Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. American Thanksgiving is the kind of family feast that everyone has slightly different traditions around, from what desserts are must have, as to whether football is really the main event, to exactly what kind of potatoes are being served Boil them, mash them, stick them in the stew. But one thing that's near ubiquitous on Americans Thanksgiving tables
is turkey. As of twenty twenty three, eighty nine point seven percent of people surveyed said that turkey was part of their main course plans for the day. The tradition
is a slightly strange one. The turkeys are native to North and Central America, but whether or not they were part of the first Thanksgiving feast among pilgrim colonists and Native Americans in the sixteen hundreds is a complicated question because there are several candidate dates and locations and peoples who might have been involved in the first Thanksgiving, and there's no really solid documentation of any of these feasts.
We basically got the idea that turkey is necessary from a woman in eighteen hundreds by the name of Sarah Josepha Hale, who thought the myth of the First Thanksgiving was a really nice idea and that it might bring people together surrounding the contentious times leading up to the Civil War. A lot of our concepts of Thanksgiving come from her and the recipes of her time, including yes, roasted turkey, but also stuffing or dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy,
cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. As many of us know from personal experience, roasting a whole bird that's as large and dense as a turkey is a difficult prospect because most ovens heat food from the outside inn so by the time the inside is cooked to a safe temperature a witch for turkey is right around one hundred and sixty five degrees fahrenheit or seventy three celsius, the outside of the bird might be a bit dry and overdone. There are lots of ways to combat this. Dry brine
is my personal favorite, and that's a separate episode. Go on and google it right now if you need to. But we can also roast a little easier, knowing that we have access to several temperature reading technologies to keep track of the internal temperature of the bird as it cooks, so that you don't let it go longer than necessary.
There are simple and expensive meat thermometers that you can leave red in the oven and check periodically, and fancier probe style thermometers with digital readouts on the outside of the oven so you don't have to keep opening it, and even ones that connect to apps so that your phone will give you an alert when the turkey hits temperature. But a lot of turkeys come packaged with an incredibly simple, inexpensive device that gives you a visible queue when the
bird is done, the pop up timer. If you've never seen one, they usually look like a skinny ballpoint pen with a point at one end and a red teb visible at the top of the other end. If it's not pre inserted, which it often is, You stick the turkey with the pointy end, placing the device deep into the innermost part of the turkey's thigh and wing or the thickest part of the breast, and then set your
oven temperature. Then all you have to do is watch for that red indicator stick to pop up out of the case and you know the inside of the bird is cooked. But how does it know okay? Pop up timers consist of four main parts. The outer case with the point the red stick that pops out of it, a coiled spring putting tension on the stick, and a small bit of soft metal similar to solder that's basically gluing the stick down into the point of that outer
case despite the push of the spring. That soft metal is solid at room temperature and colder, but it will melt and become liquid at right about one hundred and sixty five degrees fahrenheit or seventy three celsius. When it melts, it releases the red indicator stick, and the spring pops the stick out of the case. This ingeniously simple and single minded thermometer first popped up in the nineteen fifties as the result of a serious brainstorm session conducted by
the California Turkey Producer's Advisory Board. Basically, they'd been receiving complaints from consumers saying that even though they had cooked their turkey according to a reliable recipe, it still came out overcooked and dry. The advisory Board was worried that
their good product was getting a bad name. The way I've heard the story told, they were sitting around their office at their wits end when one of the board members looked up and noticed the fire sprinklers in the ceiling, which are triggered when a material inside heats up from a fire and reaches a particular temperature. Inspiration hit and now pop up timers are just about as ubiquitous as turkeys. One little known fact is that these timers are reusable.
If you dip the tip in hot water, it will remelt the metal and you can push the pop up piece back into place. Then let it cool and the piece will be stuck back in its original position and ready to use again. Today's episode is based on the article how pop up turkey timers work on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Marshall Brain. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.