As Thanksgiving approaches, newspapers, mega-stores, and food producers have recently begun their annual advertising assault to get your turkey dollars. Yet I suspect that huge numbers of people are living in dread and anxiety because they're uncertain about how their turkeys will turn out. Some will produce turkeys that are a long way from being fully cooked, while others will produce overcooked, tough birds in need of resuscitation.
If your oven is more than ten years old, the cooking temperature could vary-in the worst case-by as much as fifty degrees from the temperature you've set on the dial. So if a recipe tells you to cook a roast of beef at 375 F., you could be cooking at anywhere from 325 F to 425 F. and have no way of knowing, until you discover that when you remove your dish from the oven, what you've cooked is overcooked, undercooked, or somewhere in between. But not well cooked.
For approximately the price of a meal for one at McDonald's, you can feel assured that your oven is set at the temperature you're seeking, even if you've had to set the dial at 350 F. in order to arrive at a temperature of 375 F. The typical recipe that calls for, say, cooking something for fifteen minutes per pound, was very likely tested in an oven calibrated to cook at the expected temperature, or an oven fitted with an inexpensive oven thermometer.
Oven thermometers are readily available at the local chain hardware store, or in the kitchen gadget aisle at the local mega-store. The two most popular types, are coil (or dial) thermometers, and liquid, in which a colored liquid-usually alcohol-expands in glass as it heats, and registers the temperature on a scale. In both cases, the thermometers will have a kind of hook at the top that will enable you to hang them from one of the racks in the oven.
When you've bought your thermometer, it's a good idea to put it into boiling water for about five minutes, to see that it registers somewhere close to 212 F. If not, it may have some mechanism for adjustment, or you can simply return it to the store for another.
You could certainly buy more sophisticated timers for your roasting tasks. One popular model that retails for between $30.00 and $40.00 is digital, magnetic, so that it sticks to the oven door, and has a fireproof probe that can go into the meat roasting in your oven. And you can program it to beep when your meat has reached the desired internal temperature. Another, more expensive model, has a remote timer that you can carry up to seventy feet from the oven, and it too will beep to remind you that your meat is done. But you can get wonderful results with the least expensive models too.
So make a small investment in your oven. It will repay you with huge dividends in confidence that your roast will be medium rare; that your chicken will have a wonderful crust, yet be moist and juicy; that your meat loaf will make you a legend in the kitchen. And when your friends and family gather around your holiday table, they will proclaim this year's turkey to be the best one ever.
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