How to Cook the Best Thanksgiving Turkey

The stately, russet Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving turkey has one major flaw: It’s too big to taste any good.

There’s just no easy way to cook the dark meat of a bird that gargantuan without drying out the white meat. (That’s why many professional chefs spatchcock, deep-fry or, for more control, roast the bird in pieces.) Maybe it’s time to stop striving for that decades-old ideal. After all, Thanksgiving should be whatever you want it to be.

My challenge this year was a familiar one — as timeless as that Rockwell bird — but the solution (aside from starting with a smaller bird) had the potential to feel new, even exciting. How do you make something ordinarily boring and dry, for so many, taste suddenly juicy?

On a hot July day in the New York Times Cooking studio kitchen, my colleagues and I set out to find out, testing three different turkey techniques: salting simply (the control), wet brining (in a saltwater solution) and dry brining (salting a few days ahead). Then, we tasted eight breast portions, each prepared according to reader suggestions, to arrive at an effortlessly tender bird with immense flavor and unabashed wow factor.

What emerged was this deeply savory, chile-imbued bird roasted over a bed of fresh peppers. But in my research, I also uncovered a newfound respect for the beauty of a perfectly roasted bird, carved and laid out on a table with all its lush, savory trimmings. That such a bounty could come from one offering — a distinctly American game bird — is a gift. You might as well put your all into it. Here’s how:

1. Dry-brine the bird, then relax.

In 2006, Russ Parsons of The Los Angeles Times wrote that the best way to roast a turkey whole was to first dry-brine it, which is just a fancy way of saying it should be salted in advance — ideally two or three days before cooking.