This Thanksgiving, I was in charge of the dinner. Part of this was because I wanted to try my hand at turducken.
So here they are, in descending order of size, turkey duck and chicken. As you can see, the chicken is already out of it’s wrapper.
After deboning the chicken and the duck, I got the turkey out. For the record, the duck was a P.I.T.A. Normally, I can literally peel the meat off the carcass, but in the case of the duck, it was an uphill fight the entire way through.
Here, I cut the wings off and sliced the skin along the spine. Typically, bird wings can be made into little “lollipops,” seen on the right. I could only salvage 1 of the duck wings (did I already say ducks were a pain in the ass?) Note the size difference between the three birds.
I also took out the wishbone, which was quite flexible. My dad and I played the break-the-wishbone-for-a-wish game, and we couldn’t break it until we threw it in the oven for a couple minutes. I lost, anyway.
Here are all three birds piled on top of each other. The only bones are at the tips of the turkey legs (where the drumsticks end). They are left there because the skin likes to shrink during baking, and that looks ugly.
All wrapped up. We weighed it, and it was about 13 lbs of meat.
Here’s a bird-eye’s view of the uncooked turducken.
Here’s a bunch of potatoes…can you spot imposter cheese cube? (jk, there isn’t one.)
And here it is, baked and untied.
Say hello to leftovers for the next week.
Mmmm. Not quite as juicy as I wanted it to be. I’m convinced that it’s possible to make it juicy without doing all those silly techniques we all hear about. Next time I’ll cook it at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for 5x (min) as much as it weighs in pounds. This time, I did 6, which was too much. Maybe even 4…who knows?
We made a turducken soup with all those bones.
Let’s hope we never get visited by an advanced species of turkey on Thanksgiving day. That would be a very awkward first encounter.