Best. Turkey. Ever.

So I think I mentioned in a posts several months ago that my blogging friend Stephen Andrew Jones ( http://stephenandrewblog.blogspot.com ) wrote a post that sold me on buying a sous vide system for cooking, due to his gorgeous, magazine-worthy pictures of his perfect Thanksgiving turkey. The other option was to show up at his house for the big day and just enjoy all his hard work, but since that's technically stalking (but is it still stalking if you bring really good wine?), instead I bought a sous vide system for myself. Stephen Andrew has several good posts on making a perfect Thanksgiving turkey on his blog, so if you've suffered through the curse of dry meat this year please check out his holidays posts from years past, as well as a couple of links I'll post below. It will change your life.

The sous vide uses vacuum sealed bags with the food inside, cooked at very precise temperatures, to cook meats and poultry to perfection. They cook at a lower temperature, for a longer time, making them safe to eat. I will never, for the record, knowingly eat a dry, briny, 165 degree bird again. 

Here at the homestead we've seen more than our fair share of dried up breast meat and under-done prime rib around the holidays and the stress of not knowing if we'd have another disaster every year was making restaurant reservations in town look extremely attractive.

Ollalieberry mimosas using my favorite sparkling Marsanne!

And so it's especially nice to be able to report that our home-cooked Thanksgiving turkey was, by far, the best any of us had ever had, whether at home or dining out. And for me, it was, by far, the easiest Thanksgiving prep I'd ever had. Thank you Stephen Andrew!

There were several factors working towards making this -- bar none -- the most delicious but also the easiest Thanksgiving ever.  The vacuum seal system I bought alongside the sous vide allowed me to vacuum seal anything, and so I used that opportunity to pre-make ALL the side dishes in advance and hold them in the fridge without fear of spoilage or flavor changes (including stuffing, which stayed moist and delicious despite not being cooked in the bird).  So all the side dishes were done by Wednesday.

Behold the stuffing cooker.

Thursday was Pie Day (we celebrated dinner on Friday, so Thursday was a prep day), using pumpkins I'd harvested a couple of months ago and Olallieberries harvested and fast-frozen in spring.  All I had to do was make two pie crusts and cook it all up, which wasn't hard.

Then our Friday Turkey Day arrived, and it was time to cut the raw bird up into pieces. I decided to only cook the breasts in the sous vide system and sear and then braise the legs in the oven, in a red wine reduction sauce (I got 99 problems, but lack of wine ain't one of them). I also pulled all the breast skin off (sous vide cooking means no crispy skin sadly, but there are alternatives for making this happen!). I slathered the peeled-off skin in bacon fat and a little salt  and popped it into the oven on a sheet of parchment to roast by itself. I roasted up nicely, but shrunk a lot, so next year I will be covering it with another baking sheet to hold it flat and help keep it's shape and size.

I then seasoned the two breasts and trussed them together to make a kind of "turchetta," popped it into a vacuum bag and dumped it into a stock pot with the sous vide cooker. Both the breasts and the legs were scheduled for exactly 2 1/2 hours of cooking. With about an hour left in the cook time, I took out all the side dishes out of the fridge and stuck them in the oven too. The stuffing I cooked outside in the solar oven to help keep it moist.

EXACTLY two and a half hours later, I had a perfect Thanksgiving dinner -- no stress whatsoever. What a cooking revolution. So nice to be able to tell people you're going to eat at 2 pm and MEAN IT. Commitment kept! There was literally no guesswork at all, which was so helpful to me as I started heating up side dishes and getting the table ready.

Generation Two, minus our son Groceries who is stationed in South Carolina.

We had two of our three kids home and I'm happy to say they absolutely loved the meal! So did Big Ag, even though he's not in this pic because he's off in the kitchen somewhere getting himself a drink.

Here is a link to the two recipes I used for this year's feast:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/food-lab-sous-vide-turkey-crisp-skin-sous-vide-101-thanksgiving.html

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/11/red-wine-braised-turkey-legs.html

Livin' La Sous Vide Loca

So I probably haven't mentioned this, but I keep a quarter jar in our living room, where I save my shiny $.25 pieces for a couple of years, and then roll them once the jar is filled and go buy myself something frivolous, sinful and fun, something I might not purchase otherwise.  I give myself permission to blow my quarter money on anything I want. I generally get about $200 from the jar, so it allows me to gift myself with absolutely no guilt whatsoever.  It's a little "I Love Me" present. One time I bought a great pair of boots, another time I actually brought the quarters with me on a cruise and used them to have fun gambling (I won all my money back!) ... and this time I bought a sous vide system.

I first heard about this wonderful appliance on my friend Stephen Andrew's blog (here's a link if you are interested: Stephen Andrew's Sous Vide blog post ) and was insanely jealous at the ease with which he appeared to put together his holiday feasts.  With the sous vide system, it appeared as if he actually had enough time to decorate beautifully AND enjoy the company of friends and family. I have a feeling he could probably do this anyway, but anything I can do to give myself a leg up I will take. Of course for me one immediate benefit presented itself in my mind, which is that I could start drinking champagne at noon without worrying I was going to forget my expensive free-range bird or cut of meat. (like last time) That decided it. I started thinking about buying a sous vide system after that, but waited until Quarter Jar Day to do it.

And so here it is, the Anova sous vide system hooked up to my spaghetti pot, gently cooking a cheap chuck roast for 36 hours as an experiment. (According to the instructions, you can cook a cheap cut of meat in the sous vide system for a long time -- like 36 hours or so, and it will emerge as soft and malleable as a more expensive cut of meat, only needing to be browned up a bit before serving.)

I will be out of the house for at least half the day tomorrow, and so the thought of coming home to a home-cooked meal is tantalizing. It's even more appealing to know that it will happen without 1) the mess and occasional overcooked quality the crock pot's meals sometimes have or 2) dining with a grumpy husband who has accidentally overcooked a meal because he was trying to cook whilst simultaneously talking to one of his vineyard workers who needs instructions on irrigation, and playing a rousing game of solitaire on his iPad -- all at the same time. It happens.

But not with the sous vide, baby. It has one task, and one task alone...to make a silk purse (tender steak) out of a sows's ear (cheap chuck) and I'm believing it's gonna happen.  I'll let you know how it goes.

And as a final note, how grand is it that it will cook dinner without either heating up the house via the oven or needing to physically go outside and turn the solar cooker every half hour or so to follow the sun while I'm cooking out there?