If you're hosting Christmas dinner this year, chances are you want everything to run smoothly and satisfy your guests - which includes having a perfectly moist turkey.
Preventing it from drying out can be a difficult task, especially if you're juggling other food preparation at the same time. Thankfully, there are a few ways to prevent this from happening.
One of these methods involves using a popular breakfast ingredient you may already have in the fridge. As well as using bacon to make delicious pigs in blankets, it can also be used to stop your turkey from becoming dry.
A go-to tip for many is to cover the turkey in a muslin cloth to prevent drying, but it turns out bacon can work just as well.
Suzanne Mulholland, author of The Batch Lady: Cooking on a Budget, explained how you can do this for the best results and a delicious dinner.
She said: "Butter under your skin. Put your fingers under the skin of the turkey, and put some butter on them.
"Cover your whole turkey in streaky bacon. That bacon – you can eat it, it's like the bacon around your chipolata – what it does is it acts like a second skin, and the fat from the bacon helps keep the top of your turkey beautifully moist with the butter."
Alternatively, the muslin cloth trick is a more traditional way to prevent dryness, as Great British Bake-Off host and author Prue Leith explained.
She said: "[Get] a J cloth or a piece of muslin, dip it in boiling water – don't use a red J cloth because then the dye comes out of them, but the blue ones don't.
"I usually dip them in boiling water first, wring them out, dip them into melted butter and drape it over the turkey.
"You're actually cooking the turkey under a melting butter muslin thing, and the cloth prevents the turkey from browning too quickly."
She advises taking the cloth off at the last 20 minutes, and it will keep the turkey "really nice and moist".
They both essentially work in the same way, but by using bacon, you can eat the results.
Sometimes even the best-laid plans can fall through – but not to worry, even an overcooked turkey can be salvaged.
"If it does dry out, turn it into a fantastic tikka masala – it's the best thing," says Nisha Katona, author of Meat Free Mowgli.
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