For the next couple days, the phone number for the Butterball Turkey-Talk line will be ringing nonstop. There’s a lot of people, especially the amateurs who don’t cook a lot, who are going to be nervous about messing up the Thanksgiving turkey.
Some of them are worried they messed it up already.
It’s understandable too. Life is always crazy these days, right? Work is nonstop, and then the kids on top of that. Plus, if you’re hosting, someone in your family is probably adding to your stress levels.
All the hustle and bustle of life made it easy to forget to pull your turkey out to thaw. Believe it or not, it happens to a lot of people.
But no matter how hard you hope, putting it in the refrigerator now won’t get it thawed in time for dinner — you need to allot a full day for every four pounds of turkey you thaw by putting the frozen bird in the fridge.
“A lot of our calls do revolve around thawing. It’s our No. 1 question we get here at the Butterball Turkey Talk Line,” Sue Smith, one of the experts who has been taking calls for Butterball for 26 years, told WTOP.
Luckily, it’s an easy fix.
“You’re going to want to soak it in cold water. It’s going to be your quickest, safest way to get this turkey defrosted in time for Thanksgiving Day,” she said.
Her advice is to just fill up the kitchen sink.
“It takes 30 minutes per pound to get it thawed in this water,” she said. “You’re going to change that water every 30 minutes, and that’s going to be the quickest way to do it.”
Experts like Smith are available to talk over the phone, or online through email, chat boxes and text message. You can also find video tutorials at the Butterball website. And during her 26 years, she’s heard lots of crazy stories from people who did things that are way dumber than anything you would do.
“There was a dad with a to-do list. He had to thaw the turkey, he had to give the twin boys a bath, you know, he had his to-do list there, and he gave me a call,” she recalled. Smith said she heard “all this laughter and chaos in the background” as he was thawing the turkey with his twin boys.
“He just wanted to know how long it would take. And I have twin boys, so I could see where it’d be pretty fun for those boys,” she said.
But she had to explain that the turkey needed to stay in its own cold water bath.
“Don’t put it in with your kids. Don’t put it in a hot tub. We’ve heard that before,” she said.
Even crazier?
“Someone had it wrapped up in their heating blankets and just wanted to know about how long that would take if it was on the high setting versus the low setting,” she remembered. “So people do get creative here.”
Once you have it in the oven, you want to use a meat thermometer to make sure the center of the turkey breast and thighs each hit 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I always recommend too, about two thirds of the way through, once your turkey starts getting a nice golden-brown color, lightly shield it with some oil,” Smith said. “That will prevent the breast from getting overdone while you’re waiting for that side meat to get to temperature.”
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