OCR Text |
Show Study finds quick turkey preparation Thawing a turkey can be time consuming and messy, which may be one of the reasons most of us eat turkey only once or twice a year. According to Charlotte Brennand, assistant professor of nutrition and food sciences at Utah State University, thawing has little to do with how a turkey tastes when it's done. She says you can roast a juicy, tender turkey any time of the year with only about five minutes preparation time. You can take the turkey directly from freezer to oven with little worry about taste. Brennand and graduate student Kim Toot did a four month study on the best methods of roasting turkeys. Their taste panels found very little difference between thawed, roasted turkey and turkeys, put directly in the oven from the. freezer. "We simply unwrapped the turkeys, put them breast up in a pan, covered the top with a foil tent and put them in the oven to bake. The only additional time spent on preparation was used to check the temperature of the bird and to remove the foil tent during the final half hour to aid browning," Brennand Bren-nand says. The major drawback of the freezer-to-oven method is that you cannot stuff the turkey before you cook it. Brennand says, "The study was designed mainly to show people how easy it is to cook an economical and nutritious meat like turkey year round. Most people will still want to thaw and stuff their turkeys for Thanksgiving because it is traditional. |