It's when you put stuffing in there and don't alter the cooking time to account for the heat taking longer to get to the centre that food poisoning becomes a possibility. That's why hoying a few veg in the cavity is safe but stuffing the cavity isn't; it's nothing to do with whether or not you eat the few veg.

Peter

Yeah, but altering the cooking time enough to cook the things stuffed inside means that your turkey is going to come out like sawdust.

Not if you do it properly.

Stuffing, the kind meant to be eaten, has always been a part of every turkey dinner served among the family. Never ever known of any one getting sick.

Thought the way the turkeys get cooked, about all you need do to remove the meat, is grab the breast bone and shake.

Brining a turkey to make it more moist is such an odd concept to me. Brining is ususally used to draw moisture out of the food and act as a perservative. It just seems counterintuitive to use it to moisten food.

My mother tried brining a turkey for the first time this year, and said it came out amazing. Apparently the brine sucks the blood out of the bird, which is what makes it more moist. It still makes my brain hurt trying to figure it out, though.

How brining works

Basically, relatively low concentrations of salt cause muscle fibers to swell and hold more water. Higher concentrations cause the opposite effect.

Exactly. There's a great Good Eats about it. For example, the recipe I used called for two gallons of liquid and one cup of salt. That's a pretty low concentration.

In the end, I don't care how it works, I just know it's friggin' delicious!

*edit*
To be clear, because it was just the breast, I halved the recipe I used. .5 gallons of water and .5 gallons of chicken broth.

I didn't think about the concentration (I still haven't gotten the recipe from my mom yet so no clue how much she used). I generally use a lot more salt than just a cup per gallon when I brine.

Pretty hard to satisfy a taste for the dark meat, when you're only cooking a breast.

So buy drumsticks.

I think higher concentration just means you need to brine it for less time. I am always afraid of using too much salt and making it taste salty.

I am making wings to take to a holiday party, I wonder how brining those would be.