Turkey in a Bag

This year was our first attempt to cook a Thanksgiving turkey and it was surprisingly easy and quick to make! I wanted to rave about the oven-bag method for cooking a turkey because it turned out juicy and plump. Yum!

Thanks to Reynold's for selling their oven bags and making turkeys delicious for families across the country. Seriously. We had a 14 pound turkey that cooked in about 2 - 2.5 hours. We let it rest until ready for carving and it was perfect. And for those that worried about the beautiful browning of the skin, it wasn't a problem for us!

Here are some tips that we incorporated into our turkey making process:

Make sure the turkey is completely thawed out! Wash and dry the turkey at least a few hours ahead of the cook time so that the skin has time to dry out (for better browning). Rub the turkey with a herb butter rub consisting of one stick of melted butter, dried spices such as sage, thyme and rosemary, salt and pepper. I also added sprinked paprika all over the turkey to enhance the brown color. Most importantly, we stuffed the cavity of the turkey with an orange, lemon and onions to enhance flavor and juices. Finally, we made a large bed of vegetables on the bottom of the bag consisting of onions and celery stalks - it also helped that we had a large bag of onions to use up!

The only negative to this cooking process? We were too lazy to take the entire turkey out of the bag so we simply carved it while it was still inside the bag. It made for less messy cleaning but we lost some of the OOOH and AHHHing effect of seeing the whole turkey.