The Julia Child Turkey Tip Alex Guarnaschelli And Michael Symon Both Swear By
It's go time, folks: Thanksgiving Day, beloved holiday of most if not all foodies, is nearly upon us. If you're in charge of making a dish — or multiple ones — this year, you should probably be honing in on the recipes you'll want to prepare, and gathering the ingredients and equipment you'll need to make them.
Of course, if you're responsible for the turkey, you've taken on the biggest and potentially most complex of all of the Thanksgiving tasks. You'll need to make quite a few decisions, from what size turkey to buy to whether to cook it whole to which cooking method you'll employ. And if you're looking for guidance, many chefs and food television personalities have been sharing their turkey tips about the web, from Alex Guarnaschelli's TikTok advice on what size bird to buy to Padma Lakshmi's New York Times-published recipe for slow-roasted turkey to Carla Hall's recommendation to whip up a turkey breast roulade for a smaller gathering.
And on Twitter, two chefs agreed on a time-tested approach to roasting turkey: A Julia Child method utilized by both Alex Guarnaschelli and Michael Symon. Read on to find out what that method is.
Julia Child roasted her turkey with butter-soaked cheesecloth
Over in the Twitterverse, plenty of professional chefs and home cooks have been chatting about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, and which recipes they'll prepare. Yesterday, Symon responded to a Twitter user asking about the best way to get crispy turkey skin and moist meat. "Cheesecloth method," Symon replied. For followers who didn't know what he was talking about, Symon later clarified, "I learned from my grandfather when I was a kid .. always do it this way .. showed on ['The Chew'] originally about a decade ago .. but was around long before that .. no ones method .. just a method."
Guarnaschelli, of "Chopped," also talked up the cheesecloth method on her Instagram page. In a post, she described how to roast a stuffed turkey by first draping it in a butter-soaked cheesecloth, then removing the cloth after about two hours. On Twitter, folks noticed that both Symon and Guarnaschelli were advocating for the same turkey-roasting method. In response, Guarnaschelli pointed out that the technique was neither hers, nor Symon's, but in fact taken from Child. "It's a Julia Child method that we both use," she tweeted.
The chef has talked up this recipe before. Last year, Guarnaschelli told People that the butter-soaked cheesecloth keeps the white meat moist, and allows the skin to brown once removed. "I got this idea from watching Julia Child do it," she revealed.