For the past few years I have been cooking turkey using a low temperature method, using the Splendid Table recipe. In short: after a 45 minute blast at 450 F to kill the bacteria on the skin and in the chest cavity you turn it down to ~170 F and cook it for ~1 hr/lb.
Those instructions are for a conventional oven. This year I have a convection oven, and I would like to use the convection feature. There are plenty of recipes for the normal high temp convection oven turkey cook out there, but I haven't really seen anything talking about using a convection oven for a low temp cook.
Has anyone done this? Does the convection feature shorten the cook time? How many hrs / lb in a convection oven? The obvious answer is: "cook it until the meat reaches 165 F". Yes, that will be done, but I first wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions for time so I can roughly schedule the cook.
Best Answer
I've never cooked anything that low and slow in a convection oven.
But a cursory lookabout led me to this Sysco chart,
https://impacweb.cbord.com/reportsets/~common/Cooking%20Times%20For%20Convection%20Oven.pdf
There is a section for whole turkey 16 to 20lbs, 275-300F, for 4-5 hours.
But more importantly a note at the bottom states,
"For menu items not listed, use recommended time and temperature for conventional oven but reduce the temperature setting by 25-50 degrees F and reduce the total bake/roast time by approximately 10 to 15 percent."
So if I were you using that recipe, I'd do 420F for 40 minutes, then 140F for 45m/lb, adjusting the time and temp by intermittent temperature checks.
Looking at a couple more sites and conversions those numbers from Sysco appear to fall in line. That's if the oven goes that low I'd imagine, 140F is pretty low.