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Food may be seasonal, but holiday memories are forever. That might be part of the reason Sam Sifton and his NYT Cooking team start planning their Thanksgiving coverage months ahead of the big day: Those turkey recipes aren’t going to test themselves.
While many are grilling hot dogs and burgers under the summer sun, Sam is, well, also grilling, but in his case it’s a turkey (more on this later).
We asked him how he conjures up autumn, and shifts his palate to fall flavors, when the temperature is in the 90s.
Q. It’s hot out. I plan to avoid turning on my oven for the rest of the summer. Yet you and your team are roasting turkeys. Why?
Thanksgiving is coming, and fast. We’ve got stories to investigate, recipes to develop, tables to set before people start coming to us to ask about what to cook this year and how.
You may love the recipe for a Cuban-style roast turkey that we published in 2014. I’m very partial to an unconventionally-roasted turkey breast I reported on in 2010. But no one wants to simply read about those again in Fall 2019.
So we need to go find the next great thing, to accompany the last great thing and the one before that. Can you cook a turkey in an air fryer? We’ll see!
Is there a comparison to the planning of any other desk — Sports, for instance?
Thanksgiving is the Super Bowl for the Food desk. It’s a lot of coverage for a lot of people and if it’s going to be exciting we have to start thinking creatively now, so we can experiment our way to joy.
What are the staples of your coverage year to year, besides the turkey?
We know we want features: stories about how people celebrate the holiday and why. Also news. We keep a close eye on pumpkin futures, the state of the pecan crop, poultry health, the effect of spring rains on the fall harvest of cranberries. Finally, we want recipes from great cooks, professional and otherwise — a lot of them. Those take time to find and test as well.
Because food is seasonal, how far in advance can recipe developers work?
I don’t want to reveal too many details about the recipes, but I can tell you this: We’ve got people out there roasting turkeys right now. Alison Roman, for instance. Melissa Clark. Me! (I’m working on a recipe for barbecued turkey, which is great because it allows me to cook outside under a tree instead of in a hot summer kitchen.)
How do you organize your coverage? Do you start with a theme, or does a theme emerge from the individual features and recipes that bubble up?
We generally arrange them around a few big ideas. One year I commissioned recipes from every state in the union. Another year we put together a series of essays about Thanksgiving and the immigrant experience. Once, Melissa Clark and I tried to cook the whole meal in a day in an oven set to 400 degrees. Another time we simply handed Melissa the feast and told her to make it exactly as she would at home, for her own family.
This year, I think one of the big stories we’re going to do will center on the experiences of Americans who have spent Thanksgivings in conflict zones over the course of the past 18 years, during the global war on terror. We’re calling out for stories and photographs from readers right now, and we’ll build a bunch of reporting off what we learn. It should be revealing and, I hope, moving as well.
O.K., you’ve got the tent. Now what goes inside it? What comes first? What’s last?
Sometimes we start with food: What to cook and why? That led us one year to a kind of recipe color wheel of brown foods and green foods and orange foods. Sometimes we start with story: Who’s cooking and why? Julia Moskin found a great one last year about a family of Syrian refugees in New Jersey cooking their first Thanksgiving. Sometimes it’s process that gets us going: Where’s this cooking happening and when? That led to calls for make-ahead cooking and a menu planner that we built over the course of a summer. Usually it’s a combination of all three.
The last thing we’ll do is figure out leftovers, and write the headlines.
What about the visuals? Do you stage Thanksgiving at the office in the summertime? Do you have a studio? Do you cover someone’s apartment in faux fall foliage? Or does that part happen much later?
We’ll photograph later. Make videos, too. The food will look better if we shoot it closer to deadline. The ingredients will be in season. There’s something weird about brussels sprouts in July.
Isn’t it also weird to be developing stories and recipes for foods like gravy and stuffing at a time of year when all you and your readers want is corn salad and strawberry sorbet?
This is the life we have chosen. We know no other way to live.
Since you’re juggling summer stories and Thanksgiving stories, though, does your summer self ever collide with your planning-turkey-day self in unexpected or unintended ways? Do the ingredients or props ever get mixed up in your mind or on the serving platter?
We’re pretty good at compartmentalizing the seasons in the name of the readers we serve. Everything’s strawberries and asparagus at the farmers’ market, but no one here is suggesting asparagus stuffing or strawberry gastrique for the gravy.
With beach parties and rosé cocktail happy hours in full swing, how do you and the team get in the turkey-basting, spiced cider-making mood?
We set the AC to high, light the burning-oak-leaf candle and get to work!
Out of the kitchen now, Kasia. Scoot!
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