How To Reheat Turkey So It Never Dries It Out (2024)

FAQs

How To Reheat Turkey So It Never Dries It Out? ›

“The best way to reheat turkey is in the oven,” says chef Jose Garces. “Slice the turkey, place it in a shallow pan, add some chicken or turkey stock, and cover tightly with foil. Heat at 300 or 325 degrees until the turkey reaches 165 degrees. The stock should allow the turkey to steam without drying out.”

Simply heat your oven to 300 degrees, put the carved meat in a baking dish, and add some chicken broth or turkey stock to the pan. The meat will absorb some of the liquid as it heats, making it nice and juicy. Cover the pan tightly with foil and place it in the oven until the meat is hot, 20 to 30 minutes.

Add moisture

Splash the turkey with a bit of leftover broth or stock and cover the baking dish with aluminum foil. Bake for 20 minutes. The aluminum foil will prevent moisture from evaporating too quickly and the low temperature will help prevent the turkey from losing flavor.

If your bird is ready within two hours before serving, wait to carve it. Keeping it whole will prevent the meat from drying out. However, if you've cooked your turkey well in advance (like the day before), it's best to carve it and store it in the refrigerator until the day of the feast.

We also recommend covering turkey as it reheats. Use an aluminum foil pouch in the oven or a microwave-safe dish in the microwave. If the juices stay in the turkey instead of evaporating off into your kitchen, the leftovers will taste so much better!

If your oven isn't stuffed full of other dishes, or if you are one of the lucky folks who have a spare oven, then you can hold the turkey there at 200°F, although you should cover the bird to make sure it doesn't dry out. The most common way to keep a turkey warm is to cover it with foil.

Brine your turkey for the best juicy bird.

In recent years, brining has become more popular and can be done with either a wet or dry brine. A wet brine involves immersing the turkey in a salt-water solution for 12-24 hours. Dry-brining is where salt is rubbed over the turkey skin for 24-48 hours before cooking.

Turkey is a lean meat, and Healthline reports that turkey has slightly less fat in its dark meat than chicken. Another reason why turkey may be dry is due to its poor breast-to-leg ratio. By the time one gets the leg meat to cook to temperature so it's safe for consumption, the breast meat often has dried out.

To achieve a perfectly golden, juicy turkey, let the bird spend time both covered and uncovered in the oven. We recommend covering your bird for most of the cooking time to prevent it from drying out; then, during the last 30 minutes or so of cooking, remove the cover so the skin crisps in the hot oven.

Why does my turkey say do not reheat? ›

The manufacturer doesn't know if you are going to cool it down in the fridge, or the freezer or just leave it in the sun on your windowsill. So now it has been left to go cold again but possibly bacteria has developed because you didn't cool it down quickly enough.

Keep your turkey moist by cooking it evenly. Let the turkey sit out of the refrigerator for about an hour before roasting. If you put a cold turkey into the oven it will take longer to cook. The heat works its way from the outside in, and the longer oven time will mean that the exterior has more time to dry out.