1. How much time do you have?

2.  Is the turkey free range or a “factory” turkey?

3. Is the turkey stuffed or unstuffed?

4.  Has the turkey been brined?

5. How big is the turkey?

6.  Is the turkey deboned or left whole?

This may seem like I’m being overly complicated and in reality I am.   The entire purpose of Is It Ready Yet is to provide a good starting point and the proper information to get your turkey safely prepared.   There is no app that could account for all of the variables involved in cooking.  This is not baking where things are much more precise and a recipe should really be looked at as a formula.  Cooking is an art and a science.

So use Is It Ready Yet as your starting point.  If you want to brown the outside first, then crank up the heat for a short time.  Obviously you have to realize you can’t cook a 20lb turkey at 450 degrees for the entire duration.  The outside will be burned and the inside raw.  I personally wouldn’t deviate much more than 50 degrees based on what the application says for the majority of the cooking time.  And the bigger the turkey then the more likely I will be to stay closer to the turkey roasting times displayed.

I picked up one tip from watching Julia Childs one time and it seems to be accurate.  When you start noticing the aroma of cooked turkey in your house, then it is done.  I can not tell you how many times this has proven to be true.  Now, the science guy in me still sticks a thermometer in to double check, but it’s amazing how the simple tips that many of our mothers and grandmothers used were so accurate.

In the end, buy great quality food and enjoy it with those closest to you and you’ll be sure to create some life long memories.

So, this Thanksgiving my wife chose a heritage turkey called a bourbon red.  She was very excited about it, so I knew the pressure was on not to mess it up.  (plus that thing was $$$)  This year we also planned to prepare the turkey very differently.  I was actually going to debone the turkey, stuff it, and then tie it back up.

So I open up Is It Ready Yet? and look at my options for an 11lb turkey.  I see 325°F for 165-180 mins.  I know several things from my cooking experience in that almost everything my wife brings home that is pasture raised cooks faster and if I debone this thing it will cook faster also.  Additionally, I like to brown one side quickly at a higher temp and then turn down the temperature and turn the turkey over breast side up for the remainder of the time.

I decide to start at 450° for around 10-15 mins as I watch it.  When I’m happy with the color I turn the oven down to 325°F and then turned the turkey over.   At this point I made a judgement that this turkey being pasteur raised and deboned would take around two hours based off the times Is It Ready Yet? gave me for standard turkey roasting.

After my initial 15 mins I then changed the time that the app recommended manually to 2 hours.  After that time period expired  I would begin checking the temperature.  I knew that poultry should be cooked to 165°F since Is It Ready Yet? clearly displays that information.

Because I was periodically basting I was getting a good look at the turkey on a regular basis and at the two hour mark it was looking good.  I pulled out the trusty thermometer, took some deep readings and liked what I saw.  I knew that while letting the turkey rest the temperature would continue to rise some and I pulled it out at 158°F.

Finally, with everything else ready and the wine poured we were able to sit down and enjoy our boneless turkey, that I was able to prepare with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of guidance from Is It Ready Yet?

Cooking large cuts of meat

Apart from difficulties with the size of a Thanksgiving dinner, cooking large pieces of any kind of meat in an oven at any time of year, is one of the more difficult skills for a cook to acquire. This is especially so if they do not have to do it regularly. The rules are completely different from stovetop cooking and the cook either has to rely on experience and judgment, or they need to get help. Help can come in many forms. The old method was to use the charts provided in some cookbooks, but at Thanksgiving counter space can be limited, and flipping through a cookbook frantically looking for the right thing is nobody’s idea of a fun holiday. In the modern kitchen, help comes in the form of cooking applications for a smart phone. The Is it Ready App was designed to help cooks deal with the challenge of timing those difficult cuts that can be ruined by overcooking or undercooking. It is one more thing for which your iPhone is useful.Mobile technology and cooking

Smart phones and tablet computers are among the best things to come along for serious home cooks since the invention of the convection oven. Access to the millions of recipes and cooking applications are available right there in the kitchen with no pages to anxiously search through to find the right piece of advice. Of course, there is a lot of hunting to find the right thing, and not everything on the Internet can be trusted. That is where the trustworthy time and temperature advice on the Is it Ready Yet app comes in. The cook does not have to bet dinner on whether some random website out there is correct.

Features of Is it Ready Yet?

With one click the iPhone timer can be launched with recommended cooking times for various types of poultry, turkey being among them, of course. Other types of meat include beef, ham, and pork roasts. The makers of the app promise to help with many other kinds of meat in the future. Users may use metric as well as imperial measurements.

Then I thought, well there must be an iPhone application where I can look this up.  To my surprise I could not find one.  So finally after repeating these episodes over the last six months I became fed up and said well if I’m always looking for this info then somebody probably is also, so I thought, I’ll just create an iPhone application to do this.  My wife said that’s great, “but you don’t know how to program” and so started the journey of creating Is it ready yet? that you can read about on my blog.

Finally I had created a quick and simple way to look up oven cooking times for pork roasts, beef roasts, and most whole poultry.  It’s a very simple app but it makes our life easier and I hope it does for you also.

ryan