Turducken

As I mentioned, I got this bird from a local farm in the area. Check out Bob’s Turkey Farm if you live in MA, because this turkey was amazing.

The first step is to cut out the backbone.

On TV, they make cutting out the backbone look REALLY EASY. Perhaps cause they mostly do it with chickens and not turkeys? Anyway, this was not as easy, and as you can see there was much rejoicing when I finally got it.

There are no magic words that I can write to teach you how to butcher a chicken or turkey, the only way to learn is to do it. I can however provide some tips. These thigh bones were actually easier than expected and were a big confidence booster! Just follow the bone with the knife slowly cutting away the flesh. When you make it down to the leg, find the joint, break the joint by bending the leg back, and you should be able to slide your knife right through it. Again, learn from experience.

For the ribs, I just followed them with my knife, making sure to keep as much breast meat intact as possible. When I got to the breastbone, I slid the knife under being VERY careful not to break through the turkey. This was the most important part, because if you split the breasts, you lose the awesome presentation.

All done! Wings and legs intact. Tossed this guy into the brine overnight.

I used Alton Brown’s brine, cause really, who doesn’t?

I am going to break here to talk for a moment about the duck and chicken. All of the turducken recipes I saw said to leave the skins on the chicken and duck. To me, that is just plain crazyness! We all know crispy bird skin is delicious, but soggy fatty bird skin is no fun. Plus if I am going out of my way to get rid of the bones, I want to be able to have nice slices of turducken where everything is edible. Later on when I am doing the dishes I don’t want to see gross chunks of discarded duck skin on everyones plate. This all being said, look up at that butchered duck. If I then skinned it, I would be left with 4 separate pieces of meat! Also if I were to stuff something inside that, the duck would be totally spread out with chunks in some areas and nothing in others. So how do we solve this turdundrum?

The answer, and the way I will be making turducken in the future (THERE WILL BE A NEXT TIME) is to just buy boneless skinless pieces of chicken and duck for the inside of the turkey! This solves like 100 of the issues I had with the whole turducken concept, and would have saved me a lot of time if I had realized it earlier. I ended up just butchering my chicken and duck into thinly sliced boneless skinless breasts, thighs, and legs so I could do it my way. I shoved these into a brine as well.

The next day. Time to make a stuffing.

Dried the cornbread in the oven, and cooked the rest of the ingredients in a skillet with some butter for a few minutes.

Ready to rock. Make sure the stuffing is cooled!

Here you can see what I am talking about with the thinly sliced layer of chicken. Normally duck would go here, but our duck was smaller than our chicken (which happens to be one of turduckens 100 problems that is solved by buying the meat instead of the whole bird).

More stuffing.

Then the duck layer.

Will it close? Yes, it was actually easy to close because I made sure not to over stuff it. Over stuffing is a problem I often have with almost any stuffed anything that I cook, but this was a really important meal so I played it cautious.

My roommate Sal helped hold this together while I sewed it shut with some twine.

Time to flip it! Be verrrrry careful.

I threw it in a roasting pan, tied up the legs, and put it in the oven at 500, immediately turning it down to 350.

Beauty. I expected this to take close to 6 hours, but it was done in 3 and a half to 4. I’m guessing the lack of bones caused my discrepancy.

It rested about an hour (mainly cause we weren’t ready to eat yet). This was the moment of truth. I wish we got a picture of the 20 people standing over my shoulder right now!

At this point, I was laughing to myself because I could see the amazingness, but no one else could yet.

This came out just as I had hoped, if not better. I let it register about 5 degrees higher than I normally would have, just to be on the safe side with all the stuffing and different meats, but it was only ever so slightly drier than I would have liked. But the flavor was amazing with every bite and there was tons of turducken gravy to slop over everything.

Cutting it is never pretty unless you have one with some weird meat glue in it.

I love how everyone is eating before they sat down in this picture.

Thats a lot of people!

I stole a drumstick since I cooked the thing. Even though there was no duck or chicken in this piece, it still had the turducken essence.

Almost forgot the canned cranberry!