What's it been? A Year? Less? More?
Close enough. I am a shitty blogger. But, I am trying to ramp back up exploratory cooking, and will be trying to keep putting recipes up here for you to read and try.
To make up for my extremely long hiatus, I deliver a whopper for you today: TURDUCKEN. Oh fuck yes.
Enjoy.
09 February 2011
Episode 4: Turducken, Motherfucker.
First, I need to shout out to the late great blacktable.com, whose article "The Road to Turducken" was both the inspiration for my recipe-writing style, and also the primary basis for how I make Turducken. Please, do yourself a favor and check out their two part series on the monstrosity that is Turducken, and understand that any obvious similarities between my recipe explication and their guide is due to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun and I am basically a plagiarist.
So, we begin as we always begin, with a simple question: What is Turducken? Dear reader, I am hurt. Hurt that you never write, call or talk to me when we go drinking, because if you had, then I guarantee you I would at some point have explained exactly what the hell a Turducken is, probably right before I suggested stuffing a bunch of ungulates into each other and slow cooking them in a backyard fire pit, Luau-style.
Let's get all OED on this shit:
Turducken, n. tur-duk-en -- A Cajun fowl dish, named for the three elements which comprise it. Tur, the root case form of "Turkey", Duck, from the latin, "Duck", and en, the suffix-root of the modern commercial bird product "Chicken".
So, there you have it. A Turducken is a Turkey, a Duck, and a Chicken. Apparently invented by some enterprising Cajun chef who got tired of coming up with new ways to cook nutria. But you can't just cook a turkey, duck and chicken, put them on a really big serving platter and call it a day. No, you must put the chicken inside the duck. And that chicken-stuffed duck must be inserted into the turkey. Well, ok. It doesn't actually work that way. There's no meat insertion per se. It's more meat stacking, followed by creative use of butcher's twine and sweet, sweet fat which creates the illusion of prior insertion. There's also stuffing. Delicious stuffing.
Before we go any further, I should make something clear: This dish is not kosher. Nor is it vegetarian, or vegan. In point of fact, I have witnessed, with my very own eyes, a vegan die from acute anaphylactic shock from simply being in the same room as a completed Turducken. You have been warned. Also, Turducken is bad for you. Like, really, really bad. Even conservative estimates of the nutritional content of Turducken peg it at about 1000 calories and 400mg of sodium! IT WILL KILL YOU. But you'll enjoy eating it.
Finally, I should warn you that this is not an easy food to make. There is work involved, and I mean work in the classical sense: Energy being transferred by a force through a distance. When you are done getting this bitch ready for the oven, you will by physically sore. If you have access to a helper, be it husband, girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, parent or taiwanese lady boy, you will want their assistance at key points.
Let's get crackin. Go to a store and pickup the following:
Those are the ingredients, but you will also need a large roasting pan with a rack. The rack is very important, because as you may or may not be aware, there will be a lot of fat rendering out of these three mutilated birds, and that fat will pile up kinda deep in the bottom of the roasting pan. If you don't have a rack that gives at least 1-2" of clearance (more if you can get it), you will have a turducken that is roasted on top and fried on the bottom. Not the best.
The other non-ingredient item you will need is a knife. More accurately, several knives, preferably of varying lengths and all of exceeding sharpness. If you can get the mystical Vorpal Ginzu and make it go snicker-snack, you will be just fine, otherwise you will at various points curse the whoreson who sold you your existing knives and will wish you had listened to your crazy gun-nut uncle and bought a set of hand-forged damascus steel kitchen knives from an old-school blacksmith living in Portland. But you didn't, so just roll with it.
To begin, put on some latex gloves. (Right, I forgot. One moment....)
To begin, go back to the store and purchase latex gloves. Now, go home and put them on. Lay out some butchers paper or a huge cutting board or saran wrap or just seriously clean your counter top and start de-boning your chicken.
"Wait," you say, "I don't know how to take the bones out of a chicken, much less a duck or turkey." That's all right, because I have scoured the interwebs to bring you the finest instructional videos no money can buy. Just scroll down a bit and enjoy. I'll say this: The first time you attempt to de-bone these birds yourself, it will take you a long time. Just because sweet, sexy Jacques Pepin can do this in six minutes flat while describing it on camera does not mean that you will be able to. Take your time, and give yourself plenty of time to do this (took me almost 3 hours the first time). After you have de-boned a few birds in your life, you'll find that it gets a lot easier. Okay?
Here, then, is your chicken instructional video (ignore what he does after de-boning the chicken):
Here are some folks at something called The Turducken Project doing a duck. What they lack in sweet French accents they make up for in latin beats and instructional text overlays. A quick note on duck bones: They are brittle, and they are SHARP. If you accidentally break one of the bones, very carefully make sure you do not leave any pieces in the de-boned bird. You could hurt yourself or someone else. I'm completely serious on this one. I don't usually cut myself with a knife during this process, but I frequently stab myself with the sharp pointy end of a duck rib.
Finally, the turkey. I recommend that when you do the turkey, you leave the big bone at the end of the drumstick in, because there is no reason not to have the actual drumstick available, right? Also, you can just leave the wings on for much the same reason. Remember, the turkey is on the outside, so you want it to be as perfectly de-boned as possible, with the least broken skin. Try hard.
As you finish each bird, wrap it up in cellophane (or plastic wrap, does anyone say cellophane anymore?) and toss it in the fridge. Now, let's make some stuffing.
First, get all that bread you bought nice and stale. The way I do this is to set the oven to a low temperature (175, 200, etc), and toss it in on a couple of cookie sheets for a while until it's all dried out.
While that's going on, take the time to chop up:
All of your onions and apples.
Enough of your celery to get 4 cups worth.
8-10 cloves of garlic. Frankly, just do the whole bulb, it'll taste good.
Once you've got the choppin done, pull out a large (biggest and deepest you got) saucepan and start breaking up and browning the (probably frozen) pork sausage. When the sausage is browned, throw in your onions and garlic and cook for a minute or two, then put in your celery and apples and button mushrooms. Cook until the onions are soft.
Next, take all the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme and chop it all together until you've got at least 2 big double handfuls. I have no idea how to translate that into cups, but I'm 6'4" and my hands are just shy of being large enough to successfully palm a basketball if that helps you estimate your portion. In a mixing bowl, crack open 4 eggs and pour in two cups of milk, then whisk together. Once the eggs and milk are mixed, add in all the chopped herbs and mix well.
Take your stale bread and chop it up into crouton-like squares and dump it into a really big bowl. Now melt a half (or full, depends on your cholesterol tolerance) stick of butter in the microwave and pour it over the bread squares and toss. Dump the stuff in the saucepan into the bowl and mix, then add the herb/milk/egg slurry and a couple of handfuls of raisins and mix it all up. Put the mixture into two (or three or four) brownie pans, and cook in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes.
Once the stuffing is ready, it's time to assemble your bird. Also, by ready, I mean "cooked and allowed to cool." You don't want to be using hot stuffing during assembly. Lastly, while normally you should not assemble the bird until you are ready to put it in the oven, it is technically ok to put it together and leave it in the fridge overnight.
To assemble your monstrosity:
First, put on some more latex gloves. You'll thank me later.
Second, lay out a bunch of butcher's paper or just have a big enough cutting board/area to work on. You can also use saran wrap, but I like the paper 'cause it won't stick to the bird.
Third, lay out your turkey, spread that fowl wide, skin side down. Lightly salt and pepper the interior of the turkey, then sprinkle a dash or two of cayenne pepper, paprika, cumin and turmeric over the inside as well (the cumin and turmeric are completely optional and to taste).
Fourth, spread a layer of stuffing over the inside of the bird. You want to use a little less than half of your stuffing -- you don't need a big, thick layer, but you want full coverage of the inside.
Fifth, lay out the duck on top of the stuffing on top of the turkey, aligning the wings and drumstick areas. I then like to poke the remaining drumstic part of the duck into the drumstick part of the turkey.
Sixth, repeat the same salt, pepper, spice and stuffing process, using about half of the remaining stuffing.
Seventh, lay out the chicken on top of the stuffing-covered duck.
Eighth, salt, pepper, cayenne, rest of stuffing, etc.
Now comes the hard part, and where you need a helper. As you may notice, this looks nothing like a turkey. Since we've foolishly removed all the bones, there is nothing to provide this concoction with an internal structure and shape resembling the chicken inside a duck inside a turkey that we have promised our friends and loved ones. That's why we picked up butcher's twine and the turkey sewing kit.
Get an extra set of hands to assist (or just muscle up and get 'er done) and pull the sides of the bird together so that you can use the meat sewing kit to sew that seam right up. I swear to you that when I find the photos I will post them, but until then I want you to wing it. It's somewhat essential that before you start sewing you wrap the turducken with butcher's twine at a 90-degree angle to the lengthwise direction to take the weight and keep the sides together, or your stiches will just rip out. It helps a lot to have one person cinching the butcher's twine, one person holding the skin together at the cinch point, and another doing the sewing. So if you are in a polyamorous relationship, you've got a leg up on the rest of us. Key point: You are sewing the turkey skin together, you don't need to worry about the inside. Also, it helps to tie the drumsticks together to cover the poo hole, to keep too much stuffing from falling out. Final visualization until I get photos up: Think of it like zipping up a zipper.
Now, you need to preheat your oven to 210 degrees. At this temperature, it will take a long time for the turducken to cook (9-12 hours depending on the total poundage), but if you go higher, you may find that the skin burns too much. You can even do a lower temperature, but that will take a significantly long time to cook. As always, try it once and tweak later. Put the turducken in your roasting pan on the rack with the seam ON THE BOTTOM. One of the really cool things that will happen is that while it cooks the skin will melt together, and you can actually remove the stitches before you serve it if you like. Season the outside of the bird with cayenne pepper and paprika.
Toss the bird in the oven uncovered. Now use the following timeline:
90 minutes after insertion: Pour a full melted stick of butter lovingly over the top. Insert meat thermometer such that the temperature-sensing end is as close to the center of the bird as you can get.
30 minutes later: Baste (repeat every 30 minutes until...).
Roughly 5 hours in: cover with aluminum foil and baste every 45 minutes until done.
Done is defined as the internal temperature of the turducken reaching at least 165 degrees fahrenheit, but not more than 185 degrees. 170 is where I pull it.
When the turducken is done, carefully move it to a serving platter remembering that it has no internal structure to keep it together. Use a clever combination of tinfoil, oven mits, scissors and tongs to remove the stiching and trussing you implemented to keep it all together, make some gravy from the drippings and then do me a favor:
In front of all your friends and loved ones, take a sharp kitchen knife and slice that thing lengthwise in one stroke of awesomeness, causing the turducken to open up like a rainbow of meat love. Bask in their oohing and aahing, and take the first damn piece for yourself.
If they don't like it? Fuck em.
So, we begin as we always begin, with a simple question: What is Turducken? Dear reader, I am hurt. Hurt that you never write, call or talk to me when we go drinking, because if you had, then I guarantee you I would at some point have explained exactly what the hell a Turducken is, probably right before I suggested stuffing a bunch of ungulates into each other and slow cooking them in a backyard fire pit, Luau-style.
Let's get all OED on this shit:
Turducken, n. tur-duk-en -- A Cajun fowl dish, named for the three elements which comprise it. Tur, the root case form of "Turkey", Duck, from the latin, "Duck", and en, the suffix-root of the modern commercial bird product "Chicken".
So, there you have it. A Turducken is a Turkey, a Duck, and a Chicken. Apparently invented by some enterprising Cajun chef who got tired of coming up with new ways to cook nutria. But you can't just cook a turkey, duck and chicken, put them on a really big serving platter and call it a day. No, you must put the chicken inside the duck. And that chicken-stuffed duck must be inserted into the turkey. Well, ok. It doesn't actually work that way. There's no meat insertion per se. It's more meat stacking, followed by creative use of butcher's twine and sweet, sweet fat which creates the illusion of prior insertion. There's also stuffing. Delicious stuffing.
Before we go any further, I should make something clear: This dish is not kosher. Nor is it vegetarian, or vegan. In point of fact, I have witnessed, with my very own eyes, a vegan die from acute anaphylactic shock from simply being in the same room as a completed Turducken. You have been warned. Also, Turducken is bad for you. Like, really, really bad. Even conservative estimates of the nutritional content of Turducken peg it at about 1000 calories and 400mg of sodium! IT WILL KILL YOU. But you'll enjoy eating it.
Finally, I should warn you that this is not an easy food to make. There is work involved, and I mean work in the classical sense: Energy being transferred by a force through a distance. When you are done getting this bitch ready for the oven, you will by physically sore. If you have access to a helper, be it husband, girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, parent or taiwanese lady boy, you will want their assistance at key points.
Let's get crackin. Go to a store and pickup the following:
- One 15-20 lb turkey
- One 8-12 lb duck
- One 6 or so lb chicken (the "roaster" kind, and preferably not purdue brand, they always taste wierd).
- Salt (coarse, preferably)
- Peppercorns (and a pepper mill)
- Paprika
- Butcher's twine and one of those Turkey stuffing setups (with the meat needles, to seal the birds up)
- two lbs of pork sausage (jimmy dean-type stuff, medium or hot)
- Eggs
- Milk
- 3-4 loaves of whitebread
- One celery bunch
- 2-3 large onions
- 3-4 apples
- 1 bulb garlic
- A large fresh bunch each of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (dried if you can't get fresh)
- raisins
- A package of unsalted butter.
- cayenne pepper
- curry powder (optional)
- cumin
- turmeric
- 1 4-oz can of button mushrooms
Those are the ingredients, but you will also need a large roasting pan with a rack. The rack is very important, because as you may or may not be aware, there will be a lot of fat rendering out of these three mutilated birds, and that fat will pile up kinda deep in the bottom of the roasting pan. If you don't have a rack that gives at least 1-2" of clearance (more if you can get it), you will have a turducken that is roasted on top and fried on the bottom. Not the best.
The other non-ingredient item you will need is a knife. More accurately, several knives, preferably of varying lengths and all of exceeding sharpness. If you can get the mystical Vorpal Ginzu and make it go snicker-snack, you will be just fine, otherwise you will at various points curse the whoreson who sold you your existing knives and will wish you had listened to your crazy gun-nut uncle and bought a set of hand-forged damascus steel kitchen knives from an old-school blacksmith living in Portland. But you didn't, so just roll with it.
To begin, put on some latex gloves. (Right, I forgot. One moment....)
To begin, go back to the store and purchase latex gloves. Now, go home and put them on. Lay out some butchers paper or a huge cutting board or saran wrap or just seriously clean your counter top and start de-boning your chicken.
"Wait," you say, "I don't know how to take the bones out of a chicken, much less a duck or turkey." That's all right, because I have scoured the interwebs to bring you the finest instructional videos no money can buy. Just scroll down a bit and enjoy. I'll say this: The first time you attempt to de-bone these birds yourself, it will take you a long time. Just because sweet, sexy Jacques Pepin can do this in six minutes flat while describing it on camera does not mean that you will be able to. Take your time, and give yourself plenty of time to do this (took me almost 3 hours the first time). After you have de-boned a few birds in your life, you'll find that it gets a lot easier. Okay?
Here, then, is your chicken instructional video (ignore what he does after de-boning the chicken):
Here are some folks at something called The Turducken Project doing a duck. What they lack in sweet French accents they make up for in latin beats and instructional text overlays. A quick note on duck bones: They are brittle, and they are SHARP. If you accidentally break one of the bones, very carefully make sure you do not leave any pieces in the de-boned bird. You could hurt yourself or someone else. I'm completely serious on this one. I don't usually cut myself with a knife during this process, but I frequently stab myself with the sharp pointy end of a duck rib.
Finally, the turkey. I recommend that when you do the turkey, you leave the big bone at the end of the drumstick in, because there is no reason not to have the actual drumstick available, right? Also, you can just leave the wings on for much the same reason. Remember, the turkey is on the outside, so you want it to be as perfectly de-boned as possible, with the least broken skin. Try hard.
As you finish each bird, wrap it up in cellophane (or plastic wrap, does anyone say cellophane anymore?) and toss it in the fridge. Now, let's make some stuffing.
First, get all that bread you bought nice and stale. The way I do this is to set the oven to a low temperature (175, 200, etc), and toss it in on a couple of cookie sheets for a while until it's all dried out.
While that's going on, take the time to chop up:
All of your onions and apples.
Enough of your celery to get 4 cups worth.
8-10 cloves of garlic. Frankly, just do the whole bulb, it'll taste good.
Once you've got the choppin done, pull out a large (biggest and deepest you got) saucepan and start breaking up and browning the (probably frozen) pork sausage. When the sausage is browned, throw in your onions and garlic and cook for a minute or two, then put in your celery and apples and button mushrooms. Cook until the onions are soft.
Next, take all the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme and chop it all together until you've got at least 2 big double handfuls. I have no idea how to translate that into cups, but I'm 6'4" and my hands are just shy of being large enough to successfully palm a basketball if that helps you estimate your portion. In a mixing bowl, crack open 4 eggs and pour in two cups of milk, then whisk together. Once the eggs and milk are mixed, add in all the chopped herbs and mix well.
Take your stale bread and chop it up into crouton-like squares and dump it into a really big bowl. Now melt a half (or full, depends on your cholesterol tolerance) stick of butter in the microwave and pour it over the bread squares and toss. Dump the stuff in the saucepan into the bowl and mix, then add the herb/milk/egg slurry and a couple of handfuls of raisins and mix it all up. Put the mixture into two (or three or four) brownie pans, and cook in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes.
Once the stuffing is ready, it's time to assemble your bird. Also, by ready, I mean "cooked and allowed to cool." You don't want to be using hot stuffing during assembly. Lastly, while normally you should not assemble the bird until you are ready to put it in the oven, it is technically ok to put it together and leave it in the fridge overnight.
To assemble your monstrosity:
First, put on some more latex gloves. You'll thank me later.
Second, lay out a bunch of butcher's paper or just have a big enough cutting board/area to work on. You can also use saran wrap, but I like the paper 'cause it won't stick to the bird.
Third, lay out your turkey, spread that fowl wide, skin side down. Lightly salt and pepper the interior of the turkey, then sprinkle a dash or two of cayenne pepper, paprika, cumin and turmeric over the inside as well (the cumin and turmeric are completely optional and to taste).
Fourth, spread a layer of stuffing over the inside of the bird. You want to use a little less than half of your stuffing -- you don't need a big, thick layer, but you want full coverage of the inside.
Fifth, lay out the duck on top of the stuffing on top of the turkey, aligning the wings and drumstick areas. I then like to poke the remaining drumstic part of the duck into the drumstick part of the turkey.
Sixth, repeat the same salt, pepper, spice and stuffing process, using about half of the remaining stuffing.
Seventh, lay out the chicken on top of the stuffing-covered duck.
Eighth, salt, pepper, cayenne, rest of stuffing, etc.
Now comes the hard part, and where you need a helper. As you may notice, this looks nothing like a turkey. Since we've foolishly removed all the bones, there is nothing to provide this concoction with an internal structure and shape resembling the chicken inside a duck inside a turkey that we have promised our friends and loved ones. That's why we picked up butcher's twine and the turkey sewing kit.
Get an extra set of hands to assist (or just muscle up and get 'er done) and pull the sides of the bird together so that you can use the meat sewing kit to sew that seam right up. I swear to you that when I find the photos I will post them, but until then I want you to wing it. It's somewhat essential that before you start sewing you wrap the turducken with butcher's twine at a 90-degree angle to the lengthwise direction to take the weight and keep the sides together, or your stiches will just rip out. It helps a lot to have one person cinching the butcher's twine, one person holding the skin together at the cinch point, and another doing the sewing. So if you are in a polyamorous relationship, you've got a leg up on the rest of us. Key point: You are sewing the turkey skin together, you don't need to worry about the inside. Also, it helps to tie the drumsticks together to cover the poo hole, to keep too much stuffing from falling out. Final visualization until I get photos up: Think of it like zipping up a zipper.
Now, you need to preheat your oven to 210 degrees. At this temperature, it will take a long time for the turducken to cook (9-12 hours depending on the total poundage), but if you go higher, you may find that the skin burns too much. You can even do a lower temperature, but that will take a significantly long time to cook. As always, try it once and tweak later. Put the turducken in your roasting pan on the rack with the seam ON THE BOTTOM. One of the really cool things that will happen is that while it cooks the skin will melt together, and you can actually remove the stitches before you serve it if you like. Season the outside of the bird with cayenne pepper and paprika.
Toss the bird in the oven uncovered. Now use the following timeline:
90 minutes after insertion: Pour a full melted stick of butter lovingly over the top. Insert meat thermometer such that the temperature-sensing end is as close to the center of the bird as you can get.
30 minutes later: Baste (repeat every 30 minutes until...).
Roughly 5 hours in: cover with aluminum foil and baste every 45 minutes until done.
Done is defined as the internal temperature of the turducken reaching at least 165 degrees fahrenheit, but not more than 185 degrees. 170 is where I pull it.
When the turducken is done, carefully move it to a serving platter remembering that it has no internal structure to keep it together. Use a clever combination of tinfoil, oven mits, scissors and tongs to remove the stiching and trussing you implemented to keep it all together, make some gravy from the drippings and then do me a favor:
In front of all your friends and loved ones, take a sharp kitchen knife and slice that thing lengthwise in one stroke of awesomeness, causing the turducken to open up like a rainbow of meat love. Bask in their oohing and aahing, and take the first damn piece for yourself.
If they don't like it? Fuck em.
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