Roast Turkey with Gravy, Cranberries & Passion Fruit sauce, Bacon Jam

Having a turkey for Christmas dinner is not something we do normally. Usually, we will be celebrating Christmas overseas. However, this year, we decided to celebrate Christmas at home. We prepared a turkey for a small house gathering at my sister's place.

Bacon jam, cranberries & passion fruit sauce, parma ham wrapped stuffing, turkey gravy with the main dish

For the recipe, I searched on the Internet for some ideas and decided to use various ideas and methods to form my own recipe.

First step is to find a suitable turkey and one that is small enough to fit my oven. I settled for one that is around 5kg.

The chosen one

I defrosted the turkey in the fridge for 3 days before taking it out of the package to clean it. For every 2.2kg, 24 hours is needed to thaw the bird.

Turkey that has been cleaned

After cleaning out the bird, I soak the turkey in 600ml of butter milk and seasoning (coarse salt, pepper, garlic, paprika, fresh thyme, sage and rosemary) for one day in the fridge.

Preparing a butter milk bath/spa with seasoning for the turkey

Turkey in butter milk bath. I also want such a good life!

The following day, the turkey is washed again to remove all the butter milk and pat dry. The bird is then dried by hanging it up or left in the fridge uncovered.

Hanging the bird up to dry after the butter milk bath!

After that, I followed part of what Gordon Ramsay did in his YouTube video.

Season the cavity of the bird with some salt and pepper, stuff in one onion (cut into half), one lemon and bay leaves.

In a mixing bowl, put in some butter (room temperature), salt, pepper, olive oil, zest of 2 lemons and their juice, 3 cloves of garlic (pureed) and chopped parsley. Stir to mix.

Use your fingers to loosen the skin from the meat on the thighs and breast. Insert some butter mixture into the areas where you have separated the skin from the meat. Massage the rest of the butter mixture onto the breast, legs and wings of the bird. Sprinkle some olive oil on to those areas.

Coated with seasoning

Put the seasoned turkey into the preheated oven at 220C for 10 mins. After 10 mins, take the turkey out of the oven and baste. Then cover the breast with streaky bacon. Then baste the bacon before putting it back in the oven at 180C. The wings are wrapped in foil to prevent charring before the turkey is cooked.

Bacon wraps to prevent the breast from charring

We take out the turkey to baste and rotate for even browning every 30 to 45 minutes. Cooking time is estimated to be 30 minutes for every kg of turkey. So for my turkey, it took 2 1/2 hours to complete. To see if the turkey is done, check the temperature at 3 places - the breast, the outer thigh, and the inner thigh. They must be at least 74C in these 3 places. If any of them is under 74C, put the bird back in the oven for another 15 to 20 minutes. To prevent the breast from overcooking, shield it with foil. We removed the bacon earlier because they were going to be charred. Use the bacon for making the gravy.

After the turkey is done, rest it for the same amount of time you take to roast it. For my case, I rested it for 2 1/2 hours. Keep the juice from the roasting tray for making the gravy later.

Nice and golden brown

For the gravy, chopped up the streaky bacon, onion and lemon (from the cavity of the turkey) and put them into a pan. Heat up the pan with some of the oil from the roasting tray first. Add in a few sprig of rosemary, 3 chopped tomatoes as well. To have more turkey flavour in the gravy, cut off the wings and backside of the turkey and put them in the pan too. Pour in the juices collected.

In Gordon's recipe, he used apple cider which we don't have, so we added 50ml of red wine instead. When the fluid is reduced by half, mashed up the solids in the pan to extract more flavours. Pour in some chicken stock and reduce again. Once reduced, sift the gravy. Your turkey gravy is now ready.

We also modified our bacon jam by adding in 50ml of red wine, one bay leave and a few sprigs of thyme. Simmer the bacon jam until it is the consistency you want.

Modifying the bacon jam for special occasion

For the cranberries & passion fruit sauce, we bring 340g of cranberries (fresh), 224g of sugar, 120g passion fruit pulp and 180ml of water to a boil over medium high heat.

Once boiling, reduce the heat to low and simmer until the cranberries have broken down and the sauce is thick. Cool it before serving.

We had the turkey at the gathering and the meat is tender even for the breast. Definitely a recipe to keep.

Enjoy!

Savory Bacon Jam

I was introduced to bacon jam by a colleague one day. Being a lover of unhealthy food (tasty food is usually unhealthy, haha!), I went to a local cafe (Jewel Café+Bar) that serves homemade bacon jam to try it out for breakfast the very next morning with my significant half, Esther.

Bacon jam doesn't taste like the typical fruit jam at all. It tasted like a fusion of bacon, bak kwa (a type of Chinese BBQ pork jerky) and caramelised char siew (a type of Cantonese BBQ pork). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the taste of it. It is oily (bacon fat, duh!), sweet, salty, spicy and has a tinge of sourness with an underlying coffee aroma. In the cafe we went to, it was served with chunky slices of baguette (the dish is called Fat Soldiers, haha!). I think bacon jam goes well with everything, but that's just me...

"Fat Soldiers" from Jewel Café+Bar

On the way back from the cafe, I was already googling for recipes of bacon jam. I didn't know that it is so popular yet very simple to make as well. And as a bonus, there can be many variations to it. You need something sweet (sugar/maple syrup/honey), something salty (comes with the bacon), something sour (apple cider vinegar/balsamic vinegar/Worcestershire sauce), something spicy (mustard/hot sauce/paprika/chili powder/pepper) to give some heat and coffee. Most recipes include aromatics as well such as garlic, shallots and onions. You can add whatever ingredient you want as long as you stick to the above criteria. Some recipes even add a touch of alcohol like bourbon.

Being the experimental me, I looked for the most appealing recipe, and added extra ingredients from other recipes to round up the taste. The only "difficult" part of making bacon jam is the simmering and stirring to reduce the mass into semi-solid sludge. You can use a slow cooker for the simmering stage.

Without further delays, I present to you, our experimental bacon jam...

Ingredients
2kg bacon, (we used 1kg bacon back and 1kg streaky bacon)
3 big white onions (sweet variety), peeled and roughly sliced
7 to 10 shallot, peeled and roughly sliced
5 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
250ml pure maple syrup
60ml balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
100g brown sugar
freshly ground black pepper to taste
salt to taste (you can use the drained liquid obtained while cooking the bacon, see below)

120ml strong brewed coffee (how strong you want it to be is up to you, I actually used 2 tbsp of instant espresso)

Water if the jam is too dry during simmering
Alcohol (optional, maybe during festive seasons)

You have to cut the bacon into thin slices and cooked them over medium high heat until the fat is rendered and the bacon bits are brown and crisp. Do not over-cook them at this stage or you will get very tough bits.

Half-way through, there will be a lot of liquid released by the bacon. Drain it out to reduce the saltiness. You can always add some of the fluid back later on. If there is a lot of oil released when the bacon is crisp, you can drain it into a separate bowl as well in case you want to add back some at a later stage. Because we used half bacon back and half streaky bacon, it wasn't that oily.

Sliced bacon in frying pan

Once the bacon is crisp and you can add in the aromatics (garlic, shallot and onion). Cook using medium heat until the aromatics are softened. During this time, you can mix the brown sugar, maple syrup, vinegar, Dijon mustard and Worcestershire sauce in a bowl and stir to mix.

Cooking the bacon with the aromatics

We had to transfer the contents into a HappyCall pot since it is bigger than our frying pan and is non-sticky as well.

Once the aromatics are softened, pour in the prepared sauce and mix.

Add in black pepper and the salty liquid collected previously. Adjust according to your taste and preference.

Pour in the coffee once you are satisfied. Bring the whole mixture to a boil then reduce the heat to simmer. Cover the pot with a lid to prevent it from drying up too fast. Stir occasionally. You can use a slow cooker at this stage. If the mixture is too dry, don't add any more of the salty liquid or you might end up making it too salty. You can add some water and continue simmering. We simmered ours for about 4 hours. During that time, we were making macarons, so it wasn't that boring. ;)

Once that is done, off the heat and let it cool down before using a blender to blend it. Before blending, if you find the bacon jam not oily enough, you can add in the oil you collected previously when you were frying the bacon.

You can decide on the consistency of the bacon jam. We prefer ours to have some bits and pieces in it so we only blended it slightly instead of blending it into a paste. If you like to drink it like a milkshake, then by all means, blend it at full speed for a few minutes. :p

Bacon jam with garnishing

I think our version looks nicer and tastes better than the cafe's version. But I may be bias.  :) 

The bigger bacon bits were added in just for the photo shoot. But you can actually fry up extra bacon bits and add them after the bacon jam has been blended. There is no hard and fast rules to this recipe.

Bacon jam to complement Eggs Benedict or is it the other way round? :)

Esther cooked up something just for the bacon jam photo shoot. I noticed the Eggs Benedict tasted even better with the bacon jam! She dressed it up so well that she managed to trick her sister into thinking that this photo came from a cafe. LOL!

During the festive seasons, instead of adding water to simmer, try using red wine. We will be doing that and will post how it taste after that.

PS. All things (good or bad) must come in moderation. Please don't eat this everyday and end up with a heart attack!