Best Butter Roasted Turkey with Gravy

Best Butter Roasted Turkey with Gravy. You need this turkey for your Thanksgiving Day table! Wet brine, stuffed with aromatics and rubbed with an herb butter, this turkey is so good!

To see more of my favorites for Thanksgiving, click here. 

I can’t believe Thanksgiving is right around the corner. This year will be very different, as it will be for most of us. We won’t be with family this year but I’m still going to make sure we keep traditions alive and make some new memories with the kids. For me and my family, it’s not Thanksgiving unless we have a turkey. Back at home in Texas, we would always go big with a turkey and a ham. One year my dad might have even cooked a steak too. Needless to say, we had plenty of food. 

In addition to great food, I hope we can all focus on the positives this Thanksgiving. If you are healthy and have a roof over your heads and loved ones to eat with, I’d say you/we have a lot to be thankful for. 

Best Butter Roasted Turkey with Gravy

Is this your first year making a turkey? A lot of you have reached out to me, because, you are not traveling this year to see family and have to make a turkey for the first time. Don’t worry! We got this!

To Brine Or Not To Brine

If you’re up for it, I would suggest doing a wet brine. This will almost guarantee a juicy, delicious turkey. And if you’re making a turkey for the first time, I want your experience to be a good one.

If you don’t want to mess with a liquid brine, which can be tricky if you don’t have the space, I would suggest a dry brine. Thankfully, I live in cold weather where we can literally leave a turkey in the garage and it’s like a second refrigerator (life in Wisconsin; I think I could probably do the same thing here in PA). A dry brine is basically like doing a dry rub on a steak. For steak, there are wet marinades and dry rubs. Same thing here with the turkey but since a turkey is rather large, and anytime I have used the wet brine, I’ve always gotten a juicy bird. 

Gravy Recipes and Tips

As with the turkey, there are many opinions on how to make gravy. Some people insist on turkey drippings, some buy gravy from a jar. Some people plan way in advance and even make turkey stock from scratch. Here’s my advice: do what you can. If you are making everything from scratch and homemade, if you are making some and buying some ready made, it doesn’t matter. Just enjoy a nice dinner and time with your loved ones.

Once you have the juices from your turkey, you need to thicken them. There are several ways to do so. You can add flour to make a roux or a beurre manie (Butter+ flour, see recipe card). You can also add cornstarch or arrowroot to make a slurry. 

Thickening with a Roux

The typical approach for thickening gravy is to make a roux, which is a mixture of equal parts flour and fat, cooked for a minute or two until toasty. One way to make a roux is to leave a few tablespoons of fat (about 1 tablespoon per 2 servings) in the roasting pan and add an equal amount of flour. 

Cook the roux over moderate heat, stirring constantly to avoid burning and to keep it from forming lumps. When the roux smells toasty and turns beige, deglaze the pan by adding the juices from the roast in increments, whisking all the while to prevent the formation of lumps.

If your turkey didn’t produce a lot of juices, you’ll need to supplement with water or stock to make up the difference. Note that in this case, you don’t deglaze the pan until after you thicken. It’s important to combine the flour and fat alone before adding the liquid back in, because otherwise the flour and juice will combine to form a lumpy mess, which is definitely not what you want in gravy.

You can also make a roux in a separate saucepan and then gradually whisk in the deglazed juices from the roast, along with additional stock or water if necessary. And, if you don’t want to use the fat you reserved (perhaps it’s too greasy or there wasn’t enough), you can use either of these approaches to make a roux using all or part butter—just stick to the same formula, using an equal amount of flour and fat, and cook the roux until beige and toasty before gradually whisking in the juices.

Thickening with a Beurre Manie

This is what is shown in the recipe card below.

“Instead of making a roux, you can thicken gravy with a beurre manie, which, despite its fancy French name, is nothing more than a paste made with flour and butter. The beurre manie approach is a little easier than making a roux. It can be made ahead and offers you more control over the thickness of your gravy, because you can add it slowly in increments. To make a beurre manie, combine equal parts butter and flour and use the back of a fork to work them into a smooth paste. Then gradually whisk the paste, about 1 teaspoon as a time, into the already deglazed gravy base simmering on the stove. Continue whisking until the gravy is thick. You can make a beurre manie a day ahead and keep it in the refrigerator until ready to use.”

To learn more, click here.

Best Butter Roasted Turkey with Gravy

To see more of my favorites for Thanksgiving, click here.