It's a tale of two turkeys at our holiday open house

Two years ago, as a new bride, I insisted on doing the full Thanksgiving feast.  Like most middle class  "foodies" in this country, we ordered a premium bird direct from a farm.  In our case, the celebrity chef endorsed Kelly Bronze.

The damned thing cost £70.  Yes, it was delicious.  But it got me wondering.  How much is really in the rearing, and how much is in the preparation?  Was I … a marketeer … simply paying out money for marketing?

I've been waiting for an excuse to experiment.  Our annual holiday open house was it.  We decided to lay on a Thanksgiving buffet, given how late the American holiday was this year.  Leftover turkey sandwiches with slices of cold stuffing and cranberry jelly.  Three kinds of home made bread (the unsung heroes of my table, I thought):  four-seed, sun-dried tomato and pumpernickel.  Pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie.  Turkey-shaped sugar cookies at a decorate-it-yourself bar for the kiddies.  Which worked a treat to entertain but did cause some nasty sugar-induced tantrums later in the day.  Sorry, parents.

But about that turkey.  No hand-reared, free-range, rare breeds here.  Just two frozen, plebeian birds from Sainsbury's … £17 each … subjected to gourmet preparation.

We brined both for 16 hours in a salt, herb, spice and onion bath.  Rinsed and dried, their paths diverged.  One with a French-inspired recipe, one TexMex.  We called them Pierre and Pedro.

Pierre got the oven roasting.  Propped upright on our beer-can roaster, but the can was filled with white wine rather than beer.  Next, I soaked a tea towel in a combo of melted butter and white wine and draped it over the bird.  The rest of the soaking liquid, plus 3 cups of chicken stock, went into the roasting pan.  I basted every half hour, and should have pulled the liquid-soaked tea towel off when the bird's thigh meat reached 140c.  The now-naked skin needed to crisp and brown as the bird came up its last 40 degrees.  (I hadn't anticipated how quickly our fan oven would cook the bird … less than two hours for a 4 kilo turkey … so didn't have enough time for crisping.  Lesson learned!)

Meanwhile, Pedro got the barbecue.  I slathered him with olive oil and mesquite seasoning and put him on the Weber, coals pushed to the side and a bath of beer (emptied from Pierre's can) and stock beneath him.  Similar basting every half hour.  Despite the different cooking methods, Pedro took almost exactly as long to cook as Pierre.  His skin was a luscious brown, as opposed to Pierre's pasty, teacloth-shrouded white.  Pedro, you could have carved at the table.  But Pierre tasted a bit better.

The oven/butter/beer can-with-white wine method, unsurprisingly, turned out really moist meat.  Pedro had an interesting smokey flavour, but he was also obviously dryer.  I'd do the oven method again exactly as described … except for pulling the cloth off sooner.  The barbecue still needs some experimenting, probably with fewer coals.

But the real question:  Did all that effort bring the £17 frozen bird up to the £70 gourmet model?  Not quite.  From what we remember (it was two years ago, after all), the pricey free range bird had a rich flavour the frozen boys didn't quite match.

Was that flavour difference worth £53?

Sorry, no.  I think I proved my point with Pierre and Pedro.  There's a lot of marketing in those English turkey prices.  Buy cheap and focus on your cooking technique, and you can close to a reasonable gap.