How we source and check

Where the numbers come from

The turkey tables most sites print come from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). We wanted to check FSIS's own pages automatically. On October 21, 2026 fsis.usda.gov, usda.gov and foodsafety.gov answered our checker, which identifies itself by name, with HTTP 403 before it could even read their robots.txt files. We don't disguise the checker or work around a block, so those sites are not among our checked sources.

Instead we use university extension services, which republish the USDA FSIS guidance and say so. Two of our sources are articles written by FSIS staff and hosted by UW–Madison Extension; one is a UT Extension handout developed by FSIS. Every quote names its page, and the table below shows what each page says about where its guidance comes from.

Our checker only fetches from usda.gov, foodsafety.gov, fda.gov, cdc.gov and university (.edu) addresses, over https. It never reads social media, retailers, recipe sites or Wikipedia. During research, Michigan State's extension site answered with a bot check and the University of Idaho with HTTP 403, so they were dropped too; Texas A&M AgriLife is not on a .edu address and was not used.

How the quotes are checked

• The checker identifies itself as BasteAndBakeSourceCheck and links to this page. It obeys each site's robots.txt and won't fetch a page if robots.txt can't be read.
• It waits at least 3 seconds between requests to the same site. A 401, 403 or 429 answer is final: no retry, no other identity, no cached copy.
• It re-finds every quote, ignoring only case, spacing and the style of quote marks and dashes. For PDFs it reads the file twice, once by layout and once in reading order, so a table row or a sentence in a two-column handout can be matched.
• If any page can't be read or any quote can't be found, the run fails, the last good result is kept, and the "checked" date at the top of each page does not move. The site can't be rebuilt until a check passes, and a check older than 14 days blocks a rebuild.

A quote that still appears on a page doesn't prove the page is current. Where a page prints a revision date we show it; we never infer one from a copyright footer.

When sources disagree

• Text written by USDA FSIS ranks first, then extension pages that name USDA FSIS pages as their source, then other extension pages.
• Outdated guidance is shown only as outdated. Some older pages still say 180°F in the thigh; current guidance from every other source we cite is 165°F.[1][2][3]
• Where a published table prints a row differently, we use the version most sources print and list the others on the roasting page. Those differences don't change when a turkey is done; the thermometer does.
• Where storage limits differ, we show both and never print a longer limit than the USDA-authored text gives.

See where published versions differ and the leftover limits.

Our calculations

Some numbers on the site are ours, worked out from a published rule, and are labeled "our calculation" wherever they appear:

• Thanksgiving start-thawing dates: the date minus the long end of the refrigerator row.
• Refrigerator days above 24 pounds, from the rate of about 24 hours per 4 to 5 pounds.
• Cold-water time for an exact weight, at 30 minutes per pound.
• Cooking from frozen: the table time plus 50 percent, as a planning estimate. The sources say at least 50 percent longer.
• Oven-in and thermometer-check times from a serving time.

The calculator does not invent roasting times. For a whole turkey under 8 or over 24 pounds, or a breast outside 4 to 8 pounds, it says our sources don't give a time. It offers frozen mode only for an unstuffed whole turkey, because that is what the cited frozen procedures describe.

How the site is made

An AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) drafted these pages from the quoted sources, and a second AI model reviewed the plan and the pages. A program checks every quote. Until a person has reviewed the claims, calculations and step-by-step procedures, the footer of every page says so.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. We check every correction against the source before changing anything. Add your email only if you want a reply.

For a food-safety question about your own turkey, the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline is 1-888-MPHotline (1-888-674-6854), staffed on Thanksgiving Day from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time.[4][5]