It is Christmas already! I can’t believe that it has been more than half a year since I started this blog. Time really flies when you are having fun! And if there is a recipe that I have particularly enjoyed making is this turkey ballotine stuffed with apples and celeriac! It may be because of this time of the year, or maybe because I can’t wait for my family to try it out on such a special occasion.
In my house, there is a tradition of preparing a whole roasted turkey for Christmas lunch, always accompanied by mlinci, a very typical Croatian side dish made of a type of crispy dough that is submerged in boiling water to soften it and then mixed with the fat coming off the roasted turkey. But as you may have already learned, I have a tendency to tweak things around, and so I gave this family tradition a twist that I hope will convince even the more traditional members.
There is a couple of technical steps that will require patience and a little bit of extra attention and care, but altogether I think it is a recipe that will also allow you to save some time in the kitchen so that you can spend it where it really matters, with your loved ones.
What ingredients will we need to make this turkey ballotine recipe?
For the stuffing, you will need the following:
Turkey breast
Onion
Celeriac
Apple
Hazelnut
Nutmeg
Thyme
Olive oil
For the caramelised onion sauce:
Onion
Garlic
Orange juice
White wine
Meat cooking juices
For the side dish:
Sweet potatoes
How to make a turkey ballotine?
Turkey breast is a very affordable and available piece of meat that you will find in every butcher store. It is usually sold boneless and skinless, but you can also find it or preorder it on the crown (still attached to the breast bone) and with the skin on.
They can widely vary in weight but what you will need for this recipe is 900 g of skinless, deboned turkey breast. When buying it, ask your butcher to butterfly it for you to a thickness of around 2-2,5 cm all throughout.
Why are we butterflying the turkey breast? You can butterfly any cut of meat or fish, for that matter. Depending on the produce and the cooking method involved, there are slight differences in how you do it, but the underlying principle is the same: to make it thinner and more uniform so that it cooks faster and more evenly.
Tempering the meat
One of the essential steps when working with different kinds of meat is tempering it. That means that you want to leave the meat to come to room temperature before the cooking process begins.
Why is this important? Allowing it to reach the same temperature all throughout will result in a more even cooking. If that is not the case, the outside could easily overcook, while the inside would still be slightly under.
So, first things first, take the meat out of your fridge and leave it covered at room temperature. It will take half an hour to an hour to reach that point, which will give you plenty of time to prepare the stuffing and the rest of the elements.
How to roast hazelnuts?
In the next step, you will need roasted hazelnuts, and it is really easy to make them at home. In case you already bought them roasted, just skip this step.
You will need to set your oven temperature to 180 °C. Place hazelnuts on a baking tray lined with a piece of baking paper and roast them in the oven for 10 minutes. After you take them out of the oven, wrap them in a kitchen cloth for about a minute. The created steam will help release the skins, which will come off easily by rubbing the nuts with the cloth.
Preparing the apple-celeriac stuffing
As for the stuffing, begin by cutting onions, apples and celeriac into even-sized dice (about 5 mm). Cook onion together with celeriac. After about 5 minutes, add the apple, a pinch of nutmeg and the thyme. Cover the pan to speed up the cooking process and to avoid adding more oil. Cook until they are sweet and tender, around 8-10 minutes.
Blend the roasted hazelnuts until they reach a powder-like texture and transfer them into a bowl. Then, blend half of the apple-celeriac mix until it resembles a coarse puree. The blended part will help the stuffing bind together. Combine the ground, roasted hazelnuts with the apple-celeriac mix and reserve it for later.
Tenderising the meat
Cover a big cutting board with a layer of cling film. Place the butterflied turkey breast onto the board and cover it with another layer of cling film. Having both these pieces of cling film will make it much easier to handle the meat, and it will also prevent bacteria from spreading when we are hammering it.
Once your breast is wrapped in cling film, bang the whole surface with a mallet a couple of times. What this will do is break the muscle fibres and the connective tissue, making the meat more tender, easier to roll and to digest.
Stuffing the turkey breast
Before stuffing the turkey breast, season the meat on both sides. Wait a few minutes to flip it to the other side to let the salt dissolve and incorporate well.
Here is where the double layer of cling film comes in really handy since you can flip it easily without getting messy.
When the meat is nicely seasoned, remove the top layer of cling film and spread the stuffing in an even, thin layer, leaving the edges clean, about 3-4 cm.
Rolling the ballotine
Lay your rectangular piece of turkey breast so that one of the shorter sides is facing you. Start rolling the meat with the help of the cling film underneath. Make sure you tuck in the meat tightly while at the same time removing the cling film back towards you. Repeat the process of rolling, tucking and removing the cling film until you reach the end of the roll.
At this point, secure the ballotine by wrapping it with that same part of the cling film you have been removing, like you would wrap a bottle of wine.
Grab the ballotine by both ends where there is excess cling film and press them inside your fists. Your ballotine should now resemble a rolling pin. While still holding it by both ends, roll it a dozen times in the same direction so as to tighten both edges.
This step will give your ballotine a much nicer shape, and it will make the trussing much easier.
Trussing the ballotine
To keep the ballotine in this shape while cooking, we will have to wrap it tightly with the help of kitchen twine, which is also called trusting. So, slide the kitchen twine under your ballotine and make the first knot, leaving enough leftover to close it in the last step. A simple double knot is good enough here (image 1). To continue, make a loop around your hand with the twine (images 2 & 3), hold it by the juncture so it does not open up (image 4), slide it underneath the ballotine (image 5) and tighten it once it is in position (step 6). Repeat the process as many times as it takes you to get to the end of the roll.
Once you are done with the upper side (image 7), flip the ballotine upside down and slide the twine under the first separation (image 8), go over the second and so on, alternating under and over until all of them are done (image 9). To finish, secure the ballotine by making another double knot with the leftover twine from the first step (image 1).
How to cook the turkey ballotine?
For this recipe, I decided to cook the turkey ballotine wrapped in aluminium foil. By doing so, the meat keeps more of its juices inside and cooks faster than with the classic roasting method. Also, it is a no-fuss technique where you don’t have to baste the meat throughout the cooking process.
Place your ballotine on a big piece of aluminium foil. Close the foil to prevent any steam from coming out of the pouch. Place it in the oven, heated to 180 °C with the fan on, and set the timer for 40 minutes. After those 40 minutes, you can check the inside temperature of your meat using a thermometer. It is done when it measures around 62 °C.
Resting the meat
This step is often overlooked when we cook meat at home, and by skipping it, you are actually losing a lot of its flavour and juiciness. When you rest the meat, you allow the muscle fibres to relax and the juices to spread more evenly throughout it so that when you slice it, they don’t spill all over the plate.
Leave the turkey ballotine to rest undisturbed for 10-15 minutes after taking it out of the oven. This will allow the ballotine to finish cooking inside the foil and reach the desired temperature of 73 °C.
Reverse-searing the meat
What exactly does reverse searing mean? For a long time, I didn’t know it either, but after reading one of the many great Serious Eats articles, I got interested and decided that I’m going to be trying it out with a lot of different meat types and cuts, starting with turkey breast.
Essentially what it means is that instead of first searing the meat and then cooking it in the oven, the process goes the other way around; meat is cooked in the oven and then finished off in the pan to get a crisp crust, keeping the inside moist. Basically, it inverts the steps in traditional meat cooking, resulting in two significant advantages.
The first advantage is more even cooking. By searing the meat before, we are raising the temperature of the outer layers, and as the meat continues to cook in the oven (temperature rising from the outside to the inside), we are risking the outside overcooking.
The other way around, by first cooking it in the oven, we allow a more even temperature rise throughout all its layers.
The other benefit of this process is a better browning result. To get the golden brown colour on the outside, we need to start the Maillard reaction, which happens between proteins and sugars. For that to happen as quickly as possible, we need the smallest amount of moisture on the surface of the meat.
What is easier to dry: a raw piece of meat or a cooked one? Here lays the answer: with less moisture, a cooked piece of meat will brown more easily than the raw one, and the faster the process is, the less heat will penetrate the inside layers. This is why we need to pat dry the ballotine before we start the searing.
How to reverse sear the ballotine? After your meat has rested for 10-15 minutes, take it out of the foil, making sure you keep all the juices it has released during cooking. Place it on a cutting board and remove the twine surrounding it. After that, pat dry it with kitchen paper, making sure the whole surface is dry (easier browning, remember?). Heat up a pan with oil to medium-high. Once it comes to temperature, start searing the meat until you get a nice, golden brown colour all around.
How to make caramelised onion sauce?
This caramelised onion sauce is not the traditional kind of sauce you would expect next to your typical roasted turkey, but it is delicious, and it goes fantastically well with the tender turkey meat and the sweet hints coming from the stuffing. Plus, it is effortless to make it, and it will not take you more than 15 minutes to have it ready to serve.
To make the sauce, we’re gonna be using the same pan where you’ve previously seared the meat. This is because, if you have done your searing right, there are gonna be very flavourful bits stuck to the bottom of that pan that will enhance the flavour of our sauce.
Start by sweating down the sliced onion. After about a minute, salt it lightly and cover it as it starts to release juices. After about 5 minutes, remove the lid and continue cooking the onion on medium heat. As the onion cooks, it softens and starts releasing naturally present sugars. Those sugars will start caramelising in contact with high heat. When you start noticing the caramelisation on the bottom of the pan, add a little bit of water to deglaze it. Once the water has evaporated, repeat the process another 1-2 times until the onion is fully cooked.
Add garlic and cook it for another 3 minutes on low heat. Add the white wine and cook until the liquid has reduced by half and all the alcohol has evaporated. Finish by adding the juices released when cooking together with the orange juice and cook for another few minutes until about ⅓ of the liquid evaporates. Blend the sauce and pour it into a serving bowl.
How to cook sweet potato “en papillote”?
If you’ve already tried my beetroot and goat cheese salad, cooking “en papillote” may sound familiar to you. An ingredient is wrapped in aluminium foil in a way that its shape resembles a pouch or a pillow and then cooked in the oven. It needs a minimal amount of oil while the ingredient, in this case, the sweet potato, stays incredibly moist and full of flavour.
This is how it goes:
Wash the sweet potato. In case it has very thick skin, as was the case with mine, peel it off and cut it into even-sized wedges, place them on a long piece of aluminium foil, salt them lightly, coat them with a little bit of olive oil and add a tbsp of water to speed up the steaming process.
Fold the aluminium foil and close the ends. Bake them in the oven for 20 minutes. After you take them out, leave them in the foil to cool down for another 10-15 minutes, which will help keep all their juices inside.
