How to Roast Turkey in a Steam Oven (recipe and tips)
Steaming and then roasting a turkey using your combi steam oven is the best way to get perfect, juicy turkey with golden skin, and it cuts down the usual cooking time by about a third.
Servings: 8
Calories: 639kcal
Ingredients
- 4 kg whole fresh turkey giblets and neck removed
- fine salt
- 80 g butter softened
- 185 ml pure maple syrup
- 2 tbs dijon mustard
- 1 tbs cider vinegar
- 1/2 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper optional, to give the glaze a hum
Instructions
- Prepare your turkey: pat the skin dry with kitchen towel, then rub all over the outside and the interior cavity with salt. I used approximately a tablespoon’s worth of fine salt for this – you want enough to rub all over every part of the bird that you can get to. Tie the ends of the legs together with kitchen string, then tuck the wings under the body and use another piece of string to tie right around the turkey, securing the wings close to the body (see photograph below for example). The ‘wing string’ is optional, but it stops the possibility of the wing ends popping out from under the bird during roasting and keeps it all looking nice and neat.
- Put the prepared turkey on a wire rack or perforated tray, with a solid pan underneath to catch any juices and fat. Put the turkey into the oven and set it to 85°C/185°F using the steam-only setting (a cold start is fine here). Cook for 40 minutes.
- While the turkey is steaming, mix together the maple syrup, mustard, vinegar, garlic, smoked paprika and cayenne pepper, if using. Set aside.
- At the end of the steaming time, remove the turkey from the oven (it won’t look or smell very appealing at this point, but stay with me, because things are going to get a whole lot better soon). Change your oven setting to 180°C/350°F, convection-only (no steam), or switch to your regular oven if your steam oven doesn’t have standard oven capabilities. If you have a second oven with a pyrolytic cleaning function rather than a steam cleaning function, I’d recommend you switch ovens at this point anyway. Pyrolytic clean is going to make your clean-up job much easier.
- Rub the steamed turkey all over with the softened butter, and put it back in the oven. Roast for 30 minutes, then brush all over with the glaze and continue roasting, brushing with more glaze every 15 minutes, until the thickest part of the bird, in the leg meat just next to the breast, reaches 73-76⁰C (163-169⁰F) on an instant read thermometer. The roasting part of cooking should take somewhere between 1 ½ and 2 hours. If the turkey is browning too quickly during cooking, cover it with a tented piece of foil to protect the skin. If the juices are starting to burn in the pan underneath the bird, add half a cup of water and check regularly to see if it needs more.
- Remove the cooked bird from the oven and place it somewhere warm to rest for 30 minutes. You can cover it with aluminium foil for resting, but my preference is to cover with a sheet of baking paper and a dish towel, which will keep the heat in but allow better airflow so it doesn’t steam as it will under foil.
- You’re done! Present your beautiful turkey to the waiting crowd and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. I feel very strongly that my part with the turkey is played once I’ve gone to the trouble of buying and cooking it, and I want nothing to do with the carving and serving. If you adhere to the same theory, you can give that honour to your most esteemed guest or family elder.
Nutrition
Serving: 1g | Calories: 639kcal | Carbohydrates: 16g | Protein: 77g | Fat: 28g | Saturated Fat: 10g | Cholesterol: 277mg | Sodium: 514mg | Potassium: 858mg | Sugar: 14g | Vitamin A: 635IU | Calcium: 69mg | Iron: 3.2mg
