Turducken

I made a Turducken!!! There isn't much more to say about that; here's some pictures!

The day before I prepared 3 different stuffings to go inside each bird: Sausage Cornbread, Orange Cranberry Walnut, and Pancetta Mushroom Wild Rice.

Central Market deboned the three birds for me and charged $4.99 a pound for everything. The total of all three birds came to 13 pounds (you do the math). It was a bit smaller than I had hoped, but I can't complain for the quality of the poultry was excellent and the deboning job looked beautiful. Instead of heavy cajun seasonings (as many online recipes call for) I opted for a simple salt and rosemary seasoning for the turkey before the stuffing was layered on. It worked quite well as the turkey meat was nicely perfumed with the heavenly aroma of rosemary.

Classic sausage and cornbread stuffing goes on the turkey.

Orange cranberry and walnut stuffing goes on the duck.

Pancetta mushroom and wild rice stuffing goes on the chicken.

A side view of the layers.

Jill helped me fold the sucker up.

Sewing a turducken is slippery.

JIll got fancy with the camera angles.

We turned him over, tied his dangly boneless legs together, buttered him up and popped him in the fridge. JIll put him in the oven (200°) at 3 am. The Central Market peeps said it would take 15 hours to cook. They were wrong. By noon the internal temperature of the beast was already up to 150° and people weren't coming over until 6pm. I called the butcher at CM and he said I probably didn't stuff it enough. I swear I put at least 2 quarts of stuffing into this thing and the directions CM gave me said to use about 7 cups, but according to him it could've only cooked that fast because there wasn't enough stuffing in it. I guess I am an amateur.

So we decided to turn the oven off and cranked it back up at 5pm to 350° for an hour or so until the skin got nice and brown and the internal temperature reached 165°. Oh, there was a LOT of pan juices that had to constantly be siphoned out during the cooking process, like 2 quarts worth. We made a lot of gravy.

The beast sliced open. As you can see, the chicken got kind of pushed over to the side and all of the wild rice stuffing was pushed over to the other side. I guess we did kind of a sloppy job of folding the turducken up as everything got moved around a bit too much. I'm sure it didn't affect the taste, but it just took a way a bit from the symmetrical presentation.

A cross section of the entire beast. Kinda messy, but delish.

All in all, I don't know if I would ever cook a Turducken again. It was fun, and it was tasty, but I wouldn't say it tasted any better than just roasting a regular Turkey for holiday get togethers (I roast a mean turkey). The novelty of the idea wears away fast after you've spent $65 on just the birds alone and all the prep work that goes into it and the 10+ hours of cooking. I'd rather spend the money on a standing rib roast. You know how I love me some rare beef. Ok, I might try it one more time but with the original Cajun recipe.

Posted by yi at December 26, 2004 11:52 PM