How Top Chef Michael Voltaggio Does Thanksgiving

Take a moment and picture Thanksgiving: a steaming turkey carcass carried out to to a table larded with mushy green bean casseroles and drunken family members.

Got it? Good.

Now immediately put that Norman Rockwell image out of your mind, because there are dozens of ways to fuck with turkey, and that shouldn't be one of them.

For starters, don't roast a whole bird. You'll dry it right down to its dead bones, or else risk giving your entire family salmonella poisoning by cooking it under-done. And don't deep-fry it. You're just asking to set your house and face on fire.

Instead, take a page from the playbook of Michael Voltaggio—Top Chef alum and owner of LA's Ink. The chef has long employed an out-of-the-box approach to his cuisine, like the cream of dehydrated broccoli soup he made in his season's finale before taking home the crown.

So we were clearly drunk when we recently asked Voltaggio to make us something simple and Thanksgiving-themed. Instead, he suggested a dish of sous vide-cooked turkey thighs that get pressed and crisped before being laid atop a bowl of brandy- and cream-spiked chestnut soup, sprinkled with finely ground fried bacon bits.

Just like Grandma used to make.

In truth, however, it's not that complicated—and this dish will be done long before your conventional bird's even done thawing.

To get started, Voltaggio preheats a water bath at a precise 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, he slices the thighs off of the whole turkey (you could also buy them separately), removes the bones, seasons them with salt and pepper, and vacuum seals them in a bag with a little duck fat.

Those legs have to hang in the water bath for a good two and a half hours. That gives you plenty of time to prepare the rest of the dish.

Acquiring finely ground bacon might be a challenge if you don't have access to a reliable butcher, but a home meat grinder will work just fine. (It's not a stretch to assume that people who own immersion circulators and people who own home meat grinders meet in the middle of the Venn diagram of kitchen gadget geekery.)

Into the pan the ground meat goes, set over a medium flame to transform it into crispy bacon bits.

Once those are ready, Voltaggio removes them and drains them on some paper towels. Chestnuts take their place in the pan, getting a quick sauté in some of the leftover bacon fat.

After the chestnuts, a classic mirepoix (celery, carrots, and onion) gets its turn over the heat.

Most of the chestnuts go back into the pan, along with some brandy to deglaze all of those caramelized brown bits on the bottom. That's just pure savory flavor right there.

Voltaggio adds milk, cream, and chicken stock to the whole shebang, then simmers it for about 90 minutes.

See? You can catch up on episodes of Teen Mom in the meanwhile. And if you time everything right, the turkey thighs will be ready at the same time as the soup.

As soon as the soup reaches its optimal tastiness, Voltaggio purees it in batches in a blender until it's silky smooth. (Running it all through a fine-mesh sieve couldn't hurt.)

And once those thighs have done their time, out of the bag they come. While they're perfectly cooked at this point, they're just a little gummy-looking on the outside—but a nice sear in a cast-iron skillet crisps up the skin.

After the thighs have rested, Voltaggio slices them up into neat rectangles—what might be loosely defined as a pavé in chef-speak—and places them delicately in a shallow bowl, along with some reserved cooked chestnuts. A few drops of olive oil go into the bowl before he adds the soup.

Last, but certainly not least, are those bacon bits that get strewn across the top, adding a meaty crunch to a hearty but picture-perfect dish.

And there you have it. If you're still dead-set on overcooking a whole bird for your loved ones on Thanksgiving, you go right ahead—after all, the freedom to serve dried-out turkey is what makes America great.

But if you want to give that turkey the afterlife it deserves, a bowl of bacon-studded soup is a mighty fine chariot to heaven.