Another year, another turkey. To co-pilot our 2024 Thanksgiving episode, we've brought in flavor scientist Arielle Johnson. Yes, that is an actual job. She is the founder of Noma's fermentation lab as well as the author of Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor, which she discussed with us earlier this year.
We're also joined by Harold McGee, another authority when it comes to the science behind deliciousness. He's the author of crucial books such as On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells.
Evan Kleiman: What is your relationship to Thanksgiving? Do you love it? Do you loathe it? Are you somewhere in between?
Arielle Johnson: I would say that my strengths are not so much in the home economics side of it, even though I appreciate that a lot. I have definitely been known, in my family, to be the one to make a very detailed spreadsheet about exactly when things need to be timed and go in, because if you're going to do it, you should do it properly. That makes me popular with some people, unpopular with others. So I'm looking forward to a more relaxing Thanksgiving, possibly not a spreadsheeted one, but it can be a great canvas for pretending that you run a restaurant and yelling at your family.
Do you bring your flavor scientist hat to your own Thanksgiving meal or do you lean on tradition? Is there a dish that you grew up eating that you've maybe tweaked because of what you've learned about flavor?
Arielle Johnson: For good or for bad, I can't really turn it off, so I bring it to every time I cook. I would say I'm less experimental in terms of trying out completely new sciencey things and more interested in using what I know about the science of flavor and chemistry to amp up what's already there, to make things taste more like what they are. Often, that's little tweaks in the order of operations of recipes.
If I have any spices or herbs or aromatic components of a recipe, I usually steep them in the fat that I'm using before I add any liquid ingredients because flavor molecules, especially aroma, tend to be way more soluble in fats than in water. So you can pull the flavors out of the really flavorful bits and then essentially coat everything else with them really richly, in a way that doesn't quite happen the same if you're just adding them to water or liquids.
We have a lot to talk about, so I want to bring in Harold McGee. This is like the Dream Team. Harold, how do you identify in a professional sense? Do you think of yourself, first and foremost, as a writer or as a scientist?
Harold McGee: I am a writer and Arielle is the scientist. I moved from literature to food, and had done a fair amount of science as an undergraduate but didn't stick with it. Arielle stuck with it, so she's the scientist.
Clearly, the two of you are kindred spirits. I'm curious, and maybe, Arielle, you can answer this. Where does your work overlap with Harold's, and where does it depart?
Arielle Johnson: I think our work covers very much the same subject matter. We're both obviously very interested in food broadly but we've both been very interested in the science of flavor for a long time. That's how we initially connected. Harold has a broader knowledge than anyone I've ever met of the science and history of food whereas I tend to have a bit of a narrow scope and go deeper and get my hands dirty with more hands-on research, or lately, doing things for restaurants. [They're] complementary approaches to the same ideas, I would say.
I love how your work moves from the theoretical to the practical.
Arielle Johnson: I also like that. I think I'd be very bored if it didn't, personally, I mean. That might be a personality flaw.
Not for us eaters. Today we're talking about Thanksgiving, this bizarre yearly holiday, which involves this giant bird that most people only think about once a year. I've been hosting this show for nearly three decades, and every year I hear the same advice: Brine your bird. Is this still what we should be doing? Is there a trade off doing so? Who wants to go first?
Harold McGee: I'm happy to be opinionated about this. First of all, with something as big as a turkey, it's a real pain to find a container big enough and not have water sloshing all over the place and so on. It just does not seem to me to be worth the trouble. If you think about it, what you're really doing when you're brining is by introducing some salt into the muscle of the bird, you're getting the muscle of the bird to absorb water, which you can kind of flavor, if you like, with herbs and spices and juices and things like that. But the amount of flavor that actually gets into the bird is pretty limited. And you're basically, as I say, just adding water to a piece of meat that already has plenty. You just have to treat it well, so I don't bother.
And you, Arielle?
Arielle Johnson: Fantastic. I have experimented with it. I generally feel like whether it's early salting to hold on to juiciness or submersion brining... I've always lived in apartments since I left home so I have never really had a large enough fridge to safely brine a whole turkey in. I know it has diehard fans but I don't usually do it myself.
Me neither. I love it. The three of us are unified.
Harold McGee: I have tried it a few times and it just seems to me that you end up with something that's kind of verging toward deli case turkey flavor, which is not what I'm looking for on Thanksgiving.
So if we're going to forgo a brine, let's talk about the actual flavor that a turkey has. Most people are not using wild turkeys or even heritage breeds for that matter, so there isn't a ton of flavor there to start with, is there? Or am I wrong?
Harold McGee: I would say that there's plenty of flavor there. It was, until very recently, a living animal. It may not have had the diet and the exercise that would give it a really distinctive flavor but it is still turkey. If you take care of it, you end up with something that tastes recognizably turkey-ish.
Get a little bit deeper into the science of aromas and tell me what that flavor is.
Arielle Johnson: The flavor of a cooked turkey, breaking it down into how the different components of it are formed, I would think of it as two major pieces. One would be products of the Maillard reaction. That is basically responsible for any foods that are brown, like caramelized onions, toast, bread, crust, and obviously roasted meats of any kind. That is a very delicious reaction between free amino acids. Those are the building blocks of proteins and sugars.
When people talk about caramelized onions, it has some flavor similar to caramelization. Caramelized onions are actually the product of the Maillard reaction, so they're more like Maillard-ized onions, but this is browning that happens at a much lower temperature. You're not burning sugar. You're heating things up a bit past 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the boiling point of water, so you're in a much more, cozy range of heat. That gives you the characteristic roasty, deep, meaty flavors of a turkey.
Then, there's also reactions that happen inside the bird. Most of the browning happens on the surface but inside the muscle... For meat, generally, what makes raw meat turn into a cooked meat flavor, like a beef stew or chicken soup, so the cooked flavor minus the brown roasted parts, that's actually largely a reaction between the iron in the oxygen-carrying proteins in the muscle and the fatty acids in the cell membranes and fats of the muscle. That creates the chickeny flavor in chicken and the deeply meaty, nutty flavor of turkey.
So you've got these two layers. One, this caramelly roasty top layer from the Maillard reaction, and then this more intrinsically meaty flavor from reactions that happen inside the muscle.
Let's talk about what we can do to add to those reactions by how we treat the bird before it goes into the oven. Are we still playing with woody herbs like rosemary, thyme, and sage? What about spice? Should we be moving more towards spice, since most of us these days seem to be cooking with a much more vibrant flavor profile?
Harold McGee: In my experience, and I try to do it differently every year so I don't have my own way of making things, I try different things every year to see what happens. In my experience, the important flavor in a turkey is the flavor of the turkey. So worrying too much about the adjunct flavors, they're fine for perfuming the cavity, if you're actually cooking it whole. If you're doing something like spatchcocking, cutting the backbone out so that you can lay it flat and it cooks in a fraction of the time, you don't want to have flavorings that you add to the surface, which is really the only option you have, unless you start injecting flavor at those higher temperatures, anything that you put on the surface is going to end up scorching.
What I like to do is treat the bird itself very simply, maybe rub it with butter or something like that, or olive oil, and then cook it, and then bring the flavors along with the drippings. You collect the drippings and you make a sauce and then you can do all kinds of things with the sauce.
By the way, the value of drippings is another of the reasons that I don't think brining is worth it. If you brine a turkey, then the drippings end up being too salty to use.
Arielle Johnson: Speaking of drippings, there was one year we grilled the turkey and I was worried about not having drippings, so I actually took the neck parts and one or two turkey drumsticks and some chicken drumsticks, and then roasted them in advance and did what you're not supposed to do when you're cooking meat, which is poke it with a knife a lot of times, because the juices run out. But if you do it a lot, then all the juices run out and you get an amazing thick layer of brown juices at the bottom of the roasting pan. I actually use that to augment the gravy and the grilled turkey.
So we're ready to cook the bird now. Harold, I've read a couple of articles where you did this visual prank to the bird. You fill a Ziploc bag with ice then you lay it over the breast to chill it when the bird is out at room temperature to give the legs and the breast a chance to come to temperature more evenly. First of all, I think that's a brilliant solution. Do you still do that?
Harold McGee: Sometimes. As I say, I'm always trying new things. I've done things like cut the turkey up into pieces and sous vided the different portions at different temperatures to get them just right, not because that's something I think everyone should do. I wanted to do it to see whether it was worth it. It's a lot of trouble and my conclusion was, no, it's not worth it. You might as well just go ahead and cook it the usual way.
Something I actually did enjoy doing as part of that experiment was to cook the skin separately. There are ways of doing that that don't involve sous vide. You can go ahead and cook the turkey normally. The problem is you don't end up with a beautifully presentable bird, some centerpiece for the table.
But after you've cooked the turkey, the skin, for me, is almost the highlight of turkey. So you can cut off some pieces, or maybe all of it, much of it, go ahead and slice the meat itself then put the skin on a sheet pan in the oven, weighed down with whatever, and some parchment paper over it to keep it from shrinking up. It gets this wonderful crisp texture, which you can then cut up into pieces and sprinkle onto whichever part of the bird you're actually eating.
Arielle Johnson: I also like the really crispy skin. I'm a little lazier than Harold. What I tend to try to do is make sure that the skin is as dry as possible. I'll sometimes leave the turkey on its own rack, uncovered in the fridge for a couple days to dry out. I've even gone in with a hair dryer on the cool setting right before I put it in the oven. That ensures that any water left on the surface of the skin, it's going to absorb all the heat energy, so you need to boil off the water before you can get brown and crispy. If you remove that in advance, then pretty much all of the heat of the cooking is going to go into making it deliciously brown and crispy.
Love that. Harold, you already talked about using the drippings to create a gravy or sauce that's filled with flavor to accompany the bird, but I've been thinking about dressing. I feel like it's a parallel aromatic universe for the turkey, which is why it's such a perfect foil. Do each of you have a favored dressing? I'll call it that, since I'm assuming we're not cooking it in the bird.
Harold McGee: When I'm doing Thanksgiving, because I grew up with a particular way of doing things and particular memories that I really enjoy, I make a very simple and traditional dressing. But I should mention that I sometimes celebrate Thanksgiving with friends of mine from South India. I've had some wonderful accompaniments to turkey that go really well, that have a very distinctive flavor of other parts of the world. So I think that's something I want to start doing going forward, making sticky rice dressing, or biryani-style dressing, that kind of thing. I think that would be a nice expansion of my stuffing universe.
I love that.