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Josh called the Turkey-Hotline at Butterball to get the 4-1-1 from Jan about #NationalThawDay and some helpful tips on cooking the perfect Butterball Turkey this Thanksgiving!
Visit BUTTERBALL.com, call 1-800-BUTTERBALL or text 844-877-3456 for all you Thanksgiving cooking needs!
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Good morning on the LifeSongs Morning Show. Today is a very special day, one week till Thanksgiving, and that makes it National Thaw Day. And who better to talk about thawing a turkey than the experts at Butterball. Jan, thank you so much for joining us on the morning show.
My pleasure, I’m happy to be here.
So break it down for me, what is National Thaw Day?
It’s the day that you should start thinking about that turkey if you haven’t done so already. If you have it in your freezer, take it from the freezer and put it in the refrigerator. If you haven’t purchased the turkey, you might want to think about getting to the store, because it takes a long time to thaw it, and it needs to be thawed in a cold method. The easiest way to thaw it is in the refrigerator. Leave the turkey in the original wrapper, put it on a tray, and allow one day in the refrigerator for every four pounds of turkey. So a 20-pound turkey, for instance, would take you five days to thaw.
And after it’s thawed, it needs to be cooked within four days. So you’ve got a little leeway there. And if you don’t even have time to thaw, you can get a fresh turkey, which requires no thawing at all. And that’s very tasty as well.
Yeah, but then you have to pluck the feathers and all that. It’s going to be a bit of a mess.
No. Our fresh turkeys have no feathers.
So if you missed it, the official Butterball mathematical equation for thawing a turkey is one day per four pounds of turkey.
That’s correct.
Awesome. Now I heard this – this actually I have a request from my program director to ask this question. She heard that you guys at Butterball now have a bake from frozen turkey. Is that actually a thing or is that an urban tiktok legend?
That is a new product that we’re rolling out this year. And it is cooked from frozen. So you just take it out of the package and put it right in the oven. So by next year it should be in all states. Bbut this year it’s not. But I don’t know if people would find it in your area or not. But you can check our product locator on our website, Butterball.com.
Okay, limited edition. If you’re listening to LifeSsongs and you come across the Butterball Cook from Frozen Turkey, take a picture, send it to us, because I want to see. That sounds pretty awesome. My mom says her mother, back in the 1960s cooked their Thanksgiving turkey in the microwave. Is that something you recommend at Butterball?
Yes, you can do that. I’ve done a number of them because I used to do microwave cooking schools and demos and so I’ve done it quite often. First of all, you have to have a turkey that’s going to fit in the microwave. When the microwaves first came out in the late 60s and 70s, they were pretty big so you could get do like a 12 pound turkey, but nowadays the microwaves are pretty small in a lot of cases so you can still do it but you’re going to have to have a pretty small one. So it can be done and it does cook faster, but it’s a lot more work.
I think I’ll stick with the oven or the deep fryer or the smoker. Do you actually, Jan, have a favorite method for cooking your turkey?
I would say my favorite method is probably the grill. I love the nice charcoal grill.
Nice. Well, Jan, where can LifeSongs’ listeners go to get all of their turkey questions answered this Thanksgiving?
Well, they can call us at 1-800-Butterball. We have people here waiting to talk to them and answer their questions. They can also text us at 844-877-3456, or they can reach us at Butterball.com, which is a wonderful website with all kinds of information. And we’re also available on all the social channels, so we’re very easy to find.
Well thank you so much, Jan, for taking a moment to share with us about National Thaw Day, and I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving.
I wish you the same. Thank you.