Your worst nightmare: It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and you still need to thaw your turkey. It doesn’t matter that multiple food websites have been yelling about turkey thaw times for days—if not weeks—now. There are always a few stragglers who wait until Wednesday or—much worse—Thursday morning.
Thawing a fully frozen turkey on Thanksgiving is not impossible (though you won’t be eating dinner until way late), but let’s not leave it until then. Even on Wednesday you’ll still have time to de-ice your turkey without losing your entire mind. To thaw a turkey fast, lean on your two closest allies.
How to thaw a turkey fast with water
Filling your sink with cold water and changing it every half hour is a standard defrosting technique. It usually takes at least half an hour per pound. You can jump start the process with a quick 10-minute hot-water bath, then switch to cold water to ensure your meat doesn’t drop into the “danger zone” and promote bacterial growth.
Thaw a turkey quickly with brine
If your turkey is mostly thawed, but you were planning on brining it, you can go ahead and place it in a liquid brine in the fridge. The brine will be the same temp as the air in the refrigerator, but water is better at conducting heat than air, so your brine will help thaw the bird as it flavors.
Use a sous vide circulator to quickly thaw your bird
I cook at least four turkeys every November while developing recipes, and sometimes I don’t have the full three to four days required to defrost a 12-pound bird, nor do I have the time to change out water every half hour. In these moments, I turn to my immersion circulator.
Sous-vide circulators can’t cool water, but they can keep cool water moving, and tell you the exact temperature of the water, negating the need to change the water every half hour. This saves water (which is not cheap) and time.
The cold tap water that comes out of the average faucet is around 45℉, so try and keep it around there. Fill a big bucket with cold tap water, set your circulator temp to 45℉, and add ice as needed to get it down to that temperature. Turn on the circulator, and let the water move and groove around the bird. The frozen turkey will keep the water from climbing in temp—even though the water is five degrees above the upper end of the danger zone threshold, the meat itself is going to stay well within the safe range for quite a while, and it definitely won’t be in the danger zone for two hours.
If you start to feel a little nervous towards the end of the thaw, you can add a little more ice and drop the temp of the circulator to 39℉. (I’ve also started the water at around 60℉, then dropped it down by adding ice once the turkey starts to soften.) Using the circulator this way can shave hours off of your thaw time. And if tomorrow is Turkey Day, every hour is precious.
It’s OK to get the turkey mostly thawed
If time is running out and you’ve tried these techniques only to find ice crystals remaining in the turkey cavity, it’s okay. There’s absolutely nothing wrong or unsafe about putting a partially icy bird in the oven to bake. The cavity is mostly cartilage, bone, and a giant air pocket, so it’s not surprising that ice remains there. Your goal is to get the turkey muscles soft, or at least pretty darn pliable, using the methods above.
Roasting a slightly icy turkey requires nothing different than how you would prepare and roast a completely thawed one; you’ll just need to add on some time. It’s hard to say exactly how much extra time it’ll need—it depends on how frozen the turkey still is—but estimate for 20%-50% longer. Use a meat thermometer to check the internal temp in the thickest part of the thigh (not touching the bone) every half an hour after the recommended bake time for a thawed bird until it reaches 165℉.
Luckily, thawing a turkey quickly is mostly hands-off. So let it do its thing, and you can keep yourself busy with the other parts of the feast.