Should i use a roasting rack for turkey

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Candace Braun Davison Deputy Editor Candace Braun Davison writes, edits, and produces lifestyle content that ranges from celebrity features to roll-up-your-sleeves DIYs, all while relentlessly pursuing the noblest of causes: the quest for the world's best chocolate chip cookie.

Personally, I'd take easy and delicious over slightly more picturesque any day, but I can understand the resistance some folks have. And what if you come from one of those families with the old Auntie Emma who insists it's not Thanksgiving unless her turkey comes to the table with its back fully intact?

Is there still a method that can get you great results? My goal was to find a method for roasting turkeys that requires minimal fussiness and produces a beautifully burnished, deep-brown bird with evenly cooked, juicy meat to boot.

If you like crisp skin and juicy meat, that is. Do a quick Google search for "roast turkey recipes," open up the first five that show up, and tell me what they all have in common. It makes sense, right? You're roasting the turkey, so why wouldn't you use a roasting pan? Well, I'm here to set the record straight and to tell you that a roasting pan is the worst choice for roasting a turkey.

Alton Brown's roast turkey. As is often the case, this man gets it. Why do away with the pan? Let's recap what goes on when you're roasting that bird in order to understand. If you've been following our Thanksgiving turkey coverage over the years, we may be covering familiar ground. But it's important, so bear with me. Perfectly roasting a turkey is really about delivering two things: crisp, well-browned skin and I'm talking all of the skin here—no flabby bits hidden underneath the bird, please and moist meat from both the breast and the thighs.

Let's take a look at what's required to get there, one step at a time. Getting crisp skin is really a simple matter of cooking it long enough that collagen one of the proteins that make it tough has time to convert to gelatin and drain away, fat has time to render out, and the remaining proteins have time to dehydrate and brown.

So, for crisper skin, your goal is to maximize air circulation, which not only brings hot air to the turkey more effectively thus cooking the skin faster but also removes excess moisture, allowing the skin to crisp better.

Other things that can affect how efficiently turkey skin browns include how dry it is to begin with and its pH. By rubbing the skin with a bit of baking powder and salt, then letting the turkey rest overnight, not only do you improve the turkey's juiciness a process known as dry-brining , you also improve the skin's browning capacity.

Here's the real issue when it comes to roast turkey. Breast meat is composed mainly of what are known as fast-twitch muscles—muscles that are rarely used on a day-to-day basis, but are great for quick, powerful bursts of action. Fast-twitch muscle tends to be relatively light in color and low in connective tissue and fat. Leg meat, on the other hand, is mainly slow-twitch muscle.

It's used day in and day out as the turkey walks around scratching for food. As a result, it's darker and packed with tough connective tissue. Because the two muscle structures are so massively different, they must be cooked differently to achieve ideal results.

Put all of this together and you can come up with a short list of two parameters that will dictate how we roast our turkey. Hit those two goals, and we should be golden. Are you beginning to see why the roasting pan is so terrible for roasting a turkey?