132 - Waiting for 150

I actually compose these a couple of days before they’re posted here (I post on a schedule) so that means today’s tune was really composed on Nov 23. The upshot is today I smoked a turkey for Thanksgiving which when you see this was a couple of days ago but right now as I’m writing this, it’s tomorrow. We always cook the turkey and make pies the day before so there’s no waiting around for anything to finish with guests milling around wondering when’s the eats. Plus, its just less stressful.

My in-laws discovered my turkey smoking skills, so it invariably falls on me to do it every year at this time. This year I learned a somewhat lesser known fact, certainly unknown to me. The reason it’s recommended to cook turkey to an internal temperature of 160°F is because that temperature kills salmonella instantly. Those little plastic pop-out buttons you often see on frozen turkeys are designed to pop out at that temperature.

Well, it turns out that 150°F also kills salmonella, but not instantly - it takes a two minute exposure at that temperature to kill it. 140° F will kill it too but it take about a five minutes exposure.

The upshot is, once the internal temp of the smoking foul has arrived at 150° anything that could possibly present a food safety issue is long dead, so not only is it safe to serve, it’s way juicier!

So today I pulled it out of the smoker at 150° and yes, it was nice and juicy and flavorful.

The other little known fact I learned was dark meat needs to cook to a higher temp - between 160 - 170 - to break down the connective tissue otherwise it’ll have the consistency of an undercooked rib - chewy and sticking to the bone, and if you’ve ever overpaid for an undercooked turkey leg at a Renaissance festival, you know what I mean.

So, after I pulled the turkey out of the smoker I removed the thighs and legs and put them back in for further smoking until they reached 165° and, yeah, they’re fall off the bone tender now!

This is probably WAY more information than you needed to explain the title of this tune, plus, if you have any interest in cooking whole turkeys, this info is arriving a little too late to do you any good. Still, this IS technically a “blog,” so I should throw in some textual content every once in a while

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