Sous Vide "Turchetta"

I mentioned I was going to do this last week and someone told me to take some pictures, so here goes:

This recipe was adapted from the post here. I'm a big fan of Serious Eats, and thought this would be a good way to test out the Anova Immersion Circulator I bought on Prime Day.

Not the biggest fan of turkey in general, but this turned out pretty well for the first time making the recipe. I ditched the spices that the author put in the roast and swapped them out with some Weber seasoning Kickin' Chicken because I'm not a huge fan of fennel and sage. I also didn't bother with the gravy because I cooked this at my mother-in-law's house and wasn't really near the kitchen in the 4.5 hrs it cooked.


Apologies for the lack of pictures. Step 1 was to peel the skin off and debone the turkey breast. Peeling the skin off went OK, but instead of de-boning the turkey breast I basically just used a filet knife and cut the breast off the bone instead of using the steps outlined in the article. Finished product, after skin was off and breast was butterflied, was this:



Next step was to tie it up in a cylindrical roast-ish tube with the skin all around. However, I didn't have enough skin, so it didn't end up looking exactly how I wanted:



That being said, I figured it would be fine.

Next problem; I don't have a vacuum sealer, so instead of having a nice tube-looking roast I end up having to fold it up to go inside the ziploc freezer bag. So instead of a turkey cylindrical roast, I end up having what looks like a turkey neck pillow


No pictures of when I pulled it, but it looks as gross as you can imagine. 4.5 hrs at 140. Big dutch-oven pot filled about 1/3 full of peanut oil at about 400-425 degrees. I can't emphasize how important it is to have a large, large pot for this step. Mine was big but not big enough,and a small amount of oil went overboard onto the stove, which made a helluva mess. Ideally if you have a grill with a burner or a turkey fryer you'd do this step outdoors. I only fried it for maybe 6-8 minutes total, 3 minutes on each side, and the final result was a really good-looking golden brown turkey neck pillow:



And here's a final shot after we had dug in:




Final thoughts: Most of the roast was as tender turkey as I have ever tasted. Skin wasn't cooked long enough because it was still pretty gooey and while it looked good it should have fried longer if I wanted more than color. As I said, most of the roast was crazy tender and juicy, but there were a few bites that were really, really tough. Not sure if I got some meat that wasn't straight breast meat or what the deal was, but there were three or four bites that were pretty rough (which I suppose isn't bad on a 7 pound turkey breast).

This was really good, but I'm not sure I wouldn't just sous vide the turkey breasts individually next time and pan-sear. I'm not sure the time, effort and money involved in peeling the skin off, wrapping in twine and using a bunch of peanut oil was worth it when I could have gotten basically the same flavor doing it the other way. I think if you wanted to use the sage and fennel though this might be your best bet.