THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SOUS VIDE TURKEY

はじめに

Sous Vide Turkey Basics

Let’s get one thing straight before we begin. Sous vide techniques are just that: techniques. They are another tool to add to your arsenal in the kitchen. Sous vide cooking is not better or worse than roasting, frying, or braising, per se — it’s just different. The main advantage? It offers you very precise control over the finished product. While a hot oven ends up creating a large temperature gradient within a roasted turkey, turkey cooked sous vide will be evenly cooked from edge to center.

Traditionally, sous vide turkey consists of a two-phase cooking process:

1. シーリング the turkey parts in a plastic bag using either a vacuum sealer or the water displacement method and cooking it to the desired final temperature in a temperature-controlled water bath.
   1. The temperature of the sous vide bath during the initial cooking phase is what determines the final texture of your turkey.
2. Searing the turkey parts to crisp the skin and develop color, flavor, and textural contrast.

If you’d prefer to introduce new sous vide techniques into your arsenal, you can also use the Anova Precision™ Oven to prepare sous vide turkey. Because of the way we’ve designed the temperature sensors and humidity control, the oven will precisely maintain the cooking temperature you set.

You can choose to bag and cook your turkey parts in the Precision™ Oven just as you would with an Precision® Cooker, or you can use the oven’s food probe to tell you exactly when the core of your turkey has hit your desired temp.

Just like traditional sous vide, using Sous Vide Mode in the Anova Precision™ Oven typically is a two-stage cooking process: First, bring the turkey to your desired internal temperature, then sear or broil in the oven to create a flavorful crust.

If you’re shopping for individual turkey parts at the store, you usually have four options: breast (either boneless, skinless or whole), leg, thigh, and wings. Each can be optimized using sous vide cooking, but you’ll want to adjust your time and temp accordingly.

• For traditional sous vide techniques, we prefer to cook white and dark meat separately; it’s easier to seal parts than a whole turkey and you can dial in the perfect temperatures for each cut more easily. (Turkey breast tastes best cooked to a lower temperature than turkey thighs, for example.) It is also challenging to properly seal a whole turkey in a bag to cook in a water bath.
• If you’re cooking in the Anova Precision™ Oven, however, it’s quite easy to prepare a whole turkey sous vide. You’ll need to split the difference between your favorite doneness temps for white and dark meat, but what you lose in parts-based precision, you’ll make up for in an ultra-juicy texture and the ease of probe-based cooking.

Boneless, skinless turkey breast is a great choice for sous vide cooking because it is so easy to overcook using traditional methods. It has no bones or skin to act as insulators and far too often is bland and dry.

Because it doesn't have insulating skin, we usually skip the searing step for this turkey part. Slice it thin and serve it with gravy, or use it in any place you’d typically use poached poultry, such as a chilled salad or in a soup.

When you’re cooking dark meat turkey or if you want to serve a full turkey breast, you’ll be using bone-in, skin-on cuts. There are obvious benefits to the bones and skin: You’ll get more insulation when searing so you won’t need to worry about overcooking the meat below. And unlike a steak or a pork chop where blazing high heat is necessary to get a good sear in order to prevent overcooking, turkey can be seared at a more moderate temperature. The heat works towards crisping and browning the skin, but doesn’t penetrate too far into the bird, maintaining juiciness.

Skin and bones provide another advantage: flavor. Turkey cooked with skin and bones intact simply comes out of the bag more flavorful.

If you’re cooking skin-on turkey sous vide in the Anova Precision™ Oven, you can do so using 0% humidity instead of full steam. This method, which we call Dry Sous Vide, helps to keep the skin as dry as possible to facilitate proper searing after cooking. You can choose to sear on the stovetop or broil using the oven to brown the skin.

Temperature and Timing for Sous Vide Turkey

Just like any food cooked sous vide, the final texture and doneness of turkey is dependent on both time and temperature. With poultry, it is also important to consider food safety when choosing your preferred cook settings.

By essentially pasteurizing meat, sous vide cooking also allows you to safely cook turkey to temperatures that are lower than what can be achieved in a standard oven, and lower temperatures make for moister meat. This opens up new worlds of possibility when it comes to the texture and flavor of your finished dish.

It’s easy to remember the “165°F (74ºC) = safe” and the “40°F (4.4ºC) to 140°F (60ºC) = the danger zone” rules. So much so that it’s tempting to think of pasteurization as something akin to dropping a bomb into a fortress full of bacteria, instantly killing them all. But if you take a look at the United States Department of Agriculture’s charts, the reality is actually quite a bit more complex. Pasteurizing a piece of meat to destroy harmful bacteria is really much more similar to a slow siege, letting the bacteria die off at a steady rate. That rate is affected by the temperature of the meat.

So while at 165°F (74ºC) you reach a 7-log10 reduction in bacteria count (that is, for every 10 million bacteria you started with, only one will remain) in under 10 seconds, at 140°F (60ºC), this process can take almost 10 minutes. In other words, turkey cooked and held at 140°F (60ºC) for 30 minutes is just as safe as turkey cooked and held at 165°F (74ºC) for 10 seconds.

In a standard oven, it’s difficult to safely cook turkey to anything below around 150ºF (66ºC) to 145ºF (63ºC) — you just can’t hold its temperature in that range for a long enough period of time. With a Precision® Cooker or Precision™ Oven, we can cook as low as we’d like. So long as bacteria are actively being destroyed, it’s just a matter of timing.

The important thing to bear in mind here is that these times start after the turkey hits the target pasteurization temperature.

Want more details? Dive even deeper into the science behind pasteurization and get full time and temp charts on our pasteurization page.

White Meat Turkey

Sous Vide Turkey, Step by Step

ステップ1

Attach a Precision® Cooker to a water bath and heat to your desired final doneness temperature or preheat the Precision™ Oven to your desired temperature.

If you're planning on cooking and eating the turkey immediately, season generously with salt and pepper. If sealing now to freeze or cook for later, omit the salt and pepper.

ステップ2

If vacuum sealing, add to a bag with aromatics if desired. Seal the bag with a vacuum sealer. If using the food probe in the Precision™ Oven, insert the probe into the center of the largest turkey piece. If cooking a whole turkey, insert the probe into the breast.

ステップ3

袋をウォーターバスに入れるか、オーブンに入れ、プローブを取り付ける。お好みの時間と温度、またはプローブが目標温度に達するまで加熱する。

仕上げのステップ

Remove the turkey from the bag or oven and place it on a paper towel-lined plate. (Reserve the juices in the bag if cooking dark meat turkey.) Pat the turkey very dry on both sides. If you did not season before cooking the turkey, season it now generously with salt and pepper. Remove the probe if using.

ステップ1

厚手の鋳鉄製またはステンレス製のスキレットに、大さじ1杯（15ml）の中性油を入れ、中火にかける。

ステップ2

Carefully add the turkey to the hot oil, skin side down. Use a flexible slotted fish spatula or to hold the turkey down against the corner of the pan in order to maximize contact between the turkey skin and the hot oil and metal.

ステップ3

Carefully lift and peek under the turkey as it cooks to gauge how quickly it is browning. Let it continue to cook until the skin is deep brown and very crisp, about 2 minutes. Remove the turkey from the pan.

ステップ4

If making a pan sauce for dark meat turkey, start by adding a few chopped aromatics, such as shallots or garlic, to the pan. Cook until fragrant, then add a glass of wine or a shot of liquor along with the gelled turkey juices from the sous vide bag. Add secondary flavorings, such as whole grain mustard, if desired.

バター1パット、刻んだハーブ、レモン汁を加える。塩と胡椒で味を調える。ソースが油っぽかったり、崩れているようなら、大さじ2～3杯の水を加えて激しくかき混ぜ、ソースをほぐして乳化させる。

ステップ5

Serve the turkey immediately garnished with lemon wedges, extra virgin olive oil, vinaigrette, pan sauce, or gravy.

ステップ1

Adjust the oven temperature for air frying: If using Precision™ Oven 1.0, turn sous vide mode off and set the oven to 475°F (246°C) with 0% steam using the Top+Rear heating elements. If using Precision™ Oven 2.0, turn the oven on to Air Fry cooking mode at 475°F (246°C).

ステップ2

While the oven is heating, brush the surface of the turkey skin with neutral oil.

ステップ3

When the oven has reached temperature, return the turkey to the middle rack. Roast until the skin is golden brown and crisp, 5 to 10 minutes. Keep a close eye on the turkey — the skin can go from perfectly golden to burnt in a short time. If cooking legs or wings, flip halfway through cooking.

ステップ4

Remove the turkey from the oven. Serve.

A Closer Look at Sous Vide Turkey Breast

How to Shape a Turkey Breast for Sous Vide Cooking

The goal for cooking sous vide turkey breast is to get it to cook evenly. To prevent the skinny end from cooking faster than the fat end, all you need to do is find a way to make sure that the turkey is an even thickness throughout.

Just remove two breasts and pack them together tops-to-tails, like a jigsaw puzzle. This will create a single large cylinder that is very close to even in radius throughout its whole width. Any minor differences can be evened out with a bit of butcher’s twine tied at 1-inch intervals.

Another advantage to this method is that it allows you to season the interior of the breast roll as well. This is important not only for flavor, but for getting those turkey breast halves to stick together. As the salt works its way into the meat, it dissolves some of the muscle proteins, which in turn can then cross-link with each other, binding the two turkey breast halves together into a single, solid piece of meat (even without the aid of fancy meat glues and such). It’s the exact same process that helps a good sausage bind together.

How to Get Ultra-Crisp Sous Vide Turkey Breast Skin

When you’re roasting a turkey conventionally, that roasted flavor really mostly comes from the skin, as it’s the only part of the turkey that’s actually getting exposed to the high heat of the oven. For the meat underneath, it couldn’t really care less whether it was in an oven or in a water bath — the final temperature is the only thing that matters.

So what’s the best way to get that roasted turkey flavor into the skin? Just roast it on its own.

Spread the skin out flat on a sheet of parchment, season it thoroughly, top it with another sheet of parchment, then sandwich it between two rimmed baking sheets. Roast it in the Anova Precision™ Oven using Convection Bake (Rear heat) at 375°F (190°C) with 0% steam for 20 to 35 minutes or in a conventional oven at 400°F (205°C) for 30 to 45 minutes. What you end up with is a single, flat sheet of perfectly crisp skin that can shatter into serving-sized shards.

What’s more, because this skin isn’t wrapped around steaming-hot turkey meat, it will stay crisp for far longer than the skin on a traditionally roasted turkey, all while delivering on that promise of intense, roasty flavor.

A Closer Look at Seasoning Sous Vide Turkey

We recommend seasoning turkey with salt and pepper before sealing it in vacuum bags. Wet brining is entirely unnecessary when it comes to sous vide turkey. Your turkey will come out plenty moist and juicy while also having a more concentrated turkey flavor, as brine dilutes the flavor of the turkey with water.

You can also add aromatics to the bag before sealing. Think about what you’d like the flavors of the final dish to be: a few tarragon sprigs and some wheels of lemon for a take on roast turkey or slices of ginger, garlic, and scallions for a cold salad. The key is to avoid excess liquid (doing that means you’ll end up flavoring the liquid with turkey instead of the other way around), and to bear in mind that most spices and garlic will intensify with flavor when added to a sous vide bag.

If using Dry Sous Vide Mode in the Anova Precision™ Oven, you can further dry out the skin by dry brining the meat the night before cooking. Add salt and any seasonings to the turkey skin and refrigerate overnight uncovered on a wire rack set in a sheet pan.

A Closer Look at Searing Sous Vide Turkey

Searing sous vide turkey can be a challenge because the skin is quite damp and soggy after cooking in a bag at 100% humidity. The trick is to really go to town drying the turkey and to use a relatively moderate stovetop temperature to sear.

If you’re using the Anova Precision™ Oven to cook your turkey, you can use Dry Sous Vide Mode. While the skin won’t be completely dry when it’s finished, it’ll be significantly more so than when cooking at 100% relative humidity in a water bath.

Meal-Prep and Make-Ahead Sous Vide Turkey

真空調理の大きなメリットのひとつは、食材を1つずつ袋に小分けするため、食事の下ごしらえに適していることだ。しかし、特に再加熱を考えている場合は、いくつか注意すべき点がある：

• It’s true that given a high enough temperature (130°F (54.4ºC) or higher) and a long enough time period (several hours), the contents of a sealed sous vide bag should be close to sterile. Rapid chilling via an ice bath followed by rapid reheating should pose no health risks, though we still strongly recommend against it whenever avoidable: It’s not doing any favors for the quality of your turkey.
  • Moreover, it takes just as long to reheat already-cooked sous vide turkey to its final serving temperature as it does to cook that same meat from scratch so you really aren’t saving any time by doing it.
• Never chill and reheat any food that has been cooked or held at a temperature lower than 130°F (54.4ºC). These temperatures are not hot enough to destroy dangerous bacteria.
• You can seal seasoned, ready-to-cook turkey parts in sous vide bags and stack them in the freezer. When ready to cook, pop them directly in the water bath or oven and allow an extra hour to fully thaw before you begin timing it for doneness.