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Cooking times for poultry in the cook book are listed by weight of the bird you're cooking, and they're different depending on whether it's stuffed or unstuffed. It seems, however, that they're missing a very very important factor, possibly the most important one.
I learned to cook Turkey from my mother in law, and I'm not generally much of a cook, so I follow the receipt very closely, so there tends to be very little variation in how I do it. One of the things that I kept having to leave myself notes about is that the cooking times for turkey in the cook book are WRONG. A covered turkey cooks faster than one uncovered, for one thing. We've had Thanksgiving dinner at our house quite a bit since we moved here, and the problem we keep having is that the turkey cooks faster than we expect.
This last Thanksgiving, I read my notes and I realized I'd plan properly, and put the turkey in later so that it arrived at a nice early dinner time. So I did--and it was the longest-cooking turkey ever. It took the better part of 6 hours, which is very long for a 15-pounder. The only significant deviation from normal cooking procedure was I decided to pick up a disposable Aluminum-foil cooking pan from the store when I got the turkey. I assumed that it was insignificant in terms of cooking. Well, we ended up eating well after 7pm, so perhaps it wasn't so insignificant.
I was so annoyed about it that I went out a bought another turkey right after Thanksgiving last year, same brand, almost exactly the same weight, and put it in the freezer. I wanted to try it again with the original roasting pan, to see if it was back to the original cooking speed. We did that dinner yesterday. The same receipe, techniques and procedures as always. Same person doing it, same oven, same temperature, same thermometer. The only difference from last Thanksgiving was we went back to the black roasting pan that we'd always used in the past, with an Al foil cover, as always.
Here are the results. The horizontal axis is time, shifted so that
they start roughly at the same time. Vertical is the temperature read
in the breast meat by the same thermometer. The green line is the
temperature from last Thanksgiving with the oven at 325 F. The red
line is Thanksgiving after I turned the oven up to 350. The blue line
is yesterday (again with oven at 325).
It stops when we turned the oven off because the
turkey was getting done too fast.
So just to be clear: green and red line: disposable aluminum foil
roasting pan (shiny). Blue line: black roasting pan.
It's nice occasionally nice to be dead right. And the cats got turkey liver, so that's all right.