'That's Why God Invented Gravy'

There is a very good chance it will be bland.

And you will enjoy it anyway.

The most common compliment bestowed on the person who has sweated over the turkey since before sunrise is this:

"It's so moist!"

The second most popular:

"I love your gravy!"

And the third?

"The stuffing is scrumptious!"

But the meat itself?

"A lot of people want bland, soft, wet meat. That's what they grew up on," said Christopher Kimball, publisher and editor of Cook's Illustrated and host of "America's Test Kitchen" on PBS.

Everyone who cooks turkey -- and one survey found that 97 percent of Americans will today -- seems to have something up his or her sleeve to battle blandness.

"The secret is stuffing," said Camille Klinker of Gambrills, who was picking up a matched pair of organic birds at the Whole Foods in Annapolis yesterday.

"And cooking slowly so there's moisture still left," added her husband, Richard. "If it's too dry, you let it go too long."

Terry Phillips-Seitz of Crownsville is a turkey connoisseur who confesses to trying a Caribbean turkey recipe that he found in The Washington Post a few years ago. Now he's convinced that a deep-fried bird is the best bet.

"It's juicier," he said. "Now, two days later, it doesn't taste a bit different, but when you serve it on Thanksgiving, everybody loves it."

The man standing at Phillips-Seitz's elbow as he perused the Whole Foods turkeys yesterday probably knew more about the birds, and what makes them bland, than anybody in town.

"It's bland if it was frozen six months ago and given the industrial treatment," said Mike Cleary, mid-Atlantic research and development chef for Whole Foods. By coincidence, Cleary was in the store shopping for Thanksgiving dinner.

"A turkey that never walks on land and lives in a building with 10,000 other turkeys and never sees the light of day and always eats the cheapest feed, it's going to be bland," Cleary said. "If it walks on land and mimics the diet it would eat in the wild and more or less has a life before you slaughter it, it's going to have flavor."

It is commonly held that a fresh turkey is going to be better than a frozen bird, but it's equally common to find that people who share that turkey tip have no idea why. Cleary can explain.

"When a turkey is slow-frozen, and most of them are, tiny little icicles form in the meat," he said. "And as you thaw it, the icicles have expanded the meat to form pathways for moisture to escape. That doesn't kill the bird, but if you brine it, that adds some aromatics back into the meat."

You don't need to brine a fresh bird, Cleary said. And if you've got a formerly frozen bird that wasn't brined in the oven, not to worry, Kimball said. You will succeed as a turkey chef if you follow his simple formula.

"Buy a frozen Butterball and roast it at 325 [degrees], just like it says on the package," Kimball said. "Butterballs are injected with brine. If you want a bland moist bird, the Butterball is for you.

"Anyway, that's why God invented gravy."

Kimball says slathering the bird in salt pork will give it flavor because salt pork actually has flavor, while turkey, the breast in particular, has little more appeal than, say, warm cardboard.

Although Kimball does not applaud bland turkey, and says his will not be bland, he invokes the iconic French chef to argue that a bland meat is not necessarily a bad meat.

"A classic French chef would say that some foods are there for the texture, as a base for the sauce or the gravy," he said.

He points to beef tenderloin for illustration.

"The real grain-fed stuff has no flavor," he said. "But most people don't like grass-fed beef because it's chewy and it's very tangy. Americans don't want chewy. They want tender and moist."

And that will be the standard of success at many a Thanksgiving table today: "Moist."

Cyber Monday may not be the digital shopping extravaganza it was once purported to be. But even if consumers are spreading out their online sales, cybersecurity firm Webroot software believes the Monday after Thanksgiving will still be a special day: The company issued a warning last week that Dec. 1 is still the most likely 24 hours of the year to have your banking information stolen by cyber fraudsters.

That's been a common refrain from security researchers in years' past. And Webroot's recommendations--including updating security software and buying from trusted sites--makes sense. But just how worried should online shoppers be? (Back to main story: "Holiday E-Deals Come Early.")

Much of the hype around Cyber Monday's cyber threats is overblown, says Patrik Runald, a security researcher with software company F-Secure. To steal your banking codes while you use a site like Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) or eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ), hackers would need to place hidden "keylogger" software on your computer. And F-Secure, he says, has never tracked a spike in that kind of malicious software either on Cyber Monday or even in the weeks leading up to it. This implies that hackers aren't using the opportunity to infect PCs for future fraud, either. "Cyber Monday is just another day for us," he says.

There are still reasons to shop with care. Runald warns of Cyber Monday-themed "phishing" e-mails that impersonate messages from legitimate sites and send consumers to lookalike pages designed to steal passwords, he says. Security researchers have also warned that search engines could be populated with fake pages that impersonate retailers.

But navigating directly to a known site will be as safe on Monday as it would be on any other day. In fact, while F-Secure tracks about 30,000 new samples of malicious software daily, Runald says he rarely sees noticeable bursts of new identity theft software.

"We don't really have doomsdays anymore,” he says. "We get so many new samples all the time that it's hard to see a spike on any particular day.” (Back to main story: "Holiday E-Deals Come Early.")