How To Season A Turkey

I'm going to show you today how to season turkey - a very straight forward and very easy way of doing it. Now, before I season any of my meats, I always make sure I'm thinking ahead and that my oven is nice and hot so when I season my meat, it's going to go straight into my oven. The basics for seasoning any poultry or any pork or beef is just salt and pepper.

Today, I'm going to use sea salt and cracked black pepper. I would normally score my meat as well to get all the flavors in, but I'm not going to do that. I don't want to over salt it, I don't want to overdo it.

We're looking for a nice crispy skin, so the salt and the oil will react and create a nice crispy skin. A little tip: when putting your salt, pepper and oil on your meat, right before the meat is coming to an end, take it out and just caramelize it with some butter. Get some butter in the pan and baste your meat on top so you get a nice golden color.

You're going to get a full flavor as well. You can reduce the amount of salt if you're using a salted butter, so put less salt on your chicken and when you're taking it out, just run the butter through it and that will add some more color and flavor to it and you're not using too much salt. So, we're just going to season it up.

A lot of chefs will add the salt and pepper right at the end because they feel the salt is withdrawing all the moisture from the meat. I don't believe that. I want to impregnate my skin, I want it to be crispy.

There is a barrier there, so it's not going to do anything to the meat at all. I'm looking for a nice crispy skin, so salt and pepper, a nice bit of olive oil. You can make your own dry rub by getting some dry herbs and blitzing it down and making an olive oil paste, but I'm just going to rub my salt and pepper through my skin.

Then, again, I'm going to add my salt and pepper and then I'm going to put it on my tray and it's ready for the oven. Very quickly, I'm using sea salt, cracked black pepper, a nice bit of olive oil. When my meat is cooked, I'm taking it out and finishing it off with salted butter to give it that final taste.

And that's how I season my turkey. .