The Best Thanksgiving Turkey Recipe

Pre-warming the turkey in a mineral rich subterranean environment provides excitingly more possibilities for failure than traditional recipes. Finish the rest of the cooking with any other method.

By: Jeff Bethune

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The key to the best thanksgiving turkey for me, actually started with two food writers I admire greatly. I have mentioned them here before - FX Cuisine and William Rubel, who got me into cooking and got me into cooking with fire respectively. Check them out if you haven’t already. They both have IG too.

After reading Rubel’s amazing book, The Magic of Fire, I was captivated by the idea of burying a bird, wrapped in clay and surrounded by coals. The book described this as a traditional way to cook small birds, often not needing to remove the feathers etc as they would bake into the clay. In modern times, where clay is purchased from an art supply store, and birds are rarely available pre-plucked, the recipe gets some modifications. Logically, I decided the best way to attempt this would be:
- To harvest my own clay to honour the traditions
- To do it at Thanksgiving, because working under pressure is the best!
- With a 15lb bird instead of the recommended 3-4lb, because go big or go home

Clay

The thought of encrusting a beautiful, free range, organic turkey in chemical-ridden clay from the art store seemed like a bad idea, so why not collect a little organic clay from the river bed in the valley?

I’ll tell you why:

1) Check the tides. We drove ~1hr to the valley to get there at high tide and there was no clay available. We had to return another day when there was exposed clay.

2) It’s slippery. Very slippery. I took three steps forward before both feet propelled skyward, as if I were running in a giant hamster wheel and that was their only path. I landed square on my keister. I squealed. The rest of clay collection looked like someone pretending they knew how to tap dance - feet violently going in arbitrary and unnatural directions, counter balanced by a wildly swinging shovel.

3) It stinks. It was a little too organic. So many things in there decaying and smelling like Sulphur. It was very unpleasant.

After finally getting a bucket filled and driving home, I tried to rinse the clay with fresh water. It took about four hours, was very messy, and did little to mitigate the smell. What an adventure. We had the clay.

Recipe

The actual recipe is quite elegant. Follow these 8 simple steps:

1. Mix some herbs and butter

2. Rub butter under skin and on top of skin.

3. Wrap in cheese cloth

4. More butter

5. Wrap in clay

6. Bury with coals and heat the clay into a crust

7. Break open the clay crust and serve.

What could go wrong?! Lets break it down (follow along with the pictures).

First, we had to make a big fire. I’m not going to lie, the rain and wet wood didn’t set the tone we wanted right from the beginning. Luckily some kids sporting ski goggles we’re sitting around to cheer us on. It was important to build a big pile of embers to bury with our turkey. Unfortunately that never really happened..

We took the brined turkey and put butter under the skin. Then wrapped the whole thing in cheesecloth to keep the clay from sticking to the bird. Then, we added more butter because we really really didn’t want the clay to stick and that seemed like a good excuse. We wrapped it again in more cheesecloth.

Meanwhile, the younger children started to get really confused. The mud was way to runny to enclay any turkey - as in, to completely surround a turkey in clay. I really wish we had some art store plasticine at this point. We’re about 2 hours behind schedule and needed to find a way to enclay..

Luckily, the lawn was freshly mowed - so we mixed in enough grass to make the clay paste like. Through a combination of rolling and patting, we got the turkey wrapped up in clay, then wet newspaper and string to hold it together. A quick high-five and into the fire she goes.

We dug a hole in the ash and laid the turkey parcel in, surrounding it with all the coals we had. Built a fresh fire on top, and then the pit crew, goggles and all, posted up to wait. Typically this would be for a long time, but because it took so long to get underground, it was only buried for 3-4 hours.

We brought the package up 30 minutes or so before dinner, and the clay was barely a crust. Mostly still soft, with the wet newspaper still intact, there were clear signs it wasn’t hot enough to turn the clay into a hard shell to cook our turkey. Our ember fueled cooking pit turned out to be more like a pleasant sauna. The clay we peeled off revealed a muddy, 90% raw turkey. Hooray!

Oh - I forgot number 8.

8. Eat your backup turkey.

I learned pretty early on to have a backup plan for your backup plan. In this case, we had a backup cooking in the oven, according to the well established schedule we’ve dialed in over the last several years. For our second backup plan, we fired the raw, mud-turkey into the pizza oven to smoke/cook. It wasn’t the most beautiful bird, but it was delicious! The combination of the smoke, and relatively fast cook made for a flavorful but juicy turkey. Or maybe it was that 4 hour pre-warm, buried in organic clay? It made for some great stuffing waffle topping!

In the end, there were some clear areas for improvement. Patches of the clay shell were firm and hard, lighting a spark of hope for a future attempt…

…Take II, scheduled October 2024…..