For Thanksgiving this year, I heard that I could get a Turducken from the Loblaws up the street all pre-assembled. For the uninitiated, a Turducken is a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. To me, this was a very exciting thing. I don’t really know why it’s exciting – but it is. I called the store and they said I didn’t even need to pre-order the Turducken, I could just show up and take one some time in the two weeks before Thanksgiving. I showed up a week before hand and found what they were talking about. The Turducken they carry comes in a pre-packaged box. The Turducken is assembled in a processing plant somewhere, frozen solid, packaged up and shipped off. For some reason I had it in my head that the butchers at the store would assemble it. Since cooking meat that comes in a box is unacceptable for Thanksgiving, and a regular turkey just wasn’t going to do now that our hopes were up, the only solution was to try to put a Turducken together ourselves.
Pre-Packaged Turducken - Sacrelidge
The first step was to gather the ingredients: turkey, duck, chicken and sausage.
Ingredients: Turkey, Duck, Chicken, and Sausage
I then brined the birds in a salt water solution for about 20 minutes, rinsed them off and then started deboning.
Brining the Birds
Knives: Chef's Knife, Meat Cleaver, Boning Knife
The trick to the Turducken is completely deboning the chicken and duck. The turkey is also deboned except the legs and wings are kept in tact so the whole thing still looks like a turkey when you’re done.
Deboned Chicken
De-Boned Duck
Once all the birds are deboned, the sausage stuffing is used to add a little flavor to the meat. To stitch the turkey back together you can use butchers cord and a needle but I prefer to just stitch it up with BBQ skewers. I then cover the bird with herbs and a layer of bacon to baste the bird. I cooked the bird for 9 hours at 275 *F.
Deboned Turkey
Assembled Turducken
Protective Bacon & Herb Layer
Behold the Turducken in all it's glory!
Because all the birds are already deboned, carving is nice and easy.
Turducken Cut In Half