Buffalo Turkey for Thanksgiving Dinner

I've been talking about it for months, and today the dream finally became reality:

The recipe is pretty simple, actually:

The Turkey


I bought a 10 1/2 lb frozen bird and thawed it in the fridge for a few days. Fully thawing the turkey is apparently very, very important.

 Then I unwrapped it, washed it, dried it, and injected it with Buffalo chicken-wing sauce (see below).

In my brother Avik's turkey fryer (a large pot over a propane burner) I heated three gallons of a soy/peanut oil blend to 350 degrees.

Then, in the fryer basket, which comes with the turkey-fryer kit, I very carefully lowered the bird into the boiling oil, put the lid on and let it fry for thirty-eight minutes. (I guess the rule is 5 minutes to get the oil back up to temperature, and then 3 minutes per pound.)

We pulled the turkey out of the fryer, put it in a pan and slathered it on all sides, inside and out, with Buffalo sauce.

The Sauce

This is the easiest part.  The basic formula is one part butter and one part Frank's Red Hot sauce. I modified it slightly by cutting the butter with canola oil to prevent the sauce from congealing when it cooled.  So, I mixed 1 1/2 cups (three sticks) butter, 1 1/2 cups canola oil, and 3 cups Red Hot in a sauce pan over low heat until everything was melted together.  I then--and this probably isn't necessary--took my hand blender to it for about thirty seconds to emulsify it. I should note that for my little turkey, this was about twice as much sauce as I needed, even after injecting and basting the bird, and serving the sauce on the side like gravy. There's enough left over to coat a couple dozen wings.

The Blue Cheese Dressing


This is almost as easy as the Buffalo sauce.  I picked up a pound of some stank Danish bleu from Larry's Cheese at the Rochester Public Market.

I mixed that with about two cups half-and-half, three cups sour cream, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.  I didn't really measure the salt and spices, but I guess I used about a teaspoon each. My brother Paul crumbled half the cheese into a Tupperware bowl, and we added the half-and-half, the salt and spices, and half the sour cream and blended it with a hand blender to make a smooth base.  We then crumbled the rest of the cheese into the bowl and folded in the rest of the sour cream.  This made the dressing chunky, and gave it some thickness. Again, this made way too much dressing.  A half or third would've been fine.

The Result


AWE-SOME. The turkey itself was perfect: moist, tender, everything you hope for in a Thanksgiving turkey, but so rarely get with birds overdone in the oven.  The added benefit of frying is the crispy skin.  For those of us who already liked Buffalo wings, the Buffalo turkey was Thanksgiving heaven.  The only comment I got on the blue cheese dressing was that it was too pungent.  A fair criticism, but pungent is what I was going for.  You can certainly get a mild blue cheese for a milder dressing.