Yield: 10 to 12 Servings
Adapted from J. Kenji López-Alt / Serious Eats
Adding baking powder to a dry brine improves your turkey skin. Not only does the baking powder work to break down some skin proteins, causing them crisp and brown more efficiently, but it also combines with turkey juices, forming microscopic bubbles that add surface area and crunch to the skin as it roasts.
The turkey is cooked in a hot oven, so the time is considerably less than a normal turkey. Plan for 90 minutes in the oven and then rest for 30-60 minutes while the sides are finished.
- Turkey
- vegetable oil
- salt (omit if turkey is brined or dry brined)
- black pepper
By laying the bird out flat and spreading the legs out to the sides, what was once the most protected part of the bird (the thighs and drumsticks) are now the most exposed. This means that they cook faster—precisely what you want when your goal is cooking the dark meat to a higher temperature than light meat.
As an added bonus, it doesn’t take up nearly as much vertical space in your oven, which means that if you wanted to, you could even cook two birds at once. This is a much better strategy for moist meat than trying to cook one massive bird.
There is no skin hiding underneath, no underbelly to worry about. Secondly, there is ample room for rendering fat to drip out from under the skin and into the pan below. This makes for skin that ends up thinner and crisper in the end.
Finally, all of that dripping fat bastes the meat as it cooks, helping it to cook more evenly, and creating a temperature buffer, protecting the meat from drying out.
A normal roast turkey can take several hours to cook through at an oven temperature of around 350°F or so. Try and increase that heat, and you end up scorching the skin before the meat has had a chance to cook through.
With a spatchcocked turkey and its slim profile, this is not a problem. You can blast it at 450°F and it will cook through in about 80 minutes without even burning the skin. In fact, you want to cook it at this temperature to ensure that the legs and breasts end up cooking at the same time (lower heat leads to a lower differential in the internal temperature between hot and cool spots), and that the skin crisps up properly.
Remove the backbone from the turkey. Use heavy poultry shears to remove the backbone. It is much safer than using a knife.
You can also invert the de-backboned turkey and cut through the central breast cartilage. This will make it easier to flatten the turkey.
Press down on the breast bone to flatten the breasts slightly. Fold the leg and thigh out (see photo).
Dry-brine the turkey.
Mix a half cup of kosher salt and the 2 TBS of baking powder in a bowl. Pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Sprinkle salt mixture over turkey from a height of 6-10 inches. Let it rain down on the bird and cover all surfaces. There will likely be salt left over.
Transfer the turkey to a rack on a rimmed baking sheet and refrigerate uncovered for 12 to 24 hours.
Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 450°F.
Pat turkey dry with paper towels and rub on all surfaces with 1 TBS oil. Season liberally on all surfaces with black pepper. If not brined, also season with salt. Tuck wing tips behind back. Place turkey on top of rack, arranging so that it does not overlap the edges, pressing down on the breast bone to flatten the breasts slightly.
Transfer turkey to oven and roast, rotating occasionally, until an instant read thermometer inserted into the deepest part of the breast registers 150°F, and the thighs register at least 165°F, about 80 minutes.
Notes:
On my first attempt at this, the breast cooked faster than the thigh. The thigh temp did get to 165°F but the juice when I removed the thermometer was still red. I separated the thighs and put them back in the oven for about 15 minutes at 400°F.
You can’t stuff a spatch-cocked turkey. However, you can start your turkey in the oven resting directly on top of a large tray of stuffing, transferring the turkey to a rack in a rimmed baking sheet about half way through cooking before the stuffing has a chance to start burning. This is actually an even more effective way of getting turkey flavor into the stuffing than to stuff it into the turkey itself. After all, you can only fit a few cups of stuffing at most into the cavity of a whole turkey. When butterflied, you get direct contact between far more turkey and stuffing than you ever could otherwise.
