By Greg B. Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching.  I know this because I meant to write this post up a week ago to give it time to disseminate amongst the series of tubes that makes up the internets, but things are busy this time of year!  Last year Mike and I provided a series of Thanksgiving posts, from how to cook a turkey, to what wines/beers pair best with the meal, as well as a post devoted soley to those delicious side dishes.  This year, we’re going to focus the effort a little bit, revolving around a fun night at Mike’s house with his new roommate Bryan, some of Bryan’s friends, the huskies, and of course, Dilgen and I.  Bryan has in his possession one of mankind’s greatest achievements: a pot large enough to deep fry a turkey.  So we set out to prepare deep fried turkey.

Brining:

While this may not come as a surprise to any of you reading this, Mike had done this before.  So under his guidance, we set out the night prior to brine the turkey.  Why brine a turkey?  Well, turkey is rather lean, and without very careful preparation, can become a dry meal (think the scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).  If you soak the turkey in a brine for the day before, you allow some very simple scientific principles to almost assure that your turkey is succulent and delicious.  We know that molecules tend to move from an area of high concentration to low concentration, and you’ve probably heard about and remember rules regarding osmolarity for water.  At first glance, brining may seem backwards… if you want a juicier turkey, why would you put it in salt water?  The water would leave the turkey, leaving it drier, right?  Well, yes, this is true.  But the salt will also diffuse into the turkey (which will be of a lower salt concentration than the brine, naturally) and in doing so, will draw water back in.  Apparently, there are other more complex reactions taking place, where salt denatures proteins, basically tenderizing the muscle tissue which allows more space for water to seep into the turkey.  If done right, brining accomplishes several things.

1. Seasons the Turkey meat with salt
2. Tenderizes the Turkey meat
3. Ensures that even after losing water during cooking, the Turkey will be juicy and tender
4. Allows the bird to soak up some of the spices in the brine

Not too shabby of a deal, right?  Well, it also requires time, days in preparation almost.  It requires appropriate equipment, a general knowledge and slight concern for dealing with raw poultry for many hours not in a fridge (but not a paralyzing fear) and the hopes that you are NOT on a low salt diet.  But if you meet these requirements, you should definitely brine your bird!

So, the night before the turkey fry, we took our thawed bird, removed the little package of the organs and neck.  In the pot which we were going to fry, we mixed up a brine.  Like most of our cooking, this was far from precise, but the brine ended up looking something like this

• 4 gallons of cold water
• 4-5 cups salt
• Paprika

The weather in Baltimore was actually fall/cold at this time, with daytime highs reading mid 40’s and nighttime lows in the 30’s.  So we ended up leaving our turkey outside for 24hrs (with rocks on top, just to ensure if the huskies were around, they wouldn’t get too curious!).  If you have a large fridge that can accommodate your brine/pot, that is recommended or if you have a cooler that you can keep reasonable chilled with ice in the brine, that is also a possibility.

So the next day we showed up at the house.  I brought a few wide varieties/styles of beer to see which would pair best with a deep fried turkey.  Bryan’s friends made homemade corn bread, homemade real bread & a delicious apple pie.  We contributed a green bean casserole, stuffing, fries (to be fried in the oil after the turkey is done) and a curry soBe made from delicious German ingredients (secret).  We purchased an injector from the store to inject a marinade into the turkey, a garlic teriyaki marinade we saw on the shelf in the supermarket.  We should mention now that this sauce was in fact too thick, or at least had bits of spices (garlic, notably) that was too thick to really inject.  so after some very careful straining, we thinned out the material and were able to inject with ease.

Frying:

Obviously, general safety procedure here should be taken.  You’re not just going to be frying some food in a pan or in a dutch oven or something.  You’re going to heat gallons of oil (peanut oil is great) up to 350F and insert a heavy animal, 22lbs in our case, into this oil.  So it’s probably an understatement to say you should proceed with caution.  And do this outside!!!   Away from a house or far, etc, and on a flat level surface that is pretty sturdy.  An old wooden deck attached to your house, that is poorly cared for and not level?  Not a good idea, but hey, it’s your house, your risk, I’m just here to give advice!  We also had an easy way of lowering the turkey into the deep frier.  The turkey was trussed up, which was hooked into a metal hook, which was then attached to essentially a steel hanger, allowing us to lower it into the pot.  Now, I once saw Alton Brown do this on his show using a tripod and a series of levers.  Sure, that’s for ultimate safety, but when lowering the bird in, just make sure you do it slow, so as to not splash around HOT oil, and to make sure the bird is wiped down, to have limited amount of water on the surface, which will cause splattering of the HOT oil.

Be sure to remove all the water from the frying pot before adding the oil and heating.  The same can be said for the turkey: pat that sucker dry of the brining solution and water!  Water and hot oil do not mix, as this will cause the oil to rapidly go nuts, bubble, froth, and generally go hog wild which will invariably either cause a fire, or burn someone.  Just be aware.

Ok, so we set everything up away from the house, filled the pot with oil and began to heat.  It’s important to have a thermometer in the oil, maybe something attached to the pot that can give you a good reading.  Just like with brewing, you’ll want a strike temperature of the oil somewhat higher than the 350, since the turkey is at a temperature below the oil, and it will drop the oil temp.  We aimed for something in the 360 range I believe, and once we hit it, we did a quick last minute seasoning of the turkey with some salt and cracked black pepper, then Mike slowly lowered the bird into the oil. Slowly, being a very important word here!

And that’s it!  You want the oil to basically submerge the bird, maintain the temperature at 350F by throttling the propane to the burner.  So lets take some time to introduce the beers for the event.

Beers:

Initially, I had imagined a somewhat more traditional marinade.  Something along the lines of savory spices, sage, rosemary, sweet ones like thyme, etc.  So I bought my beers accordingly.  But, with a paprika brined, teriyaki injected, deep fried turkey (it was a very multi-national turkey), these beers still showed the wonderful versatility of beer!

• Brooklyner – Schneider hoppfen Weisse
• Duvel Belgian Golden Ale
• Ommegang abbey Ale
• Brooklyn Lager
• Orval

From this lineup you can certainly see I have a European skew in the selection of the beer.  Even though Duvel and Orval are the only true European beers, Ommegang is Belgian styled and the Brooklyner-Schneider is a cooperation between the US and German breweries!  Only the Brooklyn lager stands alone as the singular American beer (though a good one at that!).  Why did I pick these beers?  Well, I wanted to hit the spectrum of possibilities for beer pairings.  Orval is such a spicy, herbal beer that I just wanted to experiment to see how that would play with the herbs for the turkey.  Brooklyn lager is a traditional lager, good carbonation, cold and crisp BUT unlike most lagers, it actually has some flavor… a bit of caramel malt makes its way into the beer.  And with a roasted animal, that little bit of flavor can go a long way.  Ommegang Abbey Ale takes the extreme approach for this caramel.  This beer is sweeter by nature, with aggressive carbonation and a much stronger caramel, toasted malt profile.  Duvel is just a great, all around crisp, flavorful, aggressively carbonated Belgian beer with a nice spicy nose, and the Brooklyner-Schneider Hoppfen weisse is a great crossing of American/German beers.  It is a more bitter and hoppy weisse beer… or perhaps, a more bodied and spicy IPA?  It’s impossible to describe this beer, but it hits so many flavor and aroma categories, it practically had to pair at least sort of well with something!

After one hour of frying, we checked the color of the turkey.  It was a dark, delicious brown, golden brown color.  It’s hard to describe how delicious it looked, so I’m going to include several pictures of it here.

Here it is in the pot.

Here it is being removed from the pot.

Here it is inside the house, on a plate!

We let the turkey set for at least 15, but probably more like 20 minutes will covered in aluminum.  This will let the juices set, so rather than have them all run out of the meat when you begin to slice it, the flavor and juice will remain in each slice during carving.  In the meantime, we prepared the other sides, notably the extremely healthy: deep fried asparagus, whch was well worth the 60 seconds or so it took to fry them.

Mike beginning the carving of the turkey.  Notice Nadia in the background, hoping against hope that, for whatever reason, the humans would give her the entire turkey.  But she had the right idea.  This turkey was without a doubt the best I’ve ever eaten in my life.  Amazingly, though we only injected the marinade 30-60 min before frying, the turkey really had a great teriyaki/garlic flavor, which had that delicious burnt caramel flavor that went amazingly well with the turkey skin (new favorite food item) and the just general flavor of the meat.  Tender, crispy, succulent, delicious!  This is probably the best possible way to make a turkey for thanksgiving.  And because we kept the temperature very stable around 350F, the meat does not take on much, if any of the oil that we were frying it in.  It’s another amazing feat of science, as the hot oil tries to enter the turkey, the water in the turkey is trying to escape in the form of vapor.  But around 350F, these two opposing forces are about equal, so you end up retaining most of your water and do not collect much, if any, of the frying oil.  Science, it works, bitches!

Beer – Deep Fried Turkey Pairing!

So now, finally, we get to the question I wanted to address all the way at the start of this article.  What beer pairs best with deep fried turkey?  Well I opened this up not only to my own opinions about beers and beer pairings, but was more democratic and took consensus from the folks eating and drinking.  Both in my own opinion, and also the judgement of the ground, Duvel, the Belgian Golden ale, was the winner.  It just had such a great bite to it that really managed to pair so well with the flavor of the turkey, it cut any fat or oil that the food at, and was extremely refreshing to the palate after taking a bite off the food… you felt like your tastebuds were cleaned, and ready to eat again like it was the first bite.  It was a great pairing, and we had unanimous consensus that this beer was the best for the deep fried turkey!  But below I’ll list, in order of our favorites, the beers from the night.

1. Duvel – Belgian Golden Ale
2. Brooklyn Lager
3. Brooklyner-Schiender Hoppfen Weisse
4. Orval
5. Ommegang’s Abbey Ale

The hops and bite of the carbonation really helped Duvel to the position of best beer here, though I was happy to see the Brooklyn lager came in second.  It really has great characteristics for a lager and would easily have won this tasting challenge had it not been for the bottle of Duvel I picked up!  The Brooklyner-Schneider Hoppfen Weisse was a good beer, but I think in this pairing it lacked the malt backbone the first two beers had to stand up to the fried flavors in the turkey.  Good carbonation and hops to cut fat, but lacked the pairing aspect.  Orval was out classed here by the flavorings of this turkey.  With more traditional turkey, this may be more enjoyable of a pairing.  And surprisingly, the Ommegang’s Abbey Ale actually went too far into the caramel/malt flavor, and overwhelmed the turkey.  While the winning beers helped accentuate the food, this pairing tried to steal the spotlight.  It’s a great beer, but this was apparently not it’s scene.

And so there you have it!  The Food and Wine Blog’s 2009 Turkey/Beer pairing recommendations, and a long story about how to deep fry a turkey.  Enjoy the holiday everyone!