How To Easily Moisten Your Overcooked Turkey

Overcooked, dry turkey probably counts as the No. 1 stressor for most Thanksgiving cooks making the bird. However, a dry turkey is still a viable turkey, if you know how to re-hydrate it. Fortunately, there are two simple ways to give the bird a shot in the arm, so to speak, so that its dry meat perks back up. One involves gravy (how bad could that be?), while the other requires you to work a little magic with some butter and stock.

If you go with the first option, you'll want to take a tip from your favorite dessert-first foodie, Ina Garten. Start by pouring a pool of savory gravy into the bottom of a very large serving platter. Next, slice the turkey into serving-sized pieces and arrange them on the platter, immersing them in the gravy. Cover the sliced bird with foil and put it back into the oven.

During the 15 to 30 minutes that the turkey sits in the oven, it'll bask in the juices of gravy, causing the meat to re-hydrate and make it a ready companion for your holiday mashed potatoes, which you can make ahead and freeze. The second method, using butter and stock, will also require popping the bird back into the oven for a bit. However, it's just as straightforward and won't use up any of your precious gravy.

If you haven't made the meal's gravy yet, you're not out of luck. Stock and butter will stand in for the gravy when it comes time to plump the turkey back up. (Build your own compound butter to add even more flavor if you have some extra spread on hand.) This revive-the-turkey method follows similar steps as the first, except instead of putting the sliced turkey on a platter, it goes into a large baking pan or roasting dish. 

Once you position the turkey in the baking pan, melt some butter — about 2 tablespoons — and drizzle it all over the meat. Next, pour 1 to 2 cups of stock over the bird. The exact amount of stock depends on the size of the bird, but generally speaking, one breast will require 1 cup of stock. Naturally, turkey stock is ideal for this. However, chicken or even vegetable stock work well in a pinch. The bird, which should be covered with foil again, will hang out in the oven for 15 minutes to half an hour before it's ready to go to the table. You can also use this approach after the bird has been sliced.

You may only have to do these tricks with the white meat of the turkey due to the differences in how the white and the dark meat on a bird cook. This is particularly true if you cook the turkey whole rather than in parts. In this case, the breast of the turkey — its white meat — sits belly-down in the roasting pan, a position that puts it closer to the oven's heating coils, making the breast cook faster.

To add insult to injury, the breast also boasts less fat than the legs do, making it more susceptible to drying out as the juices inside the bird evaporate. That said, if the legs of the turkey still need a bit of TLC, these tricks work on dark meat, too. To set this up, put the bird's legs into a second dish with just a 1/4 cup of broth or gravy. The rest of the steps remain pretty much the same. That is, cover the legs with a blanket of foil prior to popping them into the oven. Allow them to baste long enough to soak in the juices. If you do, your patience will be rewarded with an appetizing turkey that's both Instagram-worthy and deliciously moist.