Ingredients for Cooking a Christmas Turkey

Series Summary

While turkey dinners are more frequently associated with the Thanksgiving holiday, it is often the main dish served at Christmas celebrations as well. Many of us feel that those few days of turkey ecstasy that follow the Thanksgiving dinner in the form of sandwiches, soups and various other creatively concocted leftovers is just not enough to satisfy our thirst for the bird, and dreams of that deliciously juicy Christmas turkey start dancing in our heads as soon as their calendars are flipped on December 1st.

In this series of free cooking videos, you'll learn how to prepare a turkey for your Christmas dinner. Expert chef Brandon Sarkis shows you step-by-step how to prepare the bird, including how to thaw a frozen turkey, how to properly prepare and stuff a turkey, and how to season and cook the dish to perfection. Fear not, turkey lovers; although a month separates the two most important eating days of the year, you will be well prepared to serve this turkey recipe after watching our free cooking videos.

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a holiday turkey. Okay, the things you're going to need for today's turkey cooking project, it's a pretty small list, step one, turkey. This is about a thirteen pound turkey. It's about as small as you're going to find, usually at the grocery store. Sometimes you can find a smaller one, like a twelve pound turkey or so. The thirteen is pretty much the standard full size turkey you're going to find. Sometimes if you go to a specialty store, they specialize in smaller turkeys for smaller families, obviously, or smaller appetites. So this is a thirteen pound turkey. This is pretty much your standard, frozen grocery store turkey right here. I've also go the requisite salt and pepper. I use fresh ground for both of them. It's fresher flavor, better flavor out of both. I have one half of a yellow onion. This is actually what we'll stuff the turkey with in the inside. This turkey is going to cook without stuffing in it too by the way, just because this is more of a traditional, just a straight up roasted turkey. Then I've got some olive oil over here which we're going to rub on the outside of the turkey. At this step I should also say, if there's any special ingredient that you want to use, like if you wanted to use garlic, or some sort of you know, roasted herb seasoning, this is the time to have that as well. I'm just going to do the traditional salt, pepper, and olive oil turkey, so nothing fancy here. So let's see what equipment we're going to use. "