Our Roku Channel currently features On-Demand video from all the great shows on TOCC, and we have been working frantically to continue putting content in.

We will be working hard to offer live programming as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, if you haven’t purchased a Roku yet, now is the time, they have a fantastic assortment of channels, and of course they now have The Outdoor Cooking Channel.

Current Roku Owners, Click Here to add The Outdoor Cooking Channel to your box, or you can find us under Food, and Internet TV in your Channel Store.

The Outdoor Cooking Channel has just what you need.

Starting at 12noon and running until 12 Midnight on 12-24 Christmas Eve, then starting again at 6:00am and running until 12 midnight on 12-25 Christmas Day, the Outdoor Cooking Channel will be running non-stop Holiday Cooking from GrateTV, Gary House The Outdoor Cook, Kevin Bevington HomeBBQ.com, and Darryl Mast from BBQSuperstars.com.

Click Here To Watch!

Many cooks would much prefer to brave the chilly air of December to keep the holiday cooking mess outdoors!  Cooking outdoors may seem like a novel idea to some, but you can actually prepare some very traditional holiday foods over the open flames of your fire pit or atop your charcoal or gas grill.  Many traditional and quite historic dishes can be made-over to suit your grill; they are perfect for holiday celebrations and are likely to convince you that winter grilling is well worth withstanding the cold all season long!

Christmas Goose: The quintessential star of the Victorian Christmas feast, the goose tends to be fat and heavy making it a perfect candidate for smoking and grilling outdoors.  A fifteen pound goose is likely to take between two and three hours to grill.  If it’s simply too cold up there in Maine or thereabouts in the northlands, you can cut the cooking time dramatically by cutting the goose in half and grilling each side.  Onion powder, garlic, thyme, and a bit of lemon juice are common seasonings for goose.

Holiday Turkey: If you’re holiday gathering is small, consider grilling a breast of turkey cut in half for the grill.  This greatly shortens the cooking time and the breasts can be seasoned anyway you like.  Brine to lock in moisture and then grill over indirect heat.  To be festive, create a basting sauce combining ingredients like soy sauce, honey, lemon juice, and cloves.

Sides: Various Victorian-era and early twentieth-century cookbooks feature Christmas menus.  Potatoes are frequently mentioned as are Brussels sprouts, cranberries, asparagus, and corn.  These items can be grilled either wrapped in foil or in a grill pan.  Coat with a bit of olive oil and season with sea salt, pepper, rosemary, and oregano.  Add some holiday colorful ingredients into the mix like stewed tomatoes and red or green peppers.

Warden Pie: This sweetly spiced pie made with saffron and pears is mentioned in Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale.  To prepare this the Elizabethan way takes more time than the modern holiday cook has to spare.  You can easily revamp this dessert for modern tastes and techniques.  Chop up some pears and cover with water; simmer on your grill’s side burner until the fruit is soft.  Then, create a mixture of cinnamon, brown sugar, clove, and ginger (saffron if you want to be authentic) to suit your taste.  Lay foil across your grill to accommodate some puff pastry.  Place your fruit on top of the puff pastry—you can make small tart shapes if you prefer—and then sprinkle the spice mix across the fruit.  Grill until the pastry is ready—about six or seven minutes.  When you’re ready to serve, top with vanilla ice cream for a treat Shakespeare would approve of.

You can adapt nearly any of your favorite holiday recipes for the grill.  It keeps the mess outdoors, but most importantly, it gives your dishes that unmistakable grilled flavor that everyone loves.  Baking and boiling can leave food bland, but the grill always seems to bring out your food’s best tastes.

First, let’s find out why I don’t brine my turkey. Then we’ll find out about my salting discoveries.

Here are my reasons for not brining turkey:

1. My roasted turkey isn’t dry. Really. I’m not bragging here. This has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my parents. As you may know, I grew up working in my parents’ restaurants. During the holiday season we OFTEN catered events requiring roast turkey. We became experts at roasting the perfect bird. And I don’t think I’m biased here. I recall many strangers coming to me as I dished out second-helpings to say that it was the moistest turkey they’d ever eaten. This was admittedly in the days before brining was popular but I still take that to mean that everyone agreed with me: my momma’s turkey was no dry bit of sandy desert. And neither is mine!
2. I love me some turkey gravy. Really love. And my experiences with brining have taught me that the drippings you gain cannot, absolutely CANNOT, be used to make gravy (unless of course you’re interested in ocean-flavored gravy). Now of course, if I was smoking or deep-frying my bird, then I would not be getting any drippings to be used as gravy and I might drop this line of argumentation. But for now, under the assumption that I will be roasting (tune in next week to see what I decide to do this year), the lack of good gravy-making drippings makes me want to cry and nobody should cry over roast bird.

 

3. I don’t have that much fridge space. So many of the brining recipes I’ve seen have you put the bird and brine solution in a big container in the fridge. I’m baffled about this. As it is, the day before Thanksgiving when the hubs brings home our turkey I spend an hour rearranging things to find space. And that’s just a turkey. Not a turkey in a big container full of water! For 12-36 hours before Thanksgiving Dinner, when I’ll be feeding 15-20 people, I’m supposed to give up half of my fridge to a container of water? Seriously? Not happening. (Now, I’ll admit here that I have recently found a potential solution to this problem. Alton Brown’s method has the turkey in a drink cooler with the brine and tons of ice. He then puts the whole thing in a cool place. Living in Florida, there aren’t always a lot of cool places around. But I could keep it in my air conditioned kitchen and add ice regularly. Sounds a bit annoying but at least my fridge would not be held hostage).

 

4. I don’t  like watery meat. When I’ve brined other pieces of meat, I’ve found them juicy but not in a flavorful meat-juice way. Instead, it’s been in a non-flavorful water-juice way. I’ve never heard anyone else talk about this before so I did a big of googling to make sure that my taste buds don’t have a brined-meat-dysfunction. It turns out that I’m not alone here. In fact, this very issue prompted J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Creative Officer over at Serious Eats, to run a few turkey-brining experiments. It’s fascinating stuff. His results confirm my feelings, backed up with some science to boot! The very way that brining works results in extra flavorless water in the meat. He even tries using broth instead of water to boost some flavor. Unfortunately, science has us by the drumsticks and the broth idea does not work.

 

So those are my reasons. I don’t brine my turkey and I’m not about to start. However, reading López-Alt’s diligent brining experiments and taste-tests did lead me to discover a new possibility:

Salting the Turkey

It turns out that if you spread a coating of coarse salt over the turkey overnight in the fridge you get many of the benefits of brining (especially near the outer edges of the bird which are the places most likely to dry out during cooking) without that whole water-juice thing.

Additionally, the salted turkey takes up no more room in your fridge than a regular turkey.

However, I’m guessing that the drippings will still be uber-salty and thus the gravy will have an oceany tang. But it’s worth testing. If I can get my mom’s already moist turkey to be even moister AND have a rich turkey gravy to go with it, I’ll experiment all day long!

This weekend I’m going to salt up a whole chicken, roast it and then make some gravy. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Now tell me, do you brine your turkey? Why or why not?

When it comes to turkey, I’m a traditionalist. By that I mean that I roast it in the oven, the way my mom did, the way my grandmother did, and so on. Since I grew up eating my grandmother’s and my mother’s turkeys and since now I’m the one who hosts the dinners, this means that I haven’t had the opportunity to even taste turkey cooked in different ways.

(I can only imagine the shocked expressions on the faces of all you Outdoor Cooking Fans who have realized what this means. I admit it. It’s true: I’ve never had a deep-fryed turkey or a turkey smoked on the grill. I apologize, I didn’t mean to upset you.).

Now let me just say, I’m not sure how willing I am to turn away from my traditions. However, over the next few weeks I’m going to look into it. I’ll be researching the different techniques, searching for incredible-looking recipes and bringing you all the good turkey info that I find.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the biggest issue I face every year: To stuff or not to stuff? That is the question. Read about my own Poultry Cavity Conflict here and get a tasty recipe for Sausage and Pear Stuffing over here. And don’t forget to come back for some turkey time next week!

Christine from Cook the Story