Ingredients to Baste Turkey

Series Summary

Thanksgiving turkey is a tradition in most American households for Thanksgiving dinner. Observed on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States, Thanksgiving celebrates giving thanks for bountiful harvests, as well as celebrating family and friends. It is generally a very traditional family event. Sometimes called Turkey Day, Thanksgiving dinner almost always features turkey, but also stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

If you are preparing a turkey this Thanksgiving or Christmas, you will need to know some basics for cooking turkey, and one thing you cannot forget is basting the turkey. In this free video series, our expert will show you how to properly baste your turkey. Using broth, butter and turkey juices to keep your turkey moist is essential to achieving the best flavor for your Thanksgiving turkey, so let our expert show you how to prepare this part of a delicious holiday meal.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you the proper way to baste a turkey and how to make delicious gravy for your traditional Thanksgiving day meal. The first thing I'm going to do is to tell you about the ingredients that are needed for basting your turkey. Of course the most important ingredient is your turkey if you're going to stuff him then have him already stuffed and ready before you start preparing him for basting. Now you can use a couple of different types of ingredients for basting your turkey the two basic things to remember is you want to keep your turkey moist and you also want to have the skin get crispy. So in order for that you need fat and moisture, for our fat we have butter which I'm going to show you how to melt so we can baste the turkey with a little bit of butter. The other ingredient to use would be chicken broth, you can also use turkey broth and you can use homemade can or boxed. If you don't feel like making homemade then I would recommend going with box instead of can because it keeps its flavored better. It's generally slightly higher quality. You don't get the taste from the can. The other thing that you can do is cover the turkey but we'll get into that later. "