Photography: Skye McAlpine
This pomegranate-glazed turkey recipe is one of the best recipes out there for roast turkey for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you brine the turkey, which means the meat stays succulent no matter how it is roasted. Secondly, the pomegranate molasses glaze turns the skin a burnished colour and its sticky, salty tartness is irresistible. While this recipe doesn’t include stuffing, if you’d like to stuff the turkey you can fill the cavity after brining and increase the roasting time to allow for a heavier weight.
For more glazed turkey recipes, try this easy slow-roasted turkey with stuffing, roast turkey with lemon, cranberry and thyme stuffing or this turkey, chicken and cranberry terrine for something a bit different. For Christmas recipe ideas, check out our festive food collection.
Ingredients
Method
Place the turkey in a large, deep pan, add the brine ingredients and top with cold water to cover (4–5 litres, depending on the pan). Cover and set somewhere cold for 10–12 hours. (I know some recipes require you to boil the brine first, but I never bother and it’s still amazing.)
When ready to roast the turkey, lift it out of the brine, discard the liquid and put the bird on a rack in a roasting dish. Leave it for 1 hour to come to room temperature.
Heat the oven to 220˚C (200˚C fan-forced).
Combine the 220ml pomegranate juice, molasses, maple syrup, 2 tablespoons of the oil, the crushed peppercorns and salt flakes in a small bowl and whisk with a fork, then use a pastry brush to brush some of this glaze on the turkey, sprinkling more salt flakes over, to help it crisp in the oven. Now, pour 300–400ml of the stock into the roasting dish.
Reduce the oven temperature to 180˚C (160˚C fan-forced) and immediately set the turkey in the bottom half of the oven. After 30 minutes, pour half the remaining glaze over the breast with 2 tablespoons more of the olive oil and top up the roasting dish with a little more stock. Repeat again after a further 30 minutes. If the skin looks browned, cover the turkey with foil before placing back in the oven, though it will inevitably blacken a bit with its sticky dark glaze.
Roast until it has cooked for 1 hour 40 minutes in total (or 2 hours 10 minutes for a not free-range bird). Start checking the temperature halfway through cooking by inserting a meat thermometer in 3 places – the breast, the outer thigh and the inside thigh – to get an accurate reading. When the thermometer reads 72˚C, it’s done. Remove the turkey from the oven and rest on a carving board, covered with foil, for 20–30 minutes, before carving and serving.
This is an edited extract from ‘The Christmas Companion’ by Skye McAlpine, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, $55.
Be the first to read this story by subscribing to Home Beautiful magazine.
