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We were asked to bring turkey to Kate’s family Christmas. I think they expected us to turn up with one of those pressed turkey rolls, but not being the kind of person to do things by half-measures…

I’d already experimented with beer-butt chicken (you’ll find recipes online pretty easily), and I’m telling you friend, once you’ve had butt you’ll never go back. The next, seemingly logical step, was to try and prepare a turkey the same way.

First things first: the beer can. We went to Dan Murphy’s and looked around the imported beer section for over-sized beer cans. A warning: don’t use a draught can with a compressed nitrogen widget inside, like a Guinness can. You might end up with a lot of turkey all everywhere. We went with a 650ml Sapporo Draught can, which fit perfectly.

Next we got the turkey. Kate asked our local butcher for a smaller bird, because it needed to fit in the oven in an upright position. When we picked it up it was still a little icy inside, but that was fine because I was intending to brine the bird myself. The butcher, it later turned out, had a proper brining machine: probably best to ask ahead.

Always brine your turkey: it’ll be moister and more tasty and take a little less time to cook. Turkey breast meat, in particular, dries out very easily. You can brine chooks as well, but it’s not so important.

So we washed the turkey thoroughly, then put it in a large soup pot (a bucket would work) and filled the pot with about eight litres of cold water, just enough to cover the bird. Then we added 500g of salt (about two cups) and 250g of brown sugar and stirred it all around.

You should refrigerate the whole thing for at least eight hours, but it wouldn’t fit in the fridge, so I just left it in a cool place, put a bit of ice in every so often, and occasionally moved the bird around.

We left the bird to brine overnight, about fifteen hours all up. Christmas Day we got up about seven and took the bird out of the brine and washed it thoroughly, inside and out, then dried it with paper towels. I made up a baste from olive oil, lots of crushed garlic, thyme, pepper and some dark soy sauce, which was liberally applied inside and out. If we were preparing seasoning or vegetables to go with the bird we would have dealt with them then. It’s much better to cook the seasoning separate to the bird rather than inside the cavity: it’ll make the cooking time shorter, which makes it’s less likely that the bird will dry out, and breadcrumbs are a fantastic medium for the various nasty bacteria which may still be on and in the uncooked bird.

The other important thing to do is to separate the flesh of the breast from the meat: again, this helps keep the flesh moist. Just use your fingers to pull the skin loose and you’ll have a handy pocket to stuff some more seasonings into: we used garlic and some preserved lemon that Kate’s mother had given us the previous Christmas. Ordinary slices of lemon, or slices of orange, would be fine.

Time for the beer. We drank about a quarter of the can, then put a few cloves of crushed garlic in the can, then lubricated the outside with olive oil. This is the tricky part.

We had a large enamel roasting pan handy. Kate lifted up the bird and held it vertically, neck upwards, while I inserted the can inside the body cavity, right up the clacker (from the Latin cloaca, meaning sewer). Then Kate lowered the bird onto the roasting pan, where it sat looking quite comfortable and very, very comical.

While it was there I poured honey over the whole bird. This is one of the advantages of the beer butt method: the entire bird is constantly exposed. You don’t have to turn it to ensure it’s cooking consistently, and everything browns much more nicely. The honey makes a good glaze: don’t panic if it blackens a bit.

We bound the bird very loosely, just to keep the limbs in contact with the body, to keep them from drying out, and then we stuck an oven-proof thermometer into the inner thigh of the turkey. I have to say, right now, that if you’re roasting any decent-sized piece of meat without using a thermometer, you’re a fool. I don’t care how good you think you are at judging the readiness of a piece of meat, you’re never going to be as good at it as an actual measuring instrument. You’re either going to undercook it, which in the case of turkey is quite dangerous (Salmonella and E.Coli being major hazards), or you’re going to overcook it and it’s going to end up dry. Use a thermometer: when the turkey has reached 82ºC it’s done; take it out of the oven.

You can spend lots of money on a thermometer, probably. There’s digital thermometers and so on…I’m happy with the three buck Avanti thermometer I picked up at at catering store. It even has a little chart on the backing plate, showing the temperatures to which different meats should be cooked. I much prefer an in-oven thermometer–less mucking about. I use a thermometer for anything larger than a steak.

We preheated the oven to about 260ºC. Once the turkey was in the oven we turned it down to 180ºC. It took a bit under two hours to cook. We removed the can from the bird’s clacker and lay the bird down in the pan and covered it all with aluminium foil. There was a reasonable amount of juices in the pan, maybe not as much as you’d expect…a lot of the pan juices seemed to have ended up in the beer can, so we brought it along as well.

We drove out to Bayswater, to where Kate’s parents live. I nursed the beer can the entire half-hour drive. Kate’s father had recently been diagnosed as a celiac and I didn’t have any kind of gluten-free flour substitute at home, so we made the gravy there. We took the turkey out of the pan and put it on a serving dish, then heated up the pan over a hotplate. I poured in a little red wine to deglaze the pan remnants and added some gluten-free flour (always be careful not to add too much flour–that’s not where the flavour is) and started stirring, then I added some of the liquid from the beer can. I realise I skipped the step where you remove some of the excess fat, but there really didn’t seem to be that much…maybe it had been dissolved by the alcohol in the beer, or it had all ended up back in the can. I kept pouring more of the liquid from the can into the gravy and it just kept getting better: while we’d chosen the can simply for it’s size, the slightly metallic, dry taste of the Sapporo Draught made for a really fine complex-tasting gravy. I finally just emptied the whole can into the pan, which was nice, really, because I don’t like wasting food.

That’s the end of the story.