination of complex technologies (including the transportation networks that get the things to the store, and the marketing processes that make it possible to make enough Tofurkey to be profitable.)
And ok, it doesn't taste quite like the real thing, and I'm not actually going to bother. Traditional American Thanksgiving feasts have enough non-meat dishes that you can really just skip the actual turkey.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's a harvest festival. The genocide was incidental.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Now you may all ask yourself what any of this has to do with turkey, and you'd be right for asking. I wish there was a simple answer but, friends, it ain't simple. It's Thanksgiving.
Alice's Restaurant
By Arlo Guthrie
This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the
restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant,
that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's
Restaurant.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on
Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the
restaurant, but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the
church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and
Fasha the dog. And livin' in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of
room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Havin' all that room,
seein' as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn't
have to take out their garbage for a long time.
We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be
a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump. So
we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW
microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed
on toward the city dump.
Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the
dump saying, "Closed on Thanksgiving." And we had never heard of a dump
closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off
into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.
We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the
side road there was a fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the
cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile
is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we
decided to throw ours down.
That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had a thanksgiving
dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the
next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie. He said, "Kid,
we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of
garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And
I said, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope
under that garbage."
After speaking to Obie for about forty-five minutes on the telephone we
finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down
and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the
police officer's station. So we got in the red VW microbus with the
shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the
police officer's station.
Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at
the police station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for
being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and
we didn't expect it, and the other thing was he could have bawled us out
and told us never to be see driving garbage around the vicinity again,
which is what we expected, but when we got to the police officer's station
there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was
both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said "Obie, I don't think I
can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid.
Get in the back of the patrol car."
And that's what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the
quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about the town of
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this happened here, they got three stop
The right way for geeks to celebrate christmas or thanksgiving day is to not celebrate them at all. Geeks are supposed to be smart enough to not believe in imaginary friends in the sky and to not celebrate the biggest genocide in history eating turkey.
Speak for yourself. Not being American we don't do the whole Thanksgiving thing, but Christmas and Easter we do. Our Christmas and Easter celebrations have absolutely zero to do with religion, and are instead basically an excuse for the family to gather together and have a good meal and a drink or three.
I'm sure a co-worker's method of cooking other meats could be adapted to a turkey...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Encase in 1 ton of copper, dump LHC beams and turkey gets cooked by molten copper. Exceedingly rapid but has the disadvantage that apart from the difficulty in extracting the turkey from the copper it will also be slightly radioactive due to the activation by the beams.
As bored biomed-technicians in a USAF hospital, we found that on Thanksgiving, we had only frozen turkeys, as no-one had seen the need to thaw them (sigh).
Well, realizing we could reprogram a Steris steam-sterilizer to reach 300 degrees Farenheit, we cooked the turkeys in a sterilizer.
The most juicy, moist (soggy) turkey you will have ever tasted, and it takes about 90 minutes to cook *FROM FROZEN*
The first method came about from reading that one of the reasons that it is recommended that stuffing not be cooked in the turkey is that if the stuffing is cooked to a safe temperature, the meat is badly overcooked. My solution to this? Cook the turkey (following the usual oven method) with a heat exchanger to help cook the stuffing from the inside. 8 inches of 1" copper pipe, capped at both ends and 10 feet or so of 1/4" copper tubing tightly coiled into a 2-3" coil, and soldered into holes in one of the caps on the larger pipe, and the whole thing filled with water.
The large pipe was inside the turkey, the coil outside and exposed to the ambient oven temperature. The idea was that the oven would heat the water in the coil, and convection would circulate it into the turkey, cooking the stuffing from the inside. It seemed to actually work, too. The downside is the risk that one of the solder joints would fail after the water had heated up to ~300+ F. While that didn't happen the one time I tried it, the risk lead to the device forever after being referred to as "The Turkey Rocket". PS: Don't try this for your first dinner where you're inviting your parents and your girlfriends parents over. You might not survive. :)
Method #2 is a more recent method -- Sous vide cooking. You can't do a whole turkey, and skin of any kind is a bit of a lost cause, but skinless turkey breasts or drumsticks cooked at ~140F for 10 to 12 hours are amazing. More moist and tender than brined, and no risk of being too salty. And with wires everywhere, and an electronically controlled thermometer and heater, cooking doesn't get any geekier.
grnbrg
PS: If you're oven cooking, look up brining. It's easy, and makes a huge difference.
You're absolutely right. That's why many choose to do the humane thing and hunt them instead.
There's insecurity at work; perhaps even a hint of madness. Subtle, perhaps, but it's there. A cloying need to identify with a label, regardless of its meaning. Simply replace "geekiest" with another cultural label, and you'll see how unnatural it is. What's the most Christian way to prepare a turkey? Or the most furry? Perhaps the most patriotic? It is a desire to celebrate a simple observation about oneself and inflate it to cartoonish proportions, as if by doing so it is possible to purify out contrary personality traits.
Slowly but tirelessly, the fashion industry struggles to manipulate perhaps the last stronghold of purely rational, socially unaware people: the technically-minded. By trying to play on the reader's insecurity, they hope to drum up a desire to make the reader purchase relevant goods. This is the true cost of the passing of Slashdot to a larger commercial entity.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Okay,
Turkey Breast with Coffee Marinade:
Marinde:
1 hot chilli finely chopped (leave the seeds in preferrably).
1 small onion, finely diced.
2 cloves garlic, minced.
1 teaspoon olive oil.
1/2 teaspoon coffee grounds.
1/2 Teaspoon sea salt.
1/2 Teaspoon crushed red pepper.
1 shot of esspresso coffee.
dash of Worcestershire sauce.
dash of balsamic vinegar.
heat the olive oil in a saucepan.
Add the chilli onion and garlic and saute for 3 minutes or until the onions and chilli soften.
Add the coffee grounds, salt, red pepper and cook for a further minute.
Add coffee, Worcestershire sauce and vinegar. Simmer for about 45 minutes.
Cool the marinade.
Put Turkey breast in a zip lock bag and pour in half of the the marinade.
Put turkey breast in fridge for 2 - 4 hours.
Pre heat the oven to 180c
put turkey breast on a wire rack in the oven.
Cook till internal the temprature of the turkey breast reaches 70c - use a meat thermometer - (about 30 minutes per kilo) basting every 15 minutes using the remaining marinade.
Take the turkey out of the oven. Take photos of the turkey with phone, post photos on facebook/twitter/WATTEVA.
Phone for a pizza.
BM3
some preprocessing:
- download latest linux kernel source
- make [x]config
then in parallel:
- make bzImage modules install
- drive to boston market and buy a cooked turkey
when you return from the long take-out line at the restaurant, the kernel build will probably be done.
then, in parallel:
- reboot to new kernel
- consume turkey and its various 'modules'
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I always use the Zuni method, which is to say, the method popularized by Judy Rodgers from the Zuni Cafe.
Essentially, you wash your bird and completely cover it with 1 tablespoon of salt per pound. It's best to use the best quality salt you can find; I use Celtic sea-salt that I grind myself.
Put your salt-covered bird in the fridge for a day or three and then roast it at 400-425F (depending on how crispy you like it). The salt takes all of the juices from the inside of the bird and redistributes it throughout the meat. This is essentially an old-fashioned salt-cure.
It results in the most heavenly, moist poultry. I've tried all the other methods, frying, bbq, smoked, basting, etc, and this is how we do poultry now, period.
It's best to do this a few days ahead of time with a turkey but chicken can cure in as little as 12 hours or so and be ready to cook.
Good luck!
Well, the *nerdiest* way to cook turkey is to wait in your mom's basement until it is done.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are also geeky ways to prepare the whole thanksgiving dinner
Collector's Edition
Molecular gastronomy, digitally controlled immersion cooking, air-cannon impact tenderization...
Cooking is every bit as geeky as bits of circuitry.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Ahh yes, nothing tastier than stalking and killing a turkey with your bare hands and teeth. Their fear is the best seasoning.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
If your sense of "geeky" is like mine, and you take it to mean really investing in rigorous curiosity about the process combined with a sciency hypothesis-trial approach to technique, then you can't get any better than Kenji Lopez-Alt's Food Lab over at Serious Eats. Here's his comprehensive Thanksgiving Q & A from a few days ago. (Sorry if this post shows up twice; I think the first try was eaten by mbeta.slashdot.org)
Nobody has ever used a Solar Oven before?
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Oven-GLOBAL-SUN-OVEN/dp/B00286KQ1W
Might need 2 days to get it done.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
You're absolutely right. That's why many choose to do the humane thing and hunt them instead.
Only problem is the intelligence of the average turkey is greater than the intelligence of many of the hunters.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYkRF_FmD40
William Shatner & State Farm® present "Eat, Fry, Love," a turkey fryer fire cautionary tale
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I don't think you quite understand. They're not religious holidays. They are recognition of the passing of the seasons and the cycle of life. And yes, there may have been multiple deities involved so I suppose you could consider religious in some fashion. But not in the modern sense of Christianity. These holidays were already being celebrated before Christianity and those trying to show folks "the way" incorporated these celebrations to do so as the local population weren't going to give them up. Best to co-op them and basically Christians said: "this holiday means this" where "this" conveniently tied into the whole that was being preached.
Don't mean to offend anyone, Christians or not, but let's recognize that these holidays have been around for a long long time. Longer than Christianity. (Note, not talking about Thanksgiving, as that is not a "religious" holiday although the celebration of a good years harvest goes back many, many years.) This was directed at the comments concerning Christmas and Easter.
"It makes good meat taste like ham."
You're doing it wrong. It shouldn't taste any different.
"BTW, that 155 better be Celsius. It seems high, but any other 155 (K, F, or R) would be horrid."
155F for breast meat is near perfect. Cooked, but still juicy. Some people are freaked out by any hint of pink on the bones. I feel sad for them, but they could cook to 165 or 170 and probably it would not be too overcooked. 155 C would be dried out and inedible.
Get a Weber Smokey Mountain BBQ Smoker or equivalent to smoke the turkey. That's not the geeky part.
Add an ATC (automatic temperature control). This will allow you to set it for precise, unattended low and slow cooking.
Better still, get one with wifi and an internet server like the Stoker Power Draft from rocksbarbque.com. (no affiliation, but I do own one).
You can check and adjust your meat and fire temperatures from inside your home on wifi or remotely via the internet on your smartphone or computer.
It can even email you, or serve twitter updates. Run it with dyndns.org, and give your buddies a simple URL to monitor your cook as well.
Then install Stokerlog to your system, so that you can graph meat and fire temperatures and share temperature graphs with your geeky buddies on the bbq forums.
Use a digital camera and take pictures of the smoke ring (smoke penetration) on a slice of meat. Share it on your favorite photo sharing site.
Lastly, get farkles like an instant read thermometer, (I like the Thermapen), and measure the precise temperature of the meat everywhere on the bird.
The satisfaction, apart from the eating, is taking a stone age process; barbeque; and bringing it into the internet age.
I don't know if you could get geekier than that...
First you get a beowulf cluster of turkeys.
Then you place a naked and petrified Natalie Portman above the turkeys, and you pour hot grits all over her, letting the grits fall on the turkeys, slow cooking them with their transferred heat.
If you find the turkey's aren't cooking fast enough, you add the sonic energy from screaming, "OMG ponies!" to the process, hopefully speeding it up an uncountable number of femtoseconds.
When Netcraft confirms that all other forms of turkey cooking are dying, you dispense the entire Beowulf cluster of turkeys into a series of (feeding) tubes.
Before eating, you praise technology by reading the latest F*cking Article on Slashdot, and ban any insensitive clods to the neighbors.
Then you eat the turkeys before they can move to Soviet Russia and eat you.
Reeses
Methinks, perhaps, the best method for you to prepare a turkey would be with a tinfoil hat on.
You want geeky? Try frying a turkey with Alton Brown's Turkey Frying Derrick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KwGs-Lism4 (see about the 13 minute mark)
Presentation: C
Taste: E
Creativity: A
Time: A (very quick)
Overall a fun and new way to impress your friends and flatten the neighborhood.