How Do Pop-Up Turkey Timers Work?

You can buy all kinds of fancy meat thermometers, but many turkeys are packaged with a simple pop-up timer that tells you when the bird is done. Learn how they work (and why Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving in the first place) in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://home.howstuffworks.com/pop-up-timer.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum here. American Thanksgiving is the kind of family
feast that everyone has slightly different traditions around, from what
desserts are must have, as to whether football is really
the main event, to exactly what kind of potatoes are

(00:23):
being served Boil them, mash them, stick them in the stew.
But one thing that's near ubiquitous on Americans Thanksgiving tables
is turkey. As of twenty twenty three, eighty nine point
seven percent of people surveyed said that turkey was part
of their main course plans for the day. The tradition

(00:44):
is a slightly strange one. The turkeys are native to
North and Central America, but whether or not they were
part of the first Thanksgiving feast among pilgrim colonists and
Native Americans in the sixteen hundreds is a complicated question
because there are several candidate dates and locations and peoples
who might have been involved in the first Thanksgiving, and

(01:04):
there's no really solid documentation of any of these feasts.
We basically got the idea that turkey is necessary from
a woman in eighteen hundreds by the name of Sarah
Josepha Hale, who thought the myth of the First Thanksgiving
was a really nice idea and that it might bring
people together surrounding the contentious times leading up to the

(01:24):
Civil War. A lot of our concepts of Thanksgiving come
from her and the recipes of her time, including yes,
roasted turkey, but also stuffing or dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy,
cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. As many of us know
from personal experience, roasting a whole bird that's as large

(01:46):
and dense as a turkey is a difficult prospect because
most ovens heat food from the outside inn so by
the time the inside is cooked to a safe temperature
a witch for turkey is right around one hundred and
sixty five degrees fahrenheit or seventy three celsius, the outside
of the bird might be a bit dry and overdone.

(02:06):
There are lots of ways to combat this. Dry brine
is my personal favorite, and that's a separate episode. Go
on and google it right now if you need to.
But we can also roast a little easier, knowing that
we have access to several temperature reading technologies to keep
track of the internal temperature of the bird as it cooks,
so that you don't let it go longer than necessary.

(02:28):
There are simple and expensive meat thermometers that you can
leave red in the oven and check periodically, and fancier
probe style thermometers with digital readouts on the outside of
the oven so you don't have to keep opening it,
and even ones that connect to apps so that your
phone will give you an alert when the turkey hits temperature.
But a lot of turkeys come packaged with an incredibly simple,

(02:50):
inexpensive device that gives you a visible queue when the
bird is done, the pop up timer. If you've never
seen one, they usually look like a skinny ballpoint pen
with a point at one end and a red teb
visible at the top of the other end. If it's
not pre inserted, which it often is, You stick the
turkey with the pointy end, placing the device deep into

(03:13):
the innermost part of the turkey's thigh and wing or
the thickest part of the breast, and then set your
oven temperature. Then all you have to do is watch
for that red indicator stick to pop up out of
the case and you know the inside of the bird
is cooked. But how does it know okay? Pop up

(03:33):
timers consist of four main parts. The outer case with
the point the red stick that pops out of it,
a coiled spring putting tension on the stick, and a
small bit of soft metal similar to solder that's basically
gluing the stick down into the point of that outer
case despite the push of the spring. That soft metal

(03:55):
is solid at room temperature and colder, but it will
melt and become liquid at right about one hundred and
sixty five degrees fahrenheit or seventy three celsius. When it melts,
it releases the red indicator stick, and the spring pops
the stick out of the case. This ingeniously simple and

(04:15):
single minded thermometer first popped up in the nineteen fifties
as the result of a serious brainstorm session conducted by
the California Turkey Producer's Advisory Board. Basically, they'd been receiving
complaints from consumers saying that even though they had cooked
their turkey according to a reliable recipe, it still came
out overcooked and dry. The advisory Board was worried that

(04:39):
their good product was getting a bad name. The way
I've heard the story told, they were sitting around their
office at their wits end when one of the board
members looked up and noticed the fire sprinklers in the ceiling,
which are triggered when a material inside heats up from
a fire and reaches a particular temperature. Inspiration hit and

(05:00):
now pop up timers are just about as ubiquitous as turkeys.
One little known fact is that these timers are reusable.
If you dip the tip in hot water, it will
remelt the metal and you can push the pop up
piece back into place. Then let it cool and the
piece will be stuck back in its original position and

(05:21):
ready to use again. Today's episode is based on the
article how pop up turkey timers work on HowStuffWorks dot com,
written by Marshall Brain. Brain Stuff is production of by
Heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(05:43):
you listen to your favorite shows.