How to Debone and Slice a Turkey

back to this. All right, we're gonna— I did roast it, I let it sit for a half an hour, and take two, thank you. And now we're going to start to carve it. So this has cooled down. You can cut this warm, but you got to let wait at least 20-30 minutes. So I'm going to start simply by taking off the legs, and I'm going to come in here where the skin is, and I'm just going to follow how this comes in and run this knife Let's see if you can see. Let me move this platter out of the way. I can come back. All right, let's see if we can get this a little bit better. All right, so here's where the leg runs. So I've got a boning knife, and I'm going to run this knife right in here in the joint. See how the leg just pulls right off? How simple that was. Okay, it's nice and cooked. It almost requires no work at all. Okay, I just— I'm following, I'm letting gravity do the job for me, and I'm taking it off. Get a bowl to put all this stuff in here. All right, so we did stuff it some apples, and I probably won't use these, but I don't want to just toss them right now. See if any of them are edible. Oh, they don't feel really, really good, but too much to put down there. All right, good, we got all that out. Smells really good. Oh, I love that lime smell. It's off a little bit. All right, so we have one leg. Tim, I'll let you come in. Hey, Tim, how you doing? Can you hear me? I can see and I can hear you. I can't hear you. It must be your connection. Are you there? Okay, guys, if you have questions and want to join, please do. But it's not just to sit here and watch on screen. Okay, so let's take the other leg. We're going to come in here and we're just going to let gravity kind of do what it just did on the other side, and it just pulls right off. All right, now we have a tail piece here I'm going to get rid of. Not going to throw it out because I'm going to make some stock, and we'll get to that presently. All right, let's take these and move them back here. All right, so that was the easy part. And this really isn't hard either. But first, before I go any further, I'm just going to take the wing off. And let's get a big knife. I'm going to take the wing off at the joint right here. I just want to find where the joint is. Boom, chop. Okay, let's find the joint here. And boom, chop. It almost pulls off. And the turkey was cooked to 180 degrees for the dark meat, 165 degrees for the white meat. Alright, so now is where your surgical skills come in. And again, it's pretty simple. I see this bone, that's the breastbone running right down here. When the breastbone is just gonna pull away, now you're gonna take your knife and you're gonna kind of angle it down and you're gonna follow— you're gonna try and run right alongside that breastbone. And as you do, You want to get your fingers in here. Now curl them in so you kind of keep them away from the knife, and you can use it to push a little bit against this bone. See how it starts to spread? And it gives me a little bit view of what I'm cutting. So once I get a view, then I can come in here and I'm just going to start just cutting it away. I'm going to cut it away real close to the bone, as close as I can to the bone. Turkey's still a little hot. It's not bad though. It has sat for about 45 minutes now, and that's going to come off. All right, and there's a joint in here. I just want to get that joint. All right, so there's my nice breast, and here is the rest of the wing. So let's just take that off right there. All right, nice piece. Normally I would dig into that. Generally the wings belong to the chef. So we'll let that wait. All right, same thing here. We have this side. Now see, it's almost pulling off. If you get it right and get in here and you let gravity and nature help you— and I would normally turn it, but I'm trying to let you see from this angle how it's coming off. Now I'm pushing it a little with my finger so you can see, but I'm just going to take this knife and keep it to the bone. And just follow down, follow down. All right, and this was an organic free-range turkey. Let's take a little taste. Very nice. Okay. So let's cut off— I love dark meat. Let's cut this off. And the wings, like I said, are generally pretty much a mess, but that's some really good meat here. Very tasty. Okay, so right now we have 2 thighs, we have 2 breasts, and I'm going to start putting all these little pieces into a pan here. Skin— beautiful skin. Now we are not done with this carcass, all right? It's got some meat on it, and you can go in here and really get some— there's some really good meat down here in the bone, and it just kind of pulls off. Up here is your wishbone. If you want to take that off for the kids, or if you're making a wish, you can pull that off. That was right on this side of the breastbone, and there's still meat here behind it. There's a good amount of meat. Now, if you don't want to serve this with the table, that's fine, but put it aside, and you can either make a soup with it. If you don't want to pull it, you can just take a knife in. I'm just used to, you know, when we handle a lot of carcasses, after we trim them down, Your hands are sometimes the fastest way to get the rest of the meat off. And that's why old habits die hard. Okay, because we've come in here and just kind of scrape. Some people, I worked for one guy, he just used to throw them away with all the meat on it. Made me sick. All right, so that's done. Now we're going to put this aside for now. You guys just rest right over there. We have all this nice little meat here. All right, let's get rid of this piece of skin. Wonderful. Trim off any little pieces that aren't quite as attractive. There's your two breasts. All right, put them in here for now. Oops, sorry guys. Okay, now let me clean this off just a little bit so we have a Better working area. You guys have any questions, please feel free to ask. Like I said, if you wanna ask a question direct, you're welcome to come in. We're not having a real discussion right now, but I'll be happy to answer some questions. All right, so here's your breast. Now, the correct way to cut a breast, and if you wanna take the skin off, that's perfectly fine. Or you can always just peel the skin off and save it for later, and I'll show you what to do with it. Alright, so when you cut a turkey breast, the way you want to cut it— now normally when we're carving on a turkey, we're carving this way, and the meat gets a little stringy. It's not always really good. So what I want to do is I'm going to lay it down. Now if I was getting this in a restaurant and we were doing it by hand or on a slicer, it would be fed in this way. So this is how I'm going to cut it. I'm going to come right in here and I'm going to start slicing. I'm making nice slices. I'm not trying to make this for sandwiches. Okay, so here's your nice breast all cut up. And then what you wanted to, if you have a decent skin, you can kind of lay it back so when you take it to the table you could present it a little bit. Sometimes the skin is too torn to bother with, but other times, you know, you might want to fool with it a little and try and get a little coverage on there. To make it look a little prettier when you bring it to the table. All right, now let's get the thighs going. And when you pick this up, want to get a knife under it just like that. Slide it up. All this nice meat, we will definitely do something with that. Probably eat it for dinner tonight. Okay, chefs can eat turkey, uh, before and after, it doesn't affect us. All right, here's your thigh and your leg. So the first thing I wanna do is I wanna come in here and let's find a joint. So simply by pulling, give myself a little cut, looking for it. Sometimes the best way is just to pull a little bit. And when you pull a little bit, you'll see where it is. I'm gonna get that cut into guide. And then once it's into guide, boom. Okay, here's a leg. We're gonna leave that intact. Come over to this one. And if you don't, you know, have two size knives— and let me tell you, this skin from the dry brine, it is nice and crisp, really nice and crisp. And the secret to that dry brine too was to leave it uncovered in the refrigerator for the last part of it. Well, in my case, it was a whole day, and that whole day really allowed it to dry out. All right, see, there's the bone right there. So once we get that in there, come in and cut, and there's another nice leg. So we have two nice legs now. Okay, rinse off, get a little bit of greasy here. The restaurant, I would wear gloves and just keep changing them, but I'm at home and this is for me and for Lisa, so there's no gloves today. So I do not like wearing gloves unless I positively absolutely have to. Okay, that skin off. Now the thigh is not going to be as easy to cut up as the breast was. That was easy peasy. All right, because for one thing we have this bone running in here, but you can still get some nice pieces out of it. And if you try real hard you can kind of loosen this bone up a little bit and get the meat off of it. Okay, see, I'm just rotating it. There you go. Okay, bone is out. Good stuff. Save the bone, don't throw the bones away. All right, here's another one back here. This is kind of a bigger bum, so let's try and just Pull that away. There we go. Again, nice pieces of meat here. Don't throw it away. Now, in the case of the thigh, where it's not really going to cut as well, you can try. And you just want to make sure that knife is nice and sharp. And it's going to break up into pieces. And if you want to try and keep it together, you can, if it really doesn't matter to you. It's not a big deal. Let's try keep it a little bit together. There's another little bone here, and if you're going to debone this, try and make sure you get as many pieces of that bone out as you can because people are going to be eating this at the table. Last thing you want is for someone to get something unexpectedly and have to spit it out. So I'm going to move this over here because this is going to be a little more delicate to move. Come up under with a knife right there. Let's come back here, one of the legs. Let's put that over there, over there. There's one of the thighs. Now we have the skin. Put the skin back over it, make a nice little mound. All right, I'm going to leave that there. And let's cut this last one up. All right, remember how we did before? We took this piece off. We can take it off first or second, doesn't matter. It's a nice piece of meat right there. Just follow with a knife. We're always following with a knife and almost pulling and just finding how it naturally comes off. Save this. Now this bone is in here. We're just going to kind of turn it. Not getting as good of a grip on it this time. My hands are a little greasy. But you just want to kind of turn it a little if you can. And if it doesn't turn, turn it over and just kind of cut it away. Sometimes they come out easy. Sometimes they don't, but we'll still get it out. And you want to take it from the back side. So there it is, nice and neat. We're going to save that. You got a little piece of something here, and again, you don't want to leave anything that really isn't edible for your guests because you don't want them embarrass themselves or anything at the table. All right, so here now, this is Trim off some of this stuff and slice it down same way we did. I'm gonna try and lift some of the skin off if you can, or you don't have to, you know, it's not a big deal, but I like to do as much of a presentation as I can. That's all meat there. All right, so let's take it up and cut, cut. And I'm not trying to make real small pieces because they're going to eat it just the same. Let's put the skin, if I can, back on. Let's turn it and back on the plate. Nice piece of dark meat. Stick that back under there. All right, couple wings here, and here is your deboned turkey. All right, ready for a buffet or ready to come to the table. Now The one thing about meats and turkey is, you know, if it's not steaming hot, it's not going to, you know, it's not going to be a problem. And is it undercooked if it doesn't just pull away from the bone? Not necessarily. It depends on the, on the bird itself, what kind of bird it has. It's not necessarily undercooked and it's not necessarily overcooked. There's a lot of things into consideration on what kind of meat you're getting to. So not a big deal. So would you like to see how to make some gravy now too. I have the juice. Let's take this and let's just move it over. Let me clean this mess up a little bit. I get kind of anxious. There's a lot of stuff dirty around me, and it's from all those years of working in very small spaces, so I tend to clean up real quick. Oh, but let's— before I do that, let me do one other thing. Okay, we talked about that carcass, and this isn't my big pot, but I'm going to give you an idea what I'm going to do. I'm just going to break this up a little bit. You can see, and I'm just breaking it up because this pot's not real small— or real big, I mean. It's a little smaller. Carcass bones, whatever other bones I have, anything that I'm not going to use, any pieces of meat. I got some meat on those. So, but anyway, I'm going to take this and I'm going to fill it full of water and put it on the stove, and I'm going to let it cook down. And then I'm going to let all the rest of the meat come off, and I might do it a couple times. I might fill it up again once it fills down and let all the meat come off of it. Let the bones come pick clean, make a little extra stock with this. You don't have to use it now. You can put it in a container and freeze it for another time. But you know, there's no sense just throwing these out. Let's make a little stock. Let's get the rest of the meat off of these. Alrighty then. Okay, so let's move this over a little bit. All right, let's make some gravy. We did this on another show, but since I have my actual turkey stock and since I'm going to be eating dinner tonight and having some turkey, I want some gravy with it too. So when we roasted the turkey, I had a dry brine on it, and the dry brine, uh, was inside under the skin, was around the turkey, and I stuffed some butter up underneath the breast. And if you look at the yesterday's show, you'll see exactly how we did that. Now, when I put it in the pan, in my roasting pan, I put it on a rack. See, okay, here's the rack that I used when I cooked it, and I had all my mirepoix under here, which was celery, carrots, onions, and I put in a couple cups of water. I actually didn't have to add any more water, it was pretty good. So this is, you know, just the burn spot around here. It's not really a lot of extra flavor there. I got— put some water in and I rinsed it out. All right, so now we're going to make some gravy. And I got all this nice stock off of the turkey. So when I put it on a platter, you know, I drained it, I put a little more water into the pan. If you do burn it, you get a lot of spots on the bottom, run some water in it, put it on the stove, let it heat up, and then scrape some of those nice tasty bits that you're going to have from the bottom of the pan. But that was pretty clean. I had a rack, and racks tend to not stick as much, so that's a good thing about that. I did roast it, remember, upside down. This turkey took about 3.5 hours, and an hour and a half of it was upside down. I turned it over. I had my kitchen towels. I had my plan. I knew I was going to have to turn it back over, so I had my kitchen towels. I turned it back over, put it back in the oven, brushed the top with butter, and then about every half hour I basted it with butter a little bit more. And do yourself a favor and check the temperature early enough. Don't make it too late so that it gets overcooked You know, if you know it's going to take 3.5 hours unstuffed, then check it about 3 hours, 3 hours and 15 minutes when you take it out the base to check it. And you want to check— thigh should be up to 180, and in the breast part you want 165. If you stuff it with stuffing, which I don't suggest anymore, stuffing's got to be 165 as well. So I'm making gravy here. And what I did was I put a stick of butter in there and then I'm putting flour in. And this is the roux. I'm gonna let the roux cook, oh, for just about 3, 4 minutes. I'm gonna let that flour taste cook off of it. And you wanna do that so it doesn't have a raw taste to it. Pretty simple to do. And you don't want it to burn. You don't want— turkey gravy can be a little darker. I don't like it like white, like chicken gravy. Why do you not recommend stuffing it? Well, for one thing, if you stuff it, it's going to suck juices out of the turkey. First and foremost, that's what's going to happen is you're going to have all that bread in there and the bread. And that's why that stuffing from the turkey is so good. Okay. It's going to pull it out. Second thing is, by stuffing it, you're keeping it in a danger zone for a little bit longer than you would if you didn't stuff it. And by danger zone, I mean the temperature that it's not quite hot and it's not quite cold, and that's where bacteria multiplies. So there's, there's a lot more can happen when you stuff it. I, I love stuffing it, and I love that stuffing that comes out.. But when you think about the other things with it, first, it's going to take longer. You're going to add about an hour to your time if you do that. So that's one of the— another one of the reasons. So this is cooked. I have flour, I have butter, and now I have that wonderful juice that came off the roasted turkey. And I also have more juice from when I cooked down my neck, and I cooked— not my neck, the turkey neck— and the giblets. I did cook them off. Oh, you can see that. Oh, it's like satin. I love when it looks like this. Now I'm gonna let it— I'm not gonna thin it down completely. I have more stock, and I, I can make more gravy, or I can always save it. But I'm just going to let it heat up a little because gravy tends to thicken as it sits. And if you make this the day before, the turkey juice is at room temperature. It's good to have it hot if you can. It's probably about 80 degrees, maybe a little bit more than room temperature. It's not as critical, but, you know, it's always— it works a little better if it's a little on the warm side. You don't want it to be cold, let's put it that way. All right, so I'm going to put all this in there because it looks just about right to me. And if by chance I put too much liquid in and the gravy is not runny, get a frying pan, put a little bit more butter in it, put a little bit more flour in it, make a little roux, and then add that roux in your gravy that's not thick enough. Only just don't keep doing it back and forth because you don't want to keep thinning it and thickening it and thinning it and thickening it. But if by accident you add too much liquid to it, don't worry about it. Not a deal breaker. Just make a little bit more roux. And I've kind of been doing this for so long that I kind of know how much to put in and what it'll take. But this is a beautiful satin. I'm telling you, this gravy The flavor. You need anything else? Nothing else. This flavor from the turkey stock, the natural juices is outrageous. I love it. A lot of times we'll add some turkey base or some chicken base to it. And if you do this and you feel it's a little too salty for you, though, you can always put a little water in. I used to make a honey— a little bit of red wine and honey in a turkey gravy that I made. People used to really enjoy that. So you can add some other flavors. You can add some fresh herbs to this. You can put some sage in it if you want to, some— just some poultry seasoning if you want to. But honestly, with the herbs that I put on the turkey and the dry rub, I think it's perfect. And, you know, I just— I'm going to dip a piece of turkey in here. Oh my God, wow, that's good stuff. This is going to make— be so good over mashed potatoes, so good on the turkey, hot turkey sandwiches the next day. Oh my God, it's wonderful. All right, so we have our turkey. We have our turkey gravy. It's actually thickening up a little more. I'm probably going to hit it with a little water and just put it in a little at a time. Remember, you can always add more. It's a pain in the butt to have to thicken it back up. So if anybody has any questions or wants to come in— came in late— what did you season the turkey with at the start? Well, that was yesterday when I seasoned it. Thank you for putting that in. And I did a dry rub, and the dry rub was mostly kosher salt, black pepper, thyme, sage. I think that was it. And again, you can use your dry rub— can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Salt is the main ingredient. Some people put sugar in their dry rubs. If you want to do a wet brine, you can do a wet brine. You just want to use more salt in a wet brine. You want to use about 4 to 6 tablespoons of— and it's kosher salt, you want to make sure it's kosher salt, not table salt. If you're using table salt, cut it back by about half because table salt is too fine of a grind. So, uh, 4 to 6 tablespoons of kosher salt if you're doing a wet one, uh, 2, 2 tablespoons if you're doing a dry brine. So about half for a dry brine. And then load it up with pepper. You never put enough pepper in there. And sage, thyme. If you want to put some fresh herbs in, you can. If you want to put some citrus in, you can. A little bit of orange or lemon zest is real nice in the rub as well. If you want to spice it up, if you like, you want to put a little chili in it, you know, experiment. But I would say to experiment with chickens before you get too crazy on a whole turkey. Kind of stay a little bit on the traditional side if you're doing a turkey. And that's it. Gravy. Let's show me— let me put this back. Let's talk about this real quick. All my bones, all the carcass that I took it off of, I'm going to fill it with water. You could throw some more vegetables in here. You could throw the vegetables that were in the center of it. And we're going to fill it with water. We're going to let it cook down about halfway, fill it up again and let it cook down some more. And I'm going to make some stock out of this, get the rest of whatever little pieces of meat are off of this, and then I'm going to freeze this and save that for later. Or if I need more gravy, then I have some gravy extender. We have our turkey ready to be presented at the table, and we have our breast. Here's the legs that I disjointed. We have our breast covered with the skin. That has been sliced and ready to go. And you'll notice that I sliced it the other way than we normally do, right? And that's because it's going to eat better that way. Slicing it right off the bird is not really the best way to do it. So I can slice both of these. In fact, I can cut this one down if you'd like. For those of you that might have missed it, the skin on this is kind of gone, so you'll have to Imagine it. It did pull off. And so this back— there we go. So we have our turkey and the breast comes off. The breast pulled right off the side. Nice whole piece. And you know, when they make those turkey breasts in the grocery store, they take 3 of these. They take the 2 on the outside and they stick one in the center. Then they wrap it with the skin. And when you cook it, it kind of forms into one. So I've got it this way, and now I'm just going to start to cut. And I'm not making real super thin slices. If you do, you're going to have problems. It's going to fall apart. If you have a slicer at home and you want to save one and cook it for later, or, you know, leave it whole— if you're not— if you don't think you're going to use it, don't cut it because it's going to hold up a little better. And if you want to freeze one whole breast, then you can have it for another meal another time. And you have to excuse me when I hold the knife like this, it's because my carpal tunnel. Normally I would hold it like that, but with it being slippery and my carpal tunnel, I don't want to lose control of it. Okay, so there's the beautiful slices. Look at that, kind of just come right off. And look, you can see the juice in them. There's still juice in there. That's good. I'm going to transfer this back to the plate right there. Let's put some skin— if you have skin, again, don't fret about it if you don't, but you can always try and cover it back up if the skin stays on. And that, my friends, is how you carve. Let's put this back. There we are. All right, we have our legs— or wings disjointed, someone can eat. We have our legs that you can fight over, there's two of them. We have our thighs cut up or pulled apart because thighs are not as easy to manipulate with the bones out. And other than the bones and the legs and the wings, the This is completely deboned. And what time is it? It is 5:33. With all the talking and everything involved, it's only going to take you about 10, 15 minutes to debone the turkey. So, probably substitute gluten-free flour in the gravy. Yes, you can. I have made it with gluten-free flour. There's some cup-for-cup exchange flours that work perfectly for it. Other than that, there was nothing else on the turkey. That was gluten. And if you're around a Trader Joe's, they make a really nice gluten-free stuffing mix that you might want to buy a few boxes and keep it on hand. If you're gluten-free, it's really nice and easy. I mean, you can make your own, but it's a nice, easy way to do it. So, my friends, that's it. That's my turkey dinner. We're going to a friend of mine's tomorrow, so got to have leftovers, though. So I'm not at all worried about cooking this turkey turkey. I'll make my stuffing on Friday. I've got the gravy done. I'm gonna make some fresh cranberries. And also, these are the— if you missed it, these are the candied cranberries that I made earlier, and the refrigerator only helped them. The sugar crystallized. Oh my God, these are addictive. And I made those very simply by heating up a cup and a half of water with a cup and a half of sugar, threw a couple pieces of orange in there, boiled the simple syrup, poured the simple syrup over the cranberries— not do them in the same pan— and let it sit. And when it came to room temperature, I put in the refrigerator. These are going to soak overnight. And then I'm going to take all this lovely syrup, and this is the second batch, so it's really cranberry. And I'm going to take all this lovely syrup and I'm going to use it to make drinks with. So that ought to be really, really fun. It's going to be a nice sweet cranberry-flavored syrup, and it'll go great with, uh, just about anything. And you can watch, you can watch those shows. I also made a pumpkin roll that was insane, and I'm not going to cut another piece of it to show you because I ate the ones that I cut this afternoon. Been a very bad chef this week. So anyway, thank you so much. The recipes, a lot of the recipes are on my blog. Watch the shows. They're pretty simple. You can fast forward for the parts that you want to see. And I will be back at 7 o'clock tonight to answer any questions you may have. We'll do a Q&A at 7 o'clock. So if you want to stop by and you have questions about something you're making, or if you just want to hang out for a little while, have a glass of wine with me and talk, I'll be back at 7 o'clock for that. So thank you so much for coming, and I'll see you around the kitchen table soon. Happy Thanksgiving, if I don't see you before then. Bye-bye.