According to Alton Brown (of Serious Eats fame) you can safely brine a turkey for days. However, you'll need to adjust the brine depending on the duration. Yesterday I roasted a chicken that was brined for about 36 hours and the results were delicious.
AB Fan: Can I brine an 18-pound turkey overnight, or is this too long?
Alton Brown: No, it's not too long. Technically, you could brine a turkey for several days. The trick is in two things--brine concentration versus mass. You could either soak a bird for a long time in weak brine, or for a short time in a stronger one. You're better with weaker brine and a longer soak, so take the standard brine that we use in "Good Eats," and you could easily do that overnight. If you're afraid of it being too salty, you might cut back to 3/4 cup of salt instead of the full cup, but leave the sugar amount the same. I've gotten to where I really like to thaw my turkeys in brine, because I can make my brine, keep it in a cooler, toss in my frozen bird, and leave it for days if I want without worrying about the temperature getting too high. It will stay really cold, but, at the same time, the water will help thaw the bird. So when it's thawed, it's already brined. But that is an imprecise science, so you have to work with it. If I feel the brine will get too warm, I'll add a bit of ice. So far, that hasn't happened. It stays around 40 degrees.
Quoted from a forum post.
Well, since you asked for it, with a warning that I've neither cooked nor consumed roast hominy:
If you cover the pot with something that doesn't let steam out, it might slow or prevent the roasting. A stainless steel mesh would let the steam out while also keeping the kernels in. Alternatively, you could use some heavy-duty foil with a lot of small holes poked in it. You could probably also shake it instead of stirring, since the kernels will be contained.
As for preventing popping, I'd guess that dehydrating the kernels first would help. Certainly old, dried-out popcorn is known for failing to pop. And the physics make sense; its basically the water heats, creates intense pressure inside the pericarp, which then eventually ruptures, yielding a BLEV explosion. So if you have less water inside the pericarp, you'll have less exploding.
So I'd try dehydrating them before roasting. Maybe just leaving them out to air-dry (though that'd probably risk spoilage), or a very low oven. Or a food dehydrator.
I have no idea about slightly higher or lower temperatures. Possibly, lower temperatures would result in the water boiling slower, allowing it to leak it without exploding. Or maybe higher temperatures would have only a small portion of the water heated, and then it'd explode out, but only slightly rupturing the kernel (because it'd be a smaller explosion due to less water being involved).
Apparently weakening the hull actually improves popcorn yield, at least according to a patent Google turned up. But I'm not sure how you'd strengthen it instead.
Best Answer
The answers duck the question. No, you don't determine doneness by time, only by temperature, but when you're planning a meal, you don't want to have the potatoes done and still have to wait two hours for the turkey. So, you CAN estimate cooking times based on research/experience. I smoke my turkeys so I'm smoking at about 250F. I also spatchcock the birds to even cooking and speed cooking times. But I know I can figure ROUGHLY 15 minutes per pound for whole turkey or breast. If you cook a whole bird or a whole breast not spatchcocked estimate ROUGHLY 30 minutes per pound. If you're roasting at higher temps, cut your estimate to probably 12 minutes per pound spatchcocked, and 20-25 minutes per pound not spatchcocked.