Once up on a time, there was a split turkey breast (i.e. half a turkey breast with the bones and skin included). And there were people who were afraid of the dreaded dry turkey.
These same people, however, had not planned ahead to brine the turkey breast. And so they hatched a plan to wrap it in bacon. This was, however, one of the last things we cooked in a day of cooking tasty things, so your protagonist was the one with energy left to tackle the physics of getting the bacon to stay around the turkey without the use of butchers’ twine.
First, make sure you have thoroughly thawed a pound of bacon.
You can just assemble the on top of your roasting pan or on some surface that is easily moved and cleaned. Lay out slightly less than half of the pound of bacon to roughly the width of the breast.
Put the turkey on top of the bacon.
Decide whether or not you want to play with the seasonings. The woman who brought the meat would probably have gone with a lemon/citrus/salt/thingy seasoning schema. I was thinking along the lines of barbecue sauce only with a much more subtle flavor and no sauce, no not much like barbecue sauce at all, really. So I made a paste with:
- 1/2 tsp ground coriander
- pinch dried (and crumbled) rosemary
- pinch dried (and then crumbed) thyme
- 3 black peppercorns (ground in mortal & pestle)
- 5 white peppercorns (ground in mortal & pestle)
- 2 black cardamom seeds (not pods!) (ground in mortal & pestle)
- pinch fennel seeds (ground in mortal & pestle)
- 2/3 tsp paprika
- 1 tsp brown mustard
- 1 Tbsp orange marmalade
And I rubbed this paste over and under the skin.
Now, lay most of the rest of the bacon over the width of the top side of the turkey. As you fold the top bacon over the side, tuck up the bottom strips of bacon and secure each one with a toothpick (they didn’t burn much even though we didn’t bother with soaking them, but they were the thicker round tooled ones you get at an asian grocery, instead of the flimsy flat ones you get at a regular grocery). If you have just a little bacon left to use up, you can drape it lengthwise over the top, but that’s not necessary.
And then I sprinkled the top of the bacon with garlic salt for extra deliciousness.
Cook as you would a turkey breast.