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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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.