Juicy Cider and Sage Glazed Turkey — The First Dish I Ever Cooked for Somebody Outside My Own Kitchen

Mrs. Tilford from First Baptist called my mama at the Dollar General store Tuesday afternoon and asked if I would be willing to cook a turkey breast for the First Baptist March potluck on Saturday March eighteenth. I want to write the call down because the call was the start of a thing I have been hoping for without knowing I was hoping for it.

Mama called me from the back office at the store at three-fifteen. She said, baby, Mrs. Tilford is on the line for you. I picked up the cordless extension at home (we still have a cordless landline phone Mama refuses to give up) and Mrs. Tilford was on the line, in the careful gentle voice she has, and she said, baby, I have been hearing about your cooking from everyone on this side of town, and we are short a turkey breast for the potluck on Saturday because Mrs. Daley fell on the ice last week and is not going to be doing any baking this month, and I would be honored if you would take the breast slot if you have the time.

I said, Mrs. Tilford, I would be honored too.

I want to put on the page that this is the first time anybody outside this household has asked me to cook a dish for them. The Christmas cookie tins were gifts. I had decided to make them; nobody had asked me to. The home-ec demonstrations have been Mrs. Rivera’s class assignments and have happened inside the school. The turkey breast was different. The turkey breast was an outside assignment. The turkey breast was going to feed sixty to eighty people at a church potluck. The turkey breast was going to be served on the buffet line with my name on the index card next to it. I am fifteen years old and somebody has asked me to feed sixty to eighty grown people on a Saturday afternoon.

The math of that has been sitting in my chest since Tuesday afternoon. I have been thinking about it through every Sonic shift and every English class and every walk to the bus stop. The thinking has not been worry, exactly — I know how to roast a turkey, I roasted the Thanksgiving bird and it came out fine — but it has been the kind of weight that comes with being looked at, being expected to deliver, being asked to produce a thing that other people are going to eat and have an opinion about. I am writing it down because the weight is the part I want to remember. I do not want to take this for granted.

I picked the recipe Tuesday night. I had three options in the notebook. I picked Host the Toast’s Juicy Cider and Sage Glazed Turkey because the technique was straightforward, the flavors were the kind that would land on a Baptist potluck spread without being too foreign for the older folks, and the name had the word juicy in it, which I have decided is the word that wins on a buffet line.

The math: a six-pound bone-in turkey breast from Walmart, $14.99 (the most expensive single piece of meat I have ever bought, including last year’s Christmas ham). A 64-ounce bottle of apple cider from the produce section, $2.99. A small clamshell of fresh sage, $1.49. Three tablespoons of butter from the four-pack, $0.50. Garlic from the bulb, free. A medium yellow onion, $0.20. Salt, pepper, dried thyme, bay leaves, peppercorns from the spice rack. Total cost: about $20.50. The total was paid for from the church potluck reimbursement Mrs. Tilford brought over Tuesday evening in cash, sealed in a small white envelope, twenty-five dollars total. (She insisted I keep the four-fifty difference. She said it was for, quote, your gas and your sandpaper. I do not know what the sandpaper reference was. Mrs. Tilford has her own ways of speaking.)

The technique on the turkey breast is the brine plus the under-skin butter rub plus the glaze. I want to walk through each one because each one is the kind of trick that makes a difference, and the three of them together are the difference between a sad dry potluck turkey and a juicy one.

The brine. Friday night at eight I dissolved a half cup of kosher salt in a gallon of cold water in my biggest stockpot. I added two bay leaves and a tablespoon of peppercorns. I submerged the turkey breast in the brine and put the whole pot in the fridge overnight. The brine works through osmosis — salt water permeates the muscle fibers, denatures some of the protein, and lets the meat hold more moisture during roasting. A brined turkey is a turkey that does not dry out. The brine is the trick.

The under-skin butter rub. Saturday morning at seven I took the breast out of the brine, rinsed it, and patted it dry. I softened three tablespoons of butter and mixed in two tablespoons of finely chopped fresh sage, two cloves of minced garlic, a teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon of black pepper. I worked my fingers under the skin of the breast and spread the herb butter directly onto the meat under the skin. The butter melts during roasting and bastes the meat from the inside, and the herbs are pressed against the meat where they release the most flavor. The butter under the skin is the second trick.

The roasting. I cut the onion into thick rings and laid them in the bottom of a roasting pan. I poured two cups of the apple cider over the onions. I set the breast on top of the onions, breast-side up. I roasted at 325 for two and a half hours, basting the breast every thirty minutes with the pan juices and a little extra cider. The breast registered 165 in the thickest part at the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, which is when I started reducing the basting glaze.

The glaze. While the breast finished, I reduced two cups of cider, two tablespoons of butter, and a tablespoon of fresh sage in a small saucepan over medium heat for fifteen minutes until the mixture had reduced to a glossy syrup. I brushed the glaze on the breast for the last fifteen minutes of roasting. The glaze caramelized on the skin and gave it a deep mahogany color and a sticky-sweet-savory finish. The glaze is the third trick.

I let the breast rest at home for twenty minutes before slicing. I sliced it into thick clean rounds with my best kitchen knife, and arranged the slices on a foil-covered platter Mrs. Henderson had given me last week. I wrapped the platter in a clean dish towel. I drove to the First Baptist basement at eleven-forty-five.

The basement was the church basement of every small Baptist church in Oklahoma — fluorescent lights, fold-out tables, a kitchen at one end with two ovens and a long stainless steel counter, women in floral dresses arranging dishes on the buffet line. I carried the platter in. I felt the eyes of three or four women on me as I came through the door. I am fifteen and small and was wearing my best green sweater and my best jeans, and I am sure the women had heard from Mrs. Tilford that I was coming, and I am sure they were ready to be polite to me regardless of what I had brought.

Mrs. Tilford was at the buffet line. She walked over to me. She said, baby, set it down right here, the place of honor. She uncovered the platter herself. She looked at the turkey. She looked at me. She said, oh, baby. Three of the women in the kitchen turned around to look. One of them, an older woman in a pink cardigan, walked over and looked at the turkey and said to Mrs. Tilford, in a low voice, Anna, who made this. Mrs. Tilford said, Shelly Moreland’s daughter Kaylee. She is fifteen. The woman in the pink cardigan looked at me. She said, baby, you are going places.

The turkey was the first thing on the buffet at noon. By twelve-twenty there was nothing left of it but the bones, which I took home for stock. People walked through the line with their plates and they took two slices instead of one. People came back for thirds. A man in a blue shirt at the end of one of the long tables called across the basement to Mrs. Tilford, Anna, who made the turkey, and Mrs. Tilford pointed at me, and the man called over to me, young lady, that is the best turkey I have eaten in this church basement in twenty years, and I think I just nodded.

Mrs. Tilford found me at the dessert table at one-fifteen and pressed a small envelope into my hand. She said, this is from the church for your trouble. I tried to refuse. She did not let me. She closed my fingers around the envelope and patted my hand and walked away. The envelope had forty dollars in it.

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon and the forty dollars is in the savings envelope in my closet. The savings envelope, which had been at twenty after the Aunt Tammy payment this month, is now at sixty. The total in the savings envelope feels different from the total in the wallet. I have decided. The savings envelope is for the future. The future, today, is sixty dollars closer than it was Friday afternoon.

The recipe is below, the way Host the Toast wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the brine plus the under-skin butter rub plus the glaze — all three. Do not skip any of them. The brine takes overnight, but it is the difference between juicy and dry. The under-skin butter is the difference between flavored skin and flavored meat. The glaze is the difference between a tan turkey and a mahogany one. Make this for your own kitchen, or for a potluck if anybody ever asks you to. Sometimes a recipe is also an invitation to be looked at by the people around you, and the looking, when the recipe holds up, is one of the small good things this world can do for a person.

Juicy Cider and Sage Glazed Turkey with Gravy

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 3 hrs | Total Time: 3 hrs 25 min | Servings: 10

Ingredients

• 1 whole turkey (12–14 lbs), thawed and patted dry
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 2 tablespoons fresh sage, finely chopped (plus 6 whole leaves for garnish)
• 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 cup apple cider
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 large onion, quartered
• 2 stalks celery, roughly chopped
• 2 carrots, roughly chopped
• 4 cups low-sodium chicken or turkey broth, divided
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• Salt and black pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 325°F. Remove the turkey neck and giblets and set aside for the gravy if desired. Place the turkey breast-side up on a rack in a large roasting pan.
2. Make the herb butter. In a small bowl, combine the softened butter, chopped sage, thyme, garlic, salt, and pepper. Mix until fully combined. Gently loosen the skin over the turkey breast and thighs and rub half the herb butter directly onto the meat under the skin. Rub the remaining butter all over the outside of the turkey.
3. Prepare the cider glaze. In a small saucepan over medium heat, whisk together the apple cider, honey, apple cider vinegar, and Dijon mustard. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 5–6 minutes until slightly reduced and glossy. Set aside.
4. Roast the turkey. Scatter the onion, celery, and carrots in the bottom of the roasting pan. Pour 2 cups of broth into the pan. Roast the turkey uncovered, basting with the cider glaze every 45 minutes, until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reads 165°F — approximately 2.5 to 3 hours depending on size.
5. Rest the bird. Transfer the turkey to a cutting board, tent loosely with foil, and let it rest for at least 20 minutes before carving. This keeps all those juices where they belong.
6. Make the gravy. Pour the pan drippings through a fine-mesh strainer into a fat separator or a large measuring cup. Skim off the fat, reserving 3 tablespoons of it. Heat the reserved fat in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and cook for 1–2 minutes until golden and nutty-smelling. Gradually whisk in the strained drippings plus enough remaining broth to make about 3 cups of liquid total. Bring to a simmer, whisking constantly, until the gravy is smooth and thick — about 5 minutes. Season generously with salt and black pepper.
7. Carve and serve. Carve the turkey and arrange on a warm platter. Garnish with fresh sage leaves and serve with the peppery pan gravy poured over or alongside.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 480 | Protein: 58g | Fat: 18g | Carbs: 14g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 520mg