Over the last few years, I’ve asked students and friends to send me their turkey cooking data. In particular, I ask for the time and temperature of the cooking, along with the weight of the turkey. I also add a place for extra notes, like how the turkey was prepared, if it was cooked in something besides an oven (e.g., a deep fryer or smoker), if it was stuff, covered, or otherwise modified.
This is imperfect, because everyone has all kinds of variations and conditions and measurement imperfections. But here’s a collection of data, mostly from 2020, but also from a few years past:
I’ll explain some details:
Thanks to all of you who contributed data and/or asked others to submit data. I’ll continue to do this and potentially update this page as results pour in each year.
I often host a lab where we study the Drinking Bird in its native habitat. But, in case you don’t have a chance to be in my lab and you don’t have your own drinking bird, here’s some video you can analyze. The bird goes through two of its cycles in this clip, and I repeat those cycles at high speed so you can see things in a different way.
A drinking bird is very simple, which makes its actions that much more interesting, I think. What do you notice? What do you wonder about? Can you trace out cause-and-effect rules in the bird and its motion? Can you create a model for how it’s working? In particular, how can something just move (and there are a few different motions in this bird) when it isn’t hooked up to anything else?
In case you need more footage of the drinking bird for longer amounts of time, I have about an hour and 15 minutes of video, both in real time and at 10x speed: