How to Stuff a Turkey

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Craig Weisman and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you how to make the ultimate holiday stuffing. Okay we're back, I have the stuffing and Diane is going to show you how to finish off the turkey. Well, for one thing, you want to do a little salt and pepper, generously. I have melted butter and you can use any kind of brush, clean brush. Make sure you get it all nice and lathered up. And, what we did the night before is you can put a little oil on the night before. Because, when we took it out of the package and cleaned the bird last night, we put a little bit of butter on it or you can use oil. We put aluminum foil on the wings and the legs, in the beginning, for half the cooking process because they tend to cook a little bit faster and we don't want them to get dried out. So we put a little aluminum foil on the legs and the arms to protect them. And, now, I'm going to start by stuffing the bottom of the bird. And, what you want to do is, when you're stuffing use your hands, make sure they're nice and clean. You can use a spoon, but this is a little easier for me. I already got my own built in spoon, here. What you want to do is you stuff the bird but you don't want to fill it all the way up. You want to make it like three quarters filled. Because what's going to happen with the stuffing, is it's going to expand and pop out of the turkey. Like us. (Laughter) Yes, the turkey expands before we do. We stuff the turkey and then the turkey stuffs us. Yes, very good. So, anyway, we've got this going here. That smells good. Mmmm I can smell the fresh herbs. So, I'm putting enough in the bottom here, and push my hand in here, oh yeah, yeah. Okay, just a little bit more but you don't want it sticking out too far out of the front there, because like I said it is going to expand. Now you want to cook the turkey, well the temperature of the stuffing, then it's done should be 165. The temperature of the turkey I think is 185 from what I understand. So, it's twelve to fifteen minutes per pound, depending on your altitude, and depending on, and that's at 300 degrees, or 325, I'm sorry, 325 degrees. And that depends on where you're located so make sure you have a thermometer which we'll show you in a few minutes. Let me turn this around. A thermometer to put in between the thigh and the breast, which we'll show you and you'll check that. First Diane's going to tell you about what we're going to do first with the turkey. First. Preheat the oven. We're going to. (Lots of laughter) First. Well, we're going to preheat the oven to 400. We're going to preheat the oven to 400 degrees, which we've already done, we have that all ready for us. Then, we're going to put the bird in the over for twenty minutes. And, what's going to happen after twenty minutes, we're not doing this on camera again. After twenty minutes we're going to take the bird out. And we're going to add chicken broth to it. Add chicken broth, carrots, onions, and celery. We'll do that in the next segment."