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While some might believe that the whole Thanksgiving meal centers around the picture-perfect carving of a whole roasted turkey at the table, we’ve found that it can be tricky to cook a bird with such out-of-proportion dimensions and a very thick breast evenly. There’s an easy technique of preparing the turkey, however, that gives you more control over the cooking process and cooks the turkey a lot faster too: spatchcocking.
This technique is borrowed from a method often used for chickens, but we’ve taken it one step further by spatchcocking in a traditional Latin American way. Here’s a new way to spatchcock your bird for faster, better cooking this Thanksgiving.
An Easier Method for Spatchcocking Turkey — the Latin American Way!
In the traditional technique of spatchcocking, the backbone is cut out of the whole bird. The result is a wide butterflied bird where the breast is in the center with a leg on either side. This allows the bird to cook more evenly and more quickly.
A few years ago, however, I learned an alternative way of spatchcocking that I liked even better. In Argentina and other parts of Latin America, the backbone is kept intact. Instead, the cook pulls the legs away from the body, and uses scissors to cut through the thin ribcage on either side of the breast. The breast is pushed up and away from the legs.
The result here is a long butterflied bird with the breast and wings sitting away from the legs. It’s definitely odd-looking, a bit like a frog, but it also cooks more quickly (only about 1 1/12 hours for a 15-pound turkey on a grill) and evenly than a bird that is not butterflied.
In this tutorial we show you how to spatchcock a bird in this way, but we also go one extra step of completely removing the legs from the rest of the turkey’s body.
Why Try Our Spatchcock Method?
Here’s why I like the Latin American way of spatchcocking for turkey, as opposed to the more traditional “flattened butterfly” method.
Our Spatchcocking Tips for Success
If you plan to try this technique with your Thanksgiving turkey, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Keep in the mind that this style of spatchcocking means that the thick breast is not flattened out very much so in my testing, I found that the legs actually cooked faster than the breast. To deal with this, I start cooking the breast first and then add in the legs a bit later so that the white and dark meats were done at approximately the same time.