Kosher Blog

What do you get when you cross a turkey with a duck with a chicken?

The answer is a turducken. You’re thinking, “Hey Jon, what’s a turducken?” Well, it’s a turkey, which is stuffed with a duck, which is stuffed with a chicken. That’s right — three birds in one, all de-boned (except for the turkey legs and wings) and with added regular stuffing between the layers.

For our first seder this year, we procured a ready-prepared (but not cooked) turducken from Aaron’s Gourmet Emporium in Rego Park, NY. (While you can prepare one on your own, our estimates and anecdotal evidence suggest that it can take upwards of two full days to de-bone and stuff the birds. So, we felt it was well worth it to pay someone else to do it for us.) The turkey was somewhere between 14 and 16 pounds, and we estimated that the duck was around 4 pounds and the chicken about 2 pounds, making for about 20 pounds of poultry. When I picked up the birds, I was handed two well-wrapped bags — one with the (heavy) frozen turducken and one with a quart of extra stuffing, a quart of gravy, and a pint of cranberry sauce, all K-for-P. I then promptly left it all in the car from around noon until the time I got it to Dave’s house (where the first seder was held) in Brookline at around 8:30 pm.

Dave took the turducken out of the freezer Thursday night before Pesach and put it in the oven Monday morning at around 9:45 am, at around 250 F (slightly time-weighted average since he dropped the temp mid-way through cooking to ensure even done-ness by the time we got to shulchan oreich), and took it out at close to 9 pm when we ate it.

And ate it we did! There were ten of us at the seder and there was just about no bird left at the end of the meal. I think Dave was left with the two turkey legs and turkey wings and perhaps a piece or two of carved turkey. That’s about it. You can probably figure out that it was good if ten people managed to eat 20 pounds of boneless poultry. When asked how the duck fat drains from the turducken, the nice folks at Aaron’s said it doesn’t — the stuffing and white meat absorb the duck fat. Yep, it’s that good. It was perhaps the most moist white meat turkey I have ever had, but a very good turkey roaster can achieve comparable turkey greatness, albeit without the added goodness of duck. I don’t think I got any pieces of chicken (being the smallest, only the center cuts had chicken), but I’ll guess it was good. The duck was tender and moist, as duck should be, without being dripping in fat, which was a concern given the lack of drainage typical with duck roasting. The one thing you don’t get with a turducken is crisp roasted poultry skin, as the oven isn’t hot enough to do that and the inner birds aren’t even exposed.

While I would say that it was a great meal, I don’t know that I’d go to the trouble of having a turducken more than once in a long while, perhaps every other or every third year. It’s mighty expensive and I’m not completely sold that it’s worth the time and effort over just making a turkey, a duck, and a chicken separately for one meal. Of course, that wouldn’t be as good, but if we had turducken all the time, it wouldn’t be as exciting, would it?