Happy Thanksgiving! I was curious about heat transfer while cooking our turkey this year, so I logged the thigh temperature every five minutes. We cooked a 14lb turkey at 350⁰ F in a cooking bag, and it took almost exactly three hours (which includes a 15 minute resting period at the end). Note that I pulled the turkey out of the oven when it reached 180⁰ F, and it continued to warm to 189⁰ F.

The Thermal Imaging Blog has a nice post about cooking turkey, and here’s a post by someone else who tried this last year. If you’re really interested, I found a paper titled Modeling Heat Transfer During Oven Roasting of Unstuffed Turkeys that uses a 2D finite element model to calculate temperatures at different points in the turkey. Cool!

Update on 11/25/2011: I’ve had a few questions about the dotted line in my graph. It’s an exponential trendline that I used to predict when the turkey would reach 180⁰ F.