Some thoughts for PLR USA re: Frustrated

Hi PLR :-) I, too had a fresh turkey but much smaller than yours. In fact, I have never cooked a turkey as large as yours. Mine was a 13 pound hen turkey which I stuffed. It took 3 1/2 hours at 325 degrees F. I think that I read somewhere that fresh turkeys can be held at a temperature as low as 34 degrees F. That is nearly freezing so what I did was to get mine on Tuesday and let it warm up or whatever in the refrigerator until Thursday morning. I took it out of the refrigerator, probably 2 hours before I ended up getting it in the oven. I cleaned it by sprinkling liberally with salt inside and out (my mother cleaned hers this way), then rinsing in cold tap water. Then I dried it with paper towels so it wouldn't steam - so it would brown. I then stuffed it and trussed it. With all of this time, before getting it in the oven, it was probably close to room temperature or certainly warmer than when it came out of the refrigerator. So, I am wondering if yours was too cold when you put it in the oven and not throughly thawed because even though it was fresh, it could have been very cold when you put it in the oven??!? I took mine out when the "pop-up" timer popped up. I then used an instant read thermometer to check the thigh, breast and stuffing. They were all actually about 5 degrees above the recommended temperatures for cooked turkey. I was pretty happy with the way mine turne out. I did tent it loosely with foil until what I guess was about an hour before it would be done. It was actually more like 45 minutes but it was nicely browned by that time. I hope that this helps you figure out what went wrong with yours this year PLR so that next year your turkey will turn out to be cooked more to your expectations. If you read Micha/AZ's post, you will see that things happen to all of us no matter how many years we have been making this meal. All we can do is to carry on and keep trying :-) My own daughter, who is a student in England this year had her own disappointment with her pumpkin pie when she couldn't find a pie pan to bake it in to take to her Thanksgiving get together with some other American students. She made pumpkin bread instead. May everyone's cooking go more smoothely next year!!