Happy Thanksgiving from Marquette Magazine!

by Marquette Magazine

We Just Want To Take a Minute To Wish Everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Baste your holiday turkey before roasting in the oven to infuse it with flavor and promote browning. (Marquette Magazine photo by soullenz.com)

Marquette, MI, Nov. 28, 2013 – Happy Thanksgiving from Marquette Magazine! – We’re thankful for all the positive support we’ve been receiving with the start-up of our online magazine endeavor from friends far and near and our local readers who have already subscribed to the magazine to receive email notifications on every new post!  We thank you for your patience as we are just beginning and can’t wait to fill up all our pages with interesting, entertaining, and relevant stories and news from the Upper Peninsula and around the world!

Mixture of melted butter infused with sage, thyme, paparika, and brown sugar for turkey basting. (Marquette Magazine photo by soullenz.com)

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday tradition we’re including a short tutorial on one way to roast a turkey and would love to get comments on different traditions and turkey recipes from others out there. So if you have a minute, please share a little bit about your turkey specialties!

Turkey Roasting Traditions

During our time in Hawaii we were able to experience a delicious alternative to the traditional oven roasted turkey back on the mainland.  Hawaiians have an ancient method of cooking called “Kalua” using underground oven pits called “imus” where the prepared meat and veggies are placed upon lava rocks heated the night before on hot fires and then covered with banana leaves, wet burlap sacks, and finally a layer of heavy duty plastic.  The resulting meat is infused with the smokey flavor from the fire so moist and tender it melts in your mouth!

Known for pig roasts the Kalua cooking method is popular for Thanksgiving cooking as well.  It’s very common for communities to gather together the night before in a festive spirit to build the imu pit and tend the fires. The next morning people bring their prepared trays of turkeys to place into the imu and for the next several hours the food is blanketed with steam and earth cooking to perfection.  Often, a big community feast is eaten together afterwards as participants join hands together in a circle to give blessings and thanks for the meal and each other.

Place basted turkey into oven roasting bag and add remaining basting liquid. This turkey is also packed inside with stuffing but you could also fill the chest cavity with celery, carrots, onion, and garlic. Once finished seal bag and poke 6 1/2″ slits into top of bag to release steam during cooking. (Marquette Magazine photo by soullenz.com)

Since creating an imu outdoors in the U.P. this time of year isn’t really possible we tried recreating a similar environment inside our oven this year.  We did this with an oven cooking bag which you may already have experience with.  After brining the turkey overnight in a mixture of water, salt, herbs, garlic, onion, and citrus we slathered it in butter, salt, fresh sage, thyme, and paprika and then closed it up in the bag, (for a more Hawaiian imu flavor you could add some liquid smoke flavoring to mimic the smokey fire taste).  Oven cooking bags allow you to seal up the turkey in the oven and basically forget about it until time to take it out.  The steam generated and held in the bag creates a moist atmosphere similar to that of the imu helping to retain the moisture often lost in traditional oven roasting.  Yum! Yum! However to cook it we hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving meal with friends and family!

by marquette_magazine