CURRIED ORANGE-MUSTARD GLAZED TURKEY

- 1 whole turkey, 18lbs or less
- salt and pepper
- 6 Tbsp of sweet curry powder
- 4 limes, juiced
- 4 tsp of ground ginger
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1/2 stick of softened butter
- For the cavity: a bundle of fresh herbs, 1 quartered onion, a few roughly chopped celery stalks and carrots

Glaze:
- 1/3 cup of orange marmalade
- 1/3 cup of grainy mustard or brown mustard

Preheat oven to 450F. (Bear with me… a high ‘starting’ temperature will cause the fat underneath the skin to brown the skin from below. Starting off with a low temperature, will cause the flavorful fat to melt and run away into oblivion, without doing any tasty browning at all).

Remove gizzards and neck, then wash the turkey and pat dry. Liberally sprinkle inside and out with salt and pepper. Contemplate what to put in the cavity of the turkey…. Personally, I put a bundle of fresh herbs in my turkey’s cavity, consisting of lots of fresh rosemary, fresh thyme and sage. And I also stuff a quartered onion, a few chopped celery stalks and some roughly chopped carrots in there, for good measure.

Place the turkey on a rack in a foil-lined roasting pan. You want to prevent the bottom from getting soggy, so if you don’t have a rack, use some imagination to ‘prop’ your bird up from the bottom. Make sort of a rack with a few hard veggies like carrots, turnips and potatoes, or buy 2 disposable roasting pans and crumple them up to form an improvised V-shape rack. The possibilities are endless, just make sure your contraption is food safe and oven safe.

Cut a piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil and fold in a triangle shape. Lay it on top of your turkey’s breast and mold it to form sort of a warrior shield for the breast of the turkey. Tip facing down towards the cavity, wide part of the triangle to go over the bird like a cape. Once molded, remove the foil making sure to keep the mold ‘intact’ and set it aside.

Combine the curry powder, lime juice, ginger, cumin, and butter. Rub the mixture all over the turkey and under the skin.

Place the turkey in the blazing hot oven for 30-40 minutes, just to give the breast a chance to brown. After about 30 min, the breast should be nicely browned. If it isn’t, put it back in the oven and give it another 10 min or so. When the breast is browned, take the pan out of the oven and place the molded aluminum shield over the breast. This will deflect some of the heat and keep the breast from drying out while the red meat cooks. I learned this from Alton Brown. Honest to God. Stick your thermometer directly through the foil in the thickest part of the breast, making sure not to touch any bone.

Place the turkey back in the oven and drop the oven temperature to 350F. Roast at 350F until the thermometer registers 155F, or about 2 hours later for an 18 lbs bird. About 10 to 15 minutes before the turkey is done, or roughly after 2 hours and 15 minutes, remove the aluminum foil shield from the beast and discard, combine the preserves and mustard and brush generously over the bird. Continue roasting until internal temperature reaches 161F, about 15-min longer.

Food safety guidelines tell us that we should roast poultry to an inner-temperature of 165F. Keep in mind that once you remove the turkey from the oven, it will continue to cook for several more minutes while you allow it to rest, which means that if you take it out of the oven at exactly 165F, it will be over-cooked! Taking it out of the oven a few degrees shy of 165F, like at 161F, will mean that by the time you’re ready to carve this turkey, it will be perfectly cooked at 165F and still juicy & moist