Cook your Christmas turkey upside down to stop it drying out, researchers claim

It turns out you can avoid turkey with the texture of sawdust

(Getty Images)

For many families, turkey is as integral a part of Christmas day as presents and passing out from eating too much at 5pm.

87% of people maintain the bird is a festive must, despite many of us considering it an unexciting and all too often dry meat.

But it turns out we may have just been cooking our turkeys wrong - Channel 4’s Food Unwrapped has discovered that the best way to ensure your turkey comes out of the oven juicy and delicious is in fact to roast it upside down.

Over the years, home cooks and professional chefs have tried all sorts of tips and tricks in an attempt to stop turkey from drying out and coming out the texture of sawdust - the difficulty arises in that turkey breast cooks much quicker than the legs, often causing the former to dry out.

Food Unwrapped presenter Matt Tebbutt teamed up with physician and molecular gastronomy professor Peter Barham to trial three non-conventional cooking methods in a bid to find out which one would render the tastiest turkey.

In the episode, which will be broadcast at 8pm on Channel 4 this evening, Tebbutt and Barham tried creating a layer of stuffing in between the turkey skin and breast to keep in the moisture.

They also came up with the idea of strapping ice packs to the turkey breast in an attempt to keep it cooler and thus make it cook slower.

The third method was to cook the turkey upside down.

Each turkey was taste-tested by a panel and the winner was deemed to be the upside down turkey.

There are a couple of reasons why cooking a turkey upside down makes it tastier - with the legs at the top, they benefit from the hottest part of the oven so cook more quickly.

What’s more, the juices run down the bird meaning the breast underneath is kept moist.

The turkey with the layer of stuffing came second and the ice pack-covered one took third and final place, perhaps unsurprisingly.