The turkey whisperer

Celebrated chef Dan Barber talks about raising and cooking turkeys, tweaking Thanksgiving traditions and supporting sustainable farming without being puritanical.

By Adam Roberts

Read more: Turkey, Thanksgiving, Eating, Food and Travel

Nov. 21, 2007 | Most people don't frolic with turkeys before eating them, but that's precisely what I did this summer before dining at Blue Hill Stone Barns, Dan Barber's idyllic farm-cum-restaurant in upstate New York. The meal, which was among the best I've ever had, was both playful and refined. Each course came with a lively presentation about the featured ingredients, how they were grown, when they were picked and what made them special. We left the meal delirious, drunk and, most impressive, edified: Blue Hill Stone Barns is more than a restaurant -- to quote its Web site, it's "a platform, an exhibit, a classroom, a conservatory, a laboratory, and a garden."

What better person to ask, then, about a holiday that celebrates the harvest than a man who has devoted his life to harvesting the best food possible and cooking it to perfection, and who raises his own turkeys. Dan Barber is as philosophical about food as he is talented, he's renowned for his public speaking (his "Carrots and Almonds" speech from the Taste 3 conference, which you can watch here -- is legendary), and he's a darling of both critics and foodies alike.

I spoke to chef Barber by phone on his drive from the city (where he runs the original Blue Hill in Manhattan) to the farm. His speech pattern is both anxious and confident, a bit like Woody Allen's: lots of stops and starts and "ums" amid brilliant insights and witty anecdotes. Unlike Woody Allen, however, Barber straddles both city and country: His ability to cook and thrive in both environments makes him a perfect Thanksgiving guide.

What's your Thanksgiving family tradition?

We spend Thanksgiving at Blue Hill Farms [the family farm for which Blue Hill is named] in the Berkshires. I'm a traditionalist when it comes to Thanksgiving. In some ways, Blue Hill Farms, the aesthetic, is ridiculously Thanksgiving-ish in its origins. It looks like Plymouth Rock -- and I've always kind of liked the traditional Thanksgiving foods: the sweet potatoes and the turkey and the traditional sort of stuffing.

Do you have any flourishes that you do?

I cook a traditional turkey -- I roast it, get it all glazed and beautiful. But I cook another turkey sous vide, and that's the turkey I serve: the one that's sous vide. I have a show turkey -- like that beautiful shellacked turkey everyone "oohs" and "ahs" over that I have sitting in the kitchen all day. Nobody knows about it, but I heat up the other turkey in water and slice that and pretend to break down the glazed turkey.

People don't notice the glaze isn't on it?

Not really. Actually, the whole thing started when the gas ran out one Thanksgiving a while ago and I couldn't cook the turkey in a gas stove. But I had sous vide from the restaurant, so I did the turkey in the dishwasher. I put it on the wash cycle and it came up to temperature; it heated the turkey up beautifully.

I was actually going to ask if there'd been any Thanksgiving disasters and that sounds like it might've been a big one.

It was a disaster that turned into a culinary masterpiece. To say it was the best Thanksgiving ever would be a little precious and predictable, but it was the best turkey I ever served.

Cue cheesy music.

[Laughs]

Are there any traditional dishes you refuse to cook because they're beneath your standards?

What's a traditional one -- like jellied beets from a can?

Or marshmallows on sweet potatoes.

Well that's a '70s tradition. I don't consider that part of our heritage.

But a lot of people do it.

A lot of people are misguided. That's a 1975 sort of invention -- or '65.

That's coming from someone who cooked a turkey in a dishwasher. Do you have any tips or tricks for managing Thanksgiving without going crazy?

Being organized doesn't hurt. And to stop the obsession with everything having to be really hot when it goes out. Have a menu where everything can be at room temperature because it's going to be anyway. I don't mind my turkey being room temperature and I don't mind the stuffing not being piping hot; that tends to relax me. One of the things that makes everyone so jittery is when you feel like people aren't sitting down right on time or aren't eating right away. But if you can get over the fact they're not going to eat piping-hot food you can relax a bit more. And a couple of glasses of Champagne doesn't hurt.

What kind of turkeys do you raise at Blue Hill Stone Barns?

We raise two different varieties, which is interesting in and of itself. It relates to this idea of: How do you keep the tradition but bring it into a modern context without being Wylie Dufresne? And I can relate that metaphorically to the two types of turkeys we raise: One is a Bourbon Red, which is a very old breed that's no longer raised because 99 percent of turkeys in this country are raised in confinement, and they're not a confinement animal; it's an older delicate breed with terrific flavor that takes a long time to go from chick weight to market weight.

And the other bird we raise is the Broad-Breasted White; literally 99.99 percent of the turkeys that are raised for Thanksgiving are of this variety -- the latest, most advanced technological breed from the industry. The industry is concerned with making money, and to make money they have created, through many, many years of breeding, an animal that can go from chick to market weight in a third the time of a Bourbon Red. It can take on a lot of Marilyn Monroe-ish characteristics: big breasts. And it tastes pretty good and it has a great efficient grain-to-weight conversion. We take the breeding technological advances -- the efficiency that these animals convert to weight gain -- and we put them out to pasture. We do feed them grain because they're omnivores, but they get to pasture and run around over the land at Stone Barns; they're fed a buffet diet of different grasses and bugs, so they tend to grow very healthy.

What's the taste like? Which do you like better?

The Bourbon Red is probably a more preferable bird in its flavor. And if you're not obsessed with breast, it's got beautifully proportioned light and dark meat and really complex and deep flavor. But I'm kind of a Broad-Breasted White guy -- not that I'm obsessed with the breast, but I'm obsessed with this idea that one can take in the talk about moving toward sustainable foods and stuff. The purists look at the Broad-Breasted White as the Darth Vader, as the absolute epitome of industrialization. I look at it as taking the technological advances of breeding, which have been pretty profound since World War II: feeding the bird the right kinds of things, keeping it in open pasture, letting it have a very varied diet and in that way letting it create great flavor.

Next page: "I try to put this movement toward more sustainable foods in the context of hedonism and delight"