I've done sous vide on steaks and chicken breast for many years. This year, our son-in-law who normally smokes the turkey decided he needed a break this year. So we decided to try the sous vide method.

In doing research I came across this that hpcougar shared:


Here's the 5 min video describing the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss21r9JZFgE

So we tried to follow this process. Except I was very skeptical of doing sous vide for 12-24 hours. Having cooked with sous vide in the past I've become suspicious when it says to cook something that long. I tried a beef roast for 12 hours before and it didn't turn out well. Kinda mushy as I remember. So I was gunshy about going that long. I did a whole bunch of research including this thread on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sousvide/comments/7cjl9c/comment/dpyjm4l/. I finally decided to customize the instructions a bit. I cut up the turkey last night into the 2 breasts and the 2 thigh/leg pieces. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and put it in the fridge overnight. This morning we put fresh sage and rosemary in the bag and sealed it up. The turkey was about 19 lbs - so it was fairly big. Because of it's size and the need to cook the white meat at different temps than the dark meat - we actually had 2 sous vide pots going. The one for the breasts/white meat we did at 140 degrees. The one for the thigh/leg/dark meat we did at 150 degrees. We kept them in the sous vide bath for ~7 hours. Afterwards - we let them rest and blotted them dry. Then put them in the oven broiler for several minutes to sear them until the skins were brown and crispy.

Normally I'm a dark meat turkey guy. But I suspected that with our past experience with chicken breasts that the white meat would turn out well. Which it did. The white meat was the favorite of almost everyone.

Overall it was a great success. I would definitely do it again.

With 12 of us (half kids/ half adults) here we ended up eating almost half the turkey. Here is the half we didn't eat.



ps - We also did sous vide New York strip steaks last night for a birthday. Two great nights of fantastic meat.