Thanksgiving tips - carving

Turkey by DrTeeth

For those of you having your first real shot at the Thanksgiving turkey, you'd best learn how to carve. Honestly, I recommend that you practice on a roaster chicken. That will at least get you a scale model bit of practice, and chicken is very forgiving.

This is how I carve a turkey. Your results may vary...
(1) Let the turkey sit for 15 minutes for the meat to rest. Meat should always rest after cooking. Add more time with bigger, thicker pieces of meat, and meat with bone in. Can't get much bigger and bonier than a turkey...

(2) Put your turkey on a solid cutting surface. Use a large chef's knife or a carving knife. I also recommend using a boning knife for disarticulating joints.

(3) First remove the legs at the thigh joint. Pull the leg to expose the joint. Separate the thigh and drumstick. If you like to eat the drumstick in one piece, then you're done. Otherwise, cut the meat from the bone in slices, parallel to the bone.

(4) Disarticulate the wings. Separate each segment. Wings are mostly pointless, but someone may want to eat them. You may put away the boning knife now.

(5) There are two tactics to cutting breast meat. One is to take the whole breast off by taking a boning knife, following the ribcage from top to bottom, and pulling one breast away. Then, you can slice it on a cutting board. The other method is to take a carving knife and cut the breast near the wing joint horizontally, and deeply. This is the base cut. Then you can cut the breast from top to the base cut, and each slice should fall away.

When I first learned, I scoured the web, but learning at home is the best bet. Here's the website that I like best for learning: Butterball's guide to carving a turkey.