Salty & Clever
The Roast Clock
What time the roast goes in, and — the part almost nothing prints — what temperature to take it out at. Turkey, rib roast, chicken, ham, tenderloin, a side of salmon. Free, no sign-in.
Assumptions to check
Minutes per pound and carryover are planning estimates, not a test of doneness. Keep meat refrigerated until preparation. Poultry must reach 165°F in the breast, thigh and wing; fish 145°F. Beef roasts require 145°F and at least 3 minutes of rest under USDA consumer guidance. Lower doneness choices are explicitly below that minimum. The 140°F ham option applies only to fully cooked ham packaged in a USDA-inspected plant.
Salty and Clever · the clock
What time does it go in?
A roast is the one dish on the table with no give in it. Everything else can be reheated, held, or made the day before. This cannot, and so it decides what time everybody eats.
Pick the roast, put in its weight and the moment you want it carved. It works backwards — including the part almost nothing prints, which is the temperature to take it out at rather than the temperature you want it to end up.
Pick a roast.
Working backwards
Carryover, and the oven it leaves you
The number no recipe prints
Every roasting chart on the internet tells you the temperature you want the meat to reach. Almost none of them tell you the temperature to take it out at, which is the only one you can actually act on.
Meat keeps cooking after it leaves the oven. The outside is far hotter than the middle, and that heat carries on moving inward for as long as the gradient lasts, so the internal temperature climbs on the counter. It climbs by a different amount every time, because it scales with the mass of the thing and with how hot the oven was.
A three-pound tenderloin out of a 425°F oven climbs about five degrees. A fourteen-pound turkey out of a 325°F oven climbs about seven. An eight-pound rib roast out of a 250°F oven climbs about five, the same as a tenderloin under half its weight — which is most of the argument for cooking it that low. A gentle oven makes a shallower gradient, a shallower gradient makes less carryover, and less carryover makes the finish predictable.
Carryover is useful for predicting how far a roast may continue cooking during the rest. It is not a fixed subtraction from a safety target. On this page, the thermometer reaches the applicable safety minimum before the roast leaves the oven; the carryover estimate is there to warn you how much farther the center may climb afterward.
The number this is aiming at
For poultry it is 165°F in the thickest part of the breast, which is the USDA figure, and this page is built to land on it rather than to duck under it. For this consumer-facing calculator, poultry reaches the 165°F USDA minimum before it leaves the oven. Carryover still matters because the temperature may continue rising during the rest, but this tool no longer uses predicted carryover as the step that crosses the safety minimum.
Check the thickest breast and innermost thigh and wing, avoiding bone, before removal. Each must reach 165°F. If any checked location is below the minimum, keep cooking and recheck with the thermometer; a fixed extra ten minutes is not a guarantee.
Beef and lamb use different USDA consumer guidance from poultry: whole steaks, chops and roasts are listed at 145°F with at least a 3-minute rest, while ground beef and lamb are listed at 160°F. Rare and medium-rare temperatures below 145°F are culinary preferences, not the USDA consumer minimum. Intact whole cuts also should not be treated as a universal surface-only exception when they have been mechanically tenderized, injected or otherwise made non-intact.
The rest is not a delay
Resting gets treated as dead time to be endured while the gravy is finished. It is the opposite. It is the largest block of empty, hot, uninterrupted oven you will have all day, and it arrives at exactly the moment the potatoes, the rolls and the thing that needs color have nowhere to go. Plan something into it before the day, while you still have opinions.
The exception is on this page too. A low-roasted rib roast wants the oven back at 500°F for ten minutes at the end of its rest, so that window is not free at all — and that collision is why a rib-roast dinner runs late so reliably.
| Roast | Oven | Min / lb | Reference | Rest |
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These are the same figures our paid tools run on, generalized per pound rather than fixed to one size. Somebody who owns both should never find two answers.
This is one dish
Everything above is the roast and only the roast, which is the easy half. The hard half is that it shares an oven with four other things that all want a different temperature at the same moment.
Free, next door
The Oven Traffic Calculator takes the whole menu and names the dish that is not going to make it. The Thanksgiving Clock does the days-long version for a frozen bird: buy by, thaw, salt, roast.
Also free: the salt calculator — a dry brine is a percentage of the raw weight, and that page does the arithmetic in whichever salt you own. The board calculator, the bar calculator, the scaling calculator.
Where this stops
The roast has the oven. Everything else still has to be hot at the same time.
This gets the roast right, including the rest, which is the part most people cut short. The problem it hands you is the other five dishes now queueing behind it — and a rest window is not dead time, it is released oven capacity, which is exactly the thing worth scheduling into.
The clock above stays free. Fourteen days on anything you buy, no reason required.
How this clock works, and where every number in it comes from
A roast has two clocks running and most recipes only give you one. There is time in the oven, which is a rate multiplied by a weight, and there is temperature, which is the only thing that actually determines whether it is done. The second one overrules the first every time, and the first is what lets you tell people when to arrive.
The rate formula, written out
Minutes in the oven equals weight in pounds multiplied by a rate that belongs to that cut at that temperature. Change the temperature and the rate changes, which is the part that a single printed number hides.
Turkey at 325 degrees: 13.9 minutes a pound. The same bird spatchcocked at 425: 5.7 minutes a pound, which is not a typo, because opening the bird out roughly halves the distance heat has to travel and doubles the exposed surface. A rib roast at 250: 22.5. A beef tenderloin at 425: 11.7. A chicken at 425: 16.3. A ham at 325: 15.0. Salmon at 275: 10.0.
The temperatures, which are the part that matters
Pull poultry at 165 degrees in the thickest part of the breast. Target is 165 breast and 175 thigh, and 165 is the USDA figure for poultry.
Check the thickest breast and innermost thigh and wing, avoiding bone, before removal. Each must reach 165°F. If any checked location is below the minimum, keep cooking and recheck with the thermometer; a fixed extra ten minutes is not a guarantee.
Whole cuts of beef and lamb follow a different rule, because contamination on an intact muscle is a surface problem rather than a through-and-through one, which is why 130 degrees is a common preference for a rib roast, below the USDA 145, and is never one for a turkey. Ground meat is 160 degrees, ground poultry 165.
Two worked examples
A fourteen-pound turkey at 325. 14 multiplied by 13.9 is 195 minutes, so three hours fifteen. Pull at 165, rest, and expect it to climb a few degrees more.
The same fourteen pounds, spatchcocked at 425. 14 multiplied by 5.7 is 80 minutes. An hour and twenty against three and a quarter, for the same bird, because the geometry changed rather than the meat.
Carryover is not a constant either, and the direction is worth knowing. A tenderloin out of a 425 oven climbs about five degrees. A fourteen-pound turkey out of a 325 oven climbs about seven. An eight-pound rib roast out of a 250 oven climbs about five, the same as a tenderloin under half its weight, which is most of the argument for cooking it that low. A gentle oven makes a shallower temperature gradient through the meat, a shallower gradient makes less carryover, and less carryover makes the pull temperature something you can actually aim at.
Assumptions, and when this breaks
Rates assume an unstuffed bird at refrigerator temperature going into a preheated, accurate oven, uncovered, on a rack. Every one of those is routinely untrue in a domestic kitchen.
Stuffing a bird changes the calculation entirely and in the wrong direction, because the stuffing has to reach 165 too and it is in the coldest part of the bird. The rate here does not model it.
Oven accuracy is the largest error in the whole thing, larger than anything the arithmetic contributes, and most domestic ovens are off by more than people expect. A cheap thermometer settles it in half an hour.
It breaks for convection, which cooks faster than the stated rates, for a covered or foiled roast, which is closer to braising than roasting, and for anything brought to room temperature first, which shortens the time and is not a bad idea. In all of those cases the rate is a planning estimate and the probe is the answer.
And the probe itself has to go in the right place, which is its own problem. Every rate and temperature above is listed on Every Number This Site Runs On, and the seasoning step that should happen days before any of this is the salt calculator.
Where this goes next
You have the number. Now use it.
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