When we hosted my wife’s parents for our very first Thanksgiving together, we proudly asked her mom to check out the first turkey we’d ever roasted.  She graciously said it was lovely—but why was it upside down?  (!!!) Alrighty then… So we didn’t know which way was up.

Turns out roasting the bird breast-side down is fantastic for keeping it juicy, and our mistake turned into a family holiday tradition.  However, keeping it breast-side down the entire time meant the skin on the top of the turkey got soggy.  Plus, using a traditional roasting rack marks up the breast, so our turkeys all looked like they’d been run into a chain link fence.  Not very appealing.

Over the years, I went in search of suspension racks on the internet but couldn’t find any that stabilized the bird and allowed for ease of turning and serving.  So, putting my engineering degree to creative use, I invented one.  I tried the prototype out on our family’s Thanksgiving turkey that year, and it looked as if it had been photoshopped.  Seriously. And that’s how the Ultimate Turkey Rack came about.

The key to the Ultimate Turkey Rack is its simplicity.  The bird goes from oven to serving platter using only the skewer:  slide it through the bird, tie the legs and set on the rack breast-side down.  When you’re ready to brown the breast, use the incorporated handle to flip the bird over.  Soon as it’s done, pull the whole rack out of the oven.  The skewer makes it easy to transfer the bird from the rack to your serving platter, and you’re good to go!

The very first year we put up the website, the Ultimate Turkey Rack got picked up by the Chicago-based entertainment website KitchenChat .  The following year we got reviewed in Cook’s Illustrated magazine, and last year we got great reviews from the television cooking show America’s Test Kitchen.  Who knows where we’ll go from here!