Turkey with bacon

Has anyone tried this? One of my coworkers told me that she covers her turkey with overlapping strips of baking. She then cooks the turkey covered for 2 hours, then uncovered until done. The bacon strips keep the turkey moist (and bacon-y, yum). She uses the crumbled bacon in a salad or to top mashed potatoes. It sounded great to me (though my family is on a big-time health kick and probably won't go for it this year).

I'm sure the bacon does a nice job of basting the turkey, but I'm not sure I would be a fan of the porky taste as part of my holiday turkey enjoyment.

This sounds quite interesting, since I like to make bacon-wrapped turkey cutlets and "tenderloin." I think that I'd try to figure out a way to present the bacon WITH the turkey:

Bacon Wrapped and Stuffed Turkey Breast

Cheers,
Wade

Turkey with bacon recipes

Bacon-roasted turkey with sweet-onion gravy

Roasted turkey with bacon-cider gravy

Pilgrim's Thanksgiving turkey

Roast wild turkey

Traditional roast turkey

On a somewhat similar theme, when I was a child, my father used to have an upright smoker similar to the WSM with stackable racks. Every Thanksgiving he smoked a turkey - his twist on the bacon basting was to load the rack above the turkey with country ribs. As the ribs cooked, the drippings would drip onto the turkey below and baste it with pork fat. It was delicious and since the ribs only took about half the time as the turkey, we usually spent the afternoon snacking on the ribs while waiting for dinner. Of course, that would probably explain why now as an adult I bleed butter.

My wife's father laid strips of bacon across his turkey, somewhat in the manner of a combover. Though there was the year that the dog ate them off the turkey while he was getting ready to put it in the oven.

I knew I had come across this somewhere. The 2005 update says that this year they used 2 pounds of bacon.

We are also pointed to the Flickr Bacon Group.

Although it sounds unconventional, this dish may represent an application of a typical treatment of game birds. Generally, wild birds are a bit lean and may cook up dry if fat is not added during roasting. In my native Land of 10,000 Lakes, the men are hunters. They bag dozens of quail during the fall. Transforming these into Christmas dinner involves, first and foremost, careful removal of the buckshot. The next step is to wrap the quail in bacon (pancetta also works well) and roast at a low temperature (300 degreees), finishing briefly in a hot oven.
Ideally, the quail are served with Minnesota wild rice and shotgun sauce (currant jelly, butter, and Worchestershire sauce). A wild goose or pheasant may also benefit from the bacon-wrapping treatment.

I've had dove meat prepared in something of a similar way. A friend of mind used to go dove hunting with his family every Thanksgiving and would return with massive amounts of meat. He would prepare it by affixing the breast meat to a whole jalepeno pepper with a toothpick, then wrapping the bundle with bacon. He would throw scores of these on the grill at parties. The combination is delicious and the bacon complements the lean flavor of the game nicely.