I don’t know about you, but roasting a turkey for Thanksgiving is super intimidating. I can roast chickens all day, but something about the turkey that makes my cooking confidence zero. No matter how much I read on how to do it. It just makes me nervous. My older brother is always in charge of roasting/deep frying the turkey, even if it’s my year to host.

Well this year, we are headed to my husband’s family’s home for Thanksgiving. He so boldly volunteered to cook the turkey. To my disbelief. To prepare for it, I made a trial turkey to brine. For some reason, they didn’t put out whole turkeys yet, so I had to work with a turkey breast with wings…no dark meat. Weird right?

I usually would measure out salt, herbs, etc for the brine. But we found this jar of stuff, and decided to try it out. It’s also got dried fruit in it. I approve.

If you don’t already have one, and you cook a turkey every year, I suggest you get one. It’s just a big multipurpose bucket from home depot. With a lid. This is where I’m brining the turkey overnight.

Instead of a whole gallon of water, I dissolved the salt mixture in half a gallon of water, and then half a gallon of apple cider.

Dunk your turkey in there, I like to put the hole at the top so it can fill up and sink to the bottom. Cover and set outside (if it’s cold enough) and let it brine overnight.

The next day I opened up and saw that the turkey was completely submerged. YAY!

After I took out the turkey, I stuffed it with these goodies to make it fragrant.

Then I rubbed it down with butter, lemon zest and herbs.

My over is a little uneven. But pretty successful for the first try. The meat was cooked all the way through and it was surprisingly moist! It took me a few hours to cook it. I preheated the oven to 450F, then when the turkey went in I turned it down to 350, then basted every 30 minutes or so. If it gets brown too quickly, you can loosely cover with foil.

Do you have any turkey tips?