Turbo Roaster Review

Turbo Roaster Box image from Walmart.com

My husband gifted me a Turbo Roaster for Christmas about two years ago. I like to try something out thoroughly before I write up a review for it. Honestly, I love this thing! I've used it about 5 times so far. The Turbo Roaster has made my holidays so much more enjoyable and cooking so much more efficient!

I cook a turkey for both Thanksgiving and Christmas most years. Typically this entails getting up at the crack of dawn to put the turkey in the oven while everyone is asleep. Finding a way to get it in the oven without waking up my kids on Christmas morning has always been a major hurdle.

No longer! I haven't gotten around to timing the cooking EXACTLY due to various holiday distractions... but I do know that the cooking time is cut in HALF! I no longer wake up at the crack of dawn to prepare my turkey. This year I was up by 8 and the 17lb turkey was done in about two hours! Normally I am finished with all my other cooking and waiting on my turkey to finish so we can eat dinner. This year- my turkey sat cooling while I rushed around to finish the rest of my cooking!

Tony Chachere's Injectable Turkey Marinade
 image from Walmart.com

Most of the time the turkey seasonings you add to the outside only help flavor the top little bit of the turkey meat. I've tried and tried and tried again and no matter how I prepped it my turkey always ended up dry on the inside. Using the Turbo Roaster, along with Tony Chachere's Injectable Turkey Marinade made my turkey come out very juicy and flavorful. Even the cold leftovers were finger licking good!

What is the Turbo Roaster?

Its a glass jar attached to a curvy metal tube with a canning lid and a plastic gasket. You fill the jar with water, attach the lid/tube set up and stick the end of it in the turkey before cooking. The oven heats up the water and causes steam to rise through the tube and cook the turkey from the inside while the oven cooks the turkey from the outside. Thereby cutting cooking time in half.

It does work with a stuffed turkey... just not as well.

Tips on using the Turbo Roaster

-I use a turkey pan rack to elevate my bird so that the jar can sit mostly flat in the oven- this helps.
-Leave the turkey unstuffed for best results (though I have done it both ways)
-Put glass jar directly on stove rack- it does not need a pan under it.

-*DO NOT FILL (even with HOT WATER) until the jar has cooled!

Ok... so for the bad news...

The jar on my turbo roaster smashed this Christmas... my own stupid fault- I forgot to let the jar cool before refilling it with hot water -.-

See... I did know better... the instructions are really rather clear on this point. However, I was battling a sinus infection and apparently my brain was all mush from it. (It even took me three separate tries to figure out how many chairs and plates we needed at the table- that's how bad my head felt.)

And now the jar for my turbo roaster sits on my counter in two pieces. *facepalm!*

So... now for some Real World Speculating

The jar mouth for the turbo roaster is the same size as a regular canning jar. So, I'm wondering if I could just switch out the broken jar with a regular wide mouthed canning jar instead. To know that I needed to look up online as to whether the canning jars could even be put in the oven or not.

That's when I stumbled on this Pie in a Jar recipe:

Single serving pie in a jar recipe

Seriously... even if you don't plan on cooking your pies in a jar, you just HAVE to check out these pictures! Tiny pies! The cuteness!

My favorite is when the blogger slides the baked pie right out of the jar and onto the plate- UBER CUTENESS!

Anyhow... Apparently you CAN put mason jars in the oven.

So next year (or the next time I cook a whole bird) I will swap out the broken jar for an ordinary canning jar and be sure to come back and report the results to you!

If it doesn't work, oh well... I will certainly buy another Turbo Roaster!