This year, the bird's in the bag

I went back to the bag this year — you know, the one that makes the righteous Food Police comment till the cows come home. The turkey oven bag.

When you're all in for Thanksgiving, a big bird is the holiday table's chief ongoing concern. You make room for it in cold storage, you weigh the merits of a brine, you schedule around its cooking, you tinker with how it's seasoned, you hope the white meat stays juicy, you try not to shred it as you carve and you wonder whether there will be leftovers.

The turkey recipe we shared with readers in 2016 was about the easiest one I've ever roasted, with little prep and no brine. Could I improve on it? I wanted to brine (for flavor) and fuss a little but keep the oven time about the same. For a 14-pounder, that translated to about 2½ hours. So I bought a package and followed the directions: Dust the inside of the bag with flour (or cornstarch or a gluten-free blend). Cut slits in the top. Make sure to tuck it inside the pan.

The Reynolds brand bags I used are made of heat-resistant nylon, which is the same material used in the cooking utensils found in so many home kitchens. Food-grade safe, non-leaching. The company has sold the product steadily since its introduction in 1976, and there has been an uptick in sales the past two years.

My mother would load up a smaller-size one with a chuck roast, carrots, onions and Lipton soup mix when I was growing up, for Sunday dinners. The bags were designed to keep big cuts of meat moist in the oven; that they also eased cleanup was a bonus, says Reynolds Consumer Products test kitchen manager Charry Brown.

Tales of exploding bags persist, she says, and such scary things did happen initially, before the test kitchen discovered the flour-and-top-slits approach.

Bottom line: If you're looking to cook the turkey faster and keep its meat moist throughout, the bag's for you. If you want to skip scrubbing the roasting pan, the bag's for you. If you want the turkey's skin to be evenly browned and crisped, it might not be for you. If you want to crank up the heat to 400-plus degrees or use a countertop roaster oven, the bag's definitely not for you.

Brown has learned ways of compensating for some bag issues. You can slather the turkey with oil or butter before it goes in to help with browning; I use the latter. For even browning, you'll have better luck with a modest-size bird than a large one, she says; I found that rotating the pan a few times from front to back during cooking also helped. Reynolds does not recommend splitting open the bag for the last bit of roasting to crisp the skin, because the nylon will slump over the sides of the hot metal pan, a no-no.

My “fuss” amounts to peeling enough garlic cloves — about 50 — to put inside the cavity of the turkey so they become almost tender and absorb some meat juices. A quick turn in the food processor with a touch of maple syrup and a pinch of salt yields a mellow garlic cream that's good with just about everything on the Thanksgiving table, except for dessert.