Jennie-O turkey in a bag is a snap

Jennie-O Turkey Store Oven Ready Turkey. Home Style, and Butter, Garlic and Herb. $10 to $14 per 5-pound to 7-pound half turkey, or $22 to $26 per 11-pound to 13-pound whole turkey.

Bonnie: I was pleasantly surprised by this new Jennie-O turkey product.

Its preparation is foolproof (unless you forget to remove it from the oven!), the resulting turkey is moist and amazingly not salty, and the cleanup — well, there's hardly any. In fact, Jennie-O's new turkey is so easy to prepare, even cooking-challenged Carolyn should be able to produce a properly cooked Thanksgiving turkey.

To do that, you just remove the turkey from the freezer and the outer wrapping, place it in a baking pan in its see-through plastic bag, cut slits in the bag to vent it, and place it in a preheated oven while the turkey is still frozen solid. That's it.

The pop-up timer will let you know when it's cooked (about 4 hours for a 12-pound turkey). The bird bakes up brown, with about 350 milligrams of sodium per 4-ounce portion, similar to competitor Butterball. The amount of fat depends on which part of the turkey you choose (white meat contains less fat than dark) and how much of the drippings you use. The best part is that thanks to the bag, there's no messy pan to scrub.

To make gravy, just cut a hole in the bag and let the drippings fall into a pan or bowl, preferably through a strainer, then whisk in some flour while heating the liquid in a pan until thickened.

Carolyn: Butterball may have been the first to make frozen turkey easier to prepare with its self-basting turkey (in 1954), easy-to-carry net bag (in 1964), and the giblet and neck bag (in 1971). But Jennie-O is taking the idea to a whole new level of convenience with this turkey that cooks in its own oven-roaster bag without thawing.

Preparing Jennie-O's whole or half turkey for the oven takes an amazing 3 minutes. Just open the outer bag and throw the bagged turkey into a pan.

Despite what Bonnie just said, I did need to clean my roasting pan of some grease that dripped out of the bag during cooking, but that cleaning job was a carefree turkey strut.

Jennie-O's innovation truly turns roast turkey from a once- or twice-a-year holiday ordeal into a weeknight dinner poultry alternative that's almost as easy as picking up a supermarket rotisserie chicken. Oven Ready even comes in a rotisserie-chicken-like flavor, the quite mild and inoffensive Butter, Garlic and Herb.

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