How to Prepare Turkey for Basting

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. Now before we stick our turkey in the oven and start basting it we need to get the skin ready. By that I mean adding some seasonings, now you can add pretty much whatever you want. Make sure that if you have a turkey stuffed that the flavors are going to work with each other instead of contrasting. But for demonstration purposes I'm just going to show you how to put a layer of oil and salt the turkey. Now because we are going to be basting with butter you don't want too much of fat covering over the turkey. So my secret ingredient using non stick cooking spray. This is going to very lightly cover the turkey so you don't have pools of it anywhere you just put a very light sheen. Because you want to have enough moisture on the outside of the turkey in order for any seasonings to be able to stick, because I'm just using a little bit of salt. I'm going to pour just a little bit onto my hands. Now remember when you are doing this, this is a very hands on activity so make sure your hands are clean and you're going to wash them immediately afterwards. With the salt you just want to rub it all over the skin wanting to get underneath the turkey if you didn't have stuffing in it, you will also put seasonings on the inside. Other options for seasoning is that you can lift up the skin and kind of work your way underneath it and you can put butter and seasoning packets underneath the skin there. But for todays purposes we are just going to stick to some nice salt and a little bit of oil."