The Best Turkey You’ll Ever Eat

I know a lot about turkey—I’ve roasted hundreds of birds while developing two previous recipes for this magazine. I’m adept at keeping the delicate breast meat moist while ensuring that the longer-cooking legs and thighs turn tender. I have tricks for seasoning the flesh all the way to the bone, producing crackling brown skin, and maximizing the flavors of herbs and spices. But if I really wanted to wow you with a single unadorned bite—no drizzle of gravy, no sprinkle of flaky salt, no dollop of cranberry sauce—I wouldn’t bother with any of those techniques. I’d make turkey confit.

The term “confit” is derived from the French verb “confire,” which means “to preserve.” Before refrigeration, confit was used as a simple and effective way to prolong the shelf life of foods, including duck or goose parts. The poultry was cured in salt and then gently poached in its own fat before being buried beneath the fat and stored in an airtight crock. At serving time, all that was needed was a blast of heat to crisp the skin. Today, all types of dark‑meat poultry, pork, and game are given the treatment (tender white meat breaks down too much with this method), though regardless of the protein, duck fat is a classic choice for the poaching step.

But the most important thing you need to know about confit is that its benefits go far beyond preservation. In fact, the method is a near miracle for turkey, producing satisfyingly dense, silky meat and concentrated savory flavor with very little effort. In other words, Thanksgiving dinner just got a lot better.

I decided to work with bone-in, skin-on turkey thighs, since turkey drumsticks have multiple tendons that can be unwieldy to navigate during carving. Curing the thighs would be similar to brining or salting; it just involves more time and a higher concentration of salt. But there’s no standard approach: In my research, I came across a wide variety of times and salt amounts.

After several experiments, I landed on a four-day cure using 5 teaspoons of table salt for 4 pounds of thighs. Shorter cures didn’t give the salt enough time to fully penetrate, producing thighs that were salty at the exterior and underseasoned near the bone.

When the curing time was up, I rinsed the salt from the thighs, patted them dry, and slowly oven‑poached them in 6 cups of duck fat along with bay leaves and a head of garlic. (A 250-degree oven was preferable to the stovetop since it didn’t require babysitting. Sous vide cooking is also a great option; see “Sous Vide Confit” for the details.) After an hour, the thighs were hovering in the 140-degree range, which allowed their collagen to break down into gelatin. At the 31/2‑hour mark, the thighs were tender, so I transferred them to a foil‑lined baking sheet, cranked the oven up to 500 degrees, and slid them in. Fifteen minutes later, the thighs were beautifully browned and the meat was evenly and deeply seasoned, with a firm, dense texture.

Seasonings were my next consideration. When salting or brining meat, we don’t normally add extra flavorings, because they take too long to penetrate the flesh. But with a cure, water-soluble ingredients actually have time to travel deep inside, so many recipes recommend mixing some combination of fresh herbs (parsley or thyme), spices (black pepper, allspice, or juniper berries), and alliums (onion, garlic, or shallots) with the salt.

To help everything stick to the thighs and to ensure even distribution, I processed the salt with chopped onion, fresh thyme leaves, and black pepper, plus a touch of sugar for complexity. I increased the salt to 21/2 tablespoons because the onions would capture some of it, preventing it from seasoning the turkey’s interior. I spread a portion of the green-and-black‑flecked mixture in a baking dish, arranged the thighs in the dish, and packed the remaining mixture on top before refrigerating the assembly for four days. (After a few more tests, I concluded that for the sake of convenience, the thighs could sit for up to six days.)

When I cooked the thighs, I was delighted to find that the aromatics had worked their way into the turkey, giving it a rich, deeply savory taste; the sugar rounded out the flavors. This was far better than the salt‑only turkey. In fact, it was the finest turkey I’d ever eaten. A colleague described it best, proclaiming, “It tastes like turkey, gravy, and stuffing all in one delicious bite!” (For a deeper dive into the benefits of curing and poaching in fat, see “What Makes Confit So Darn Good?”)

The turkey’s flavor was top-notch, but I couldn’t help wishing that the meat were a little more moist. I had noticed a thin stream of bubbles rising through the poaching fat from the thighs as they cooked, indicating that moisture was escaping the meat. Would the turkey be juicier if I dropped the oven temperature?

Sure enough, when I reduced the oven to 200 degrees, the bubbles disappeared. Actually, it didn’t look like anything was happening at all. But 5 hours later, the results were well worth the wait. This was the moistest turkey yet, because the ultralow-and-slow approach forced less water out of the meat.

Finally, many recipes call for transferring the protein to a clean container; separating the fat from the perishable juices; and refrigerating the meat, submerged in the fat, for a “ripening” period. I didn’t want to bother separating the fat from the jus, so I tried six days of refrigeration (the longest I could go without the jus turning sour) directly in the pot of fat and jus. Ultimately, this waiting time had no effect on flavor or texture. That said, it was great to know that I had such a wide window for making the confit in advance.

Gravy, of course, is traditional with Thanksgiving turkey. But this turkey was anything but traditional, and a meaty sauce would only mimic the rich, decadent flavor of the meat. For a bold, fresh accompaniment, I combined citrus and mustard in the form of sweet orange marmalade, tart lime, and whole-grain mustard. A few spoonfuls of the concentrated turkey juices provided a savory backbone, and a pinch of cayenne added subtle warmth. It was bright and cheery—which is exactly how I felt when I served this turkey.