Cuisipro Roast and Serve

Pros: Fits a large turkey; non-stick; disassembles around your turkey for easy serving; good shape
Cons: Non-stick coating seems to flake off at the bottom during cooking; not meant for the dishwasher
Rating: 4 out of 5

First published 12/1/2005
Review item courtesy of Cuisipro and Jardina Communications

My husband and I love roasting turkeys. We’ve been doing it faithfully, usually at least twice a year, for as long as we’ve been together. We’ve gone through all sorts of methods of roasting, basting, and so on, eventually for the last few years settling on a brining and roasting method we learned through Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” TV show and his book, “I’m Just Here for the Food”. All sorts of effort goes into this thing; it involves a 20 qt stockpot for the brining; trying out various roasting pans; using a turkey lifter that is better than nothing but fairly inadequate to the task, and so on. All that effort is worth it, however, when you taste what is the juiciest, most flavorful turkey we or our guests have ever had. Still, we always love finding things that make the process easier; thus I was pretty fascinated by the concept of the Cuisipro Roast and Serve.

It’s a three-piece roasting rack–two sides and a long “pin” that holds them together. When assembled it has a rounded bottom and tall sides with handles. It’s supposed to handle up to a 25 lb turkey, and after using it with a 22 lb turkey I believe that claim. The tall sides and handles make it easy to remove your turkey from your roasting pan, and the wide rounded base holds the turkey nicely up out of the drippings without crushing the rib cage the way angled racks do. In fact, my only beef with the shape was that it was too wide to fit in our Maxam Steel Roaster, which is currently my favorite roasting pan.

The truly cool thing about this rack, however, isn’t the handles or the shape. It’s that nifty pin at the bottom. You see, you just put your racked turkey down on its carving platter and pull the pin. Then throw the turkey–no wait, that’s for grenades. Ahem.

Then you simply remove the sides. That’s it. They pull right away from the turkey, leaving it behind on its platter. No more trying to lever it out of your pan or off of its rack; it’s right where you want it already.

For all of its non-stick properties the rack did take some real elbow-grease to clean–particularly when trying to get turkey goo out of the crevices between bars–but that isn’t very surprising. It does make it unfortunate that the dishwasher is not recommended for this product, however. Also, there is one problem that did bother us; it seems that some of the non-stick coating at the bottom of the rack flaked off during cooking. We thought that perhaps the initial 30 minutes at 500 F was too high a temperature for the rack, but there is no maximum temperature listed on the packaging that I could find.

I’m still giving this item a rating of four because it’s just so incredibly cool an idea, and so remarkably useful, but I have to admit that I’m not thrilled with the idea of a non-stick coating that flakes, and I wish the item was dishwasher-safe. I’d love to see Cuisipro develop a version of this item made out of a better material.

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