Turkey: It’s often the most feared dish of Thanksgiving.
That’s not because of its ferocious nature or its lacking in delicious flavors, but because it far too often is the dish that turns out disastrously.
The odds of success are stacked against college students, who may be cooking their first turkey.
Shannon Carver, a Lane Community College student, has cooked turkeys several times for Thanksgiving.
She said the most challenging aspect of cooking the bird is taking out the insides.
“You have to reach in and grab the sack of the nasty pieces and pull it out, and then you also have to pull out all the other nasty organs,” Shannon said.
Knowing how long to thaw the turkey is a challenge in itself. A large frozen turkey can take up to five days to thaw in a refrigerator and that is before you get into the debate about how long to cook the bird.
One year, Carver didn’t allow enough time for her 20-pound turkey to cook. The turkey took hours longer than expected, and Carver and her guests weren’t able to eat it until 11 p.m.
“I’m scared to cook a big turkey for a lot of people because I screwed up that one time,” Carver said.
University graduate student Olivia Koo fears the turkey because she has never cooked one before and has no idea how long it would need to stay in the oven.
“It’s a relatively huge bird,” Koo said.
Koo recalled one experience in Korea when her American friend tried to cook a large turkey in a Korean oven, which is much smaller than an oven in the U.S.
“It turned out a disaster,” Koo said.
Her friend shoved the turkey in, and the result was a burnt surface layer and an undercooked inner bird.
She had to repetitively cut off the bird’s outer layer and keep cooking the inside part of the turkey.
“It was hilarious,” Koo said. “No one would recognize it as turkey we were cooking.”
When cooking a turkey for the first time, here are a few things to keep in mind.
1. It’s much easier and less time consuming to cook a smaller turkey than a huge 20-pounder.
2. Plan for much more time than is actually needed to cook the turkey.
3. If you need to defrost the turkey relatively quickly, put it in a sink filled with cold water for a couple hours.
4. Take precautions against burning the bird. Carver recommends putting tin foil over the whole turkey for the first three hours. The foil can be removed for the last hour in the oven.
5. Forget the stuffing. Cooking stuffing inside the turkey can significantly add to cooking time.
6. Be careful when handling the bird.  
Though it’s true that many things could go wrong when cooking the bird, nothing could be worse than not making the turkey at all.
When it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, it’s time to get in the kitchen and conquer the college student’s turkeyphobia.
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