WHAT’S the secret of great-tasting Christmas turkey? Let it get naked. Whipping the foil off a cooking turkey to allow the skin to brown induces a previously unrecognised process that concentrates the meat flavours at the surface.
Chefs have always known that browning the bird with direct heat creates flavour. But more important than the heat, says food scientist Bronek Wedzicha of the University of Leeds, is a capillary effect which rapidly sucks the precursors of flavour and browning chemicals to the turkey surface.
Wedzicha discovered the effect in a “model” consisting of a fibrous slab of hot cellulose containing…
