Trussing the Wings of a Christmas Turkey

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. Alright so now we have these wings, they're just flopping around like this. We're going to trust these things up. So we're just going to take some of our butchers twine, and you want to get enough to go around the turkey about three times. With a turkey this size, three times is probably pushing six feet, which is approximately the span of my arms. So I'll just go from shoulder to shoulder, I'll grab my twine here, I'll go up here to the handy built in cutter, which may or may not work, yeah, I don't think it's going to work. I get the knife, just like that. What I always do is I always go and tie a knot in both ends of my string, because it will keep, if you're using butchers twine, it will keep it from unrattling. Butchers twine's a very loose twine, so a little knot in each end. So all we're going to do, we're going to go under the turkey, we're going to get under its wings like this. We want to keep the wings close to the body, because if they're just sticking out like this and air can circulate around them freely, they'll cook really, really, well done. And then you're going to end up with very, very, well done wings, and you know, a normally done body, and it's not very tasty. Basically the wings become useless at that point. So, we want to retain the use of the wings. So we will just bind them in a little bit. It's pretty simple, you just basically go like this, take your fingers, go around the bird, as such, pulling it tight. Run back underneath, and then you just pull it straight up, and you'll see how it keeps these wings nice and tight on the body. And since this is, we're only doing two rounds this way I'll just tighten that up. And so now your wings are tucked in like that, and your extra piece of string here, you can do with it whatever you want. I'll just use it to keep the feet together just in case for some reason they decide to come apart. I don't see why they would, but you never know. I've seen it happen before where as the turkey cooks, it actually overpowers the little metal thing that's holding the feet together and the turkey pops free. Alright so, we now have our turkey all bondaged up. Let's go ahead and grease it up, get it in the pan, and get it into the oven. "