Recipes for the birds

Turkey, it is universally acknowledged, is one of the trickiest meats to cook properly. A lean bird, it's easily overcooked. The trick is to ensure that the legs are cooked enough but the breast is not dried out - a seemingly impossible task. The addition of stuffing or forcemeat can throw the cooking times off completely (and send health and safety experts into apoplexy). Yet turkey is the dish of choice for much of the world when it comes to Christmas lunch.

Most top chefs will attempt to dissuade you from choosing turkey for Christmas, recommending goose - a richly flavoured, fatty bird - instead. Those chefs who deign to talk turkey seem to make their cooking methods as complicated or outlandish as possible, perhaps as a way of punishing us for choosing it.

Take Heston Blumenthal. His tip for a moist turkey is to brine the poultry by submerging it in 10 litres of saltwater for between 12 and 24 hours. But then the fun begins.

You'll need to soak the turkey in cold water for an hour, during which time you should refresh the water every 15 minutes. Following this, Blumenthal says you should alternately place the turkey in a large pot of boiling water and then a pot of ice cold water. Twice. Only then are you ready to begin the cooking process.

Set the oven temperature at a low 60 degrees Celsius and cook the turkey until the internal temperature of the bird has reached 60 degrees (according to Blumenthal this should take six to eight hours; you'll need to use a probe thermometer to check).

Twenty minutes later the turkey should be taken out of the oven and left to rest for one hour. It will look pretty pale and unappealing at this point because of the low heat, so Blumenthal suggests frying the whole bird in a pan on a high heat until it's browned all over. But it's not over yet. He says to use a baster to suck up the pan juices and inject them into the turkey, just below the skin, at several points. Got all that?