The best Thanksgiving turkey I ever had was not brined but was salted and then roasted at an incredibly low temperature (~250) for many, many hours. The result was delicious, but it ties up an entire oven for most of a day, which is simply not practical for many families.
"Portable roaster ovens" can fit an OK sized bird and are just a bit more expensive than a good crock pot. Completely worth it to have your oven available on a busy holiday. That way you can set the turkey for any temp you want and vary your actual oven with the sets of things that cook quicker.
The only thing: they are pretty hot and could be a safety concern if not at counter height.
Generally speaking, if you are working on poultry, lower cooking temperatures work better. Why?
Primary constraint:
- Meat center at least safe-temperature.
Secondary constraint:
- The meat should be at the lowest temperature possible.
Within these constraints, the hotter the environment is, the more the outside of the meat is going to exceed the safe temperature, and thus the tougher it is going to be.
I don't think a microwave could effectively heat the center. The skin depth on a turkey is probably only a couple inches so a microwave could only heat the exterior.
Microwave ovens don't heat from the outside in, like a conventional oven. Microwaves are passed through the food, and the changing magnetic field causes water and fat molecules to move through a process called dielectric heating. The rate that food heats up within a microwave is completely dependent on what it's made of, not where it is.
You are mostly correct, but I'd like to agree that the rate food heats up does depend where it is. I know this intuitively, when the middle of my burrito is cold when the rest is hot. Microwave ovens do not cook food evenly, and it's not just due to wave nodes. See:
