Kosher Blog

Making a Turducken, Chapter 4 - Purchasing the Meat & Making the Stuffings

(Parts 1, 2 & 3) I’m sure that you’ve heard that being on a first name basis with your food purveyors is the best way to get the best products - in this case it was an absolute necessity. I was going to ask the butcher to de-bone three birds for me - not an easy job and not a common request.

In Brooklyn, we are fortunate to have a number of butchers to choose from and some of them are better than others for certain needs. In this case I decided to go with the smaller operation - the meat department at Kosher Palace (on Avenue U and 29th street, if you’re a Brooklynite). Alex has always given me the best prices for my meat needs and he will get me cuts that the other establishments wouldn’t do. This time I was giving him a challenge. A week earlier, my wife and I had gone to explain what we needed - a chicken and a duck totally de-boned and a turkey partially deboned (The ribcage is removed but the wings are left intact as are the ends of the leg bones). The skin was to be left intact to allow us to wrap the bird around the stuffing. He was willing to try anything, once. We left him with a copy of Paul Prudhomme’s illustrated recipe to make sure that he understood what we were looking for.

We picked up the cleaned carcasses of the birds on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and made stock (for the stuffings) out of them. We came back for the meat the next day - here’s what we got:

* 1 deboned chicken ($2.59/lb) $10.62
* 1 deboned duck ($5.29/lb) $22.80
* 1 partially deboned turkey ($2.29/lb) $34.60
TOTAL: 23.5 pounds of meat (not including the bones): $68

Alex had done a beautiful job of de-boning. He assured me that this was the last time he would de-bone birds for me - I hope that the generous slice of Turducken I gave him afterwards will influence him for future requests. Truth be told, I would have liked to have gotten the duck somewhere else - the only ducks available to Alex were Empire frozen ducklings. If you’ve ever had one, you’ll know that there isn’t a lot of meat on them and the breasts are particularly thin. The best source for ducks that I’m aware of is at Le Marais in NYC. I’m not sure what species of duck they use, but they are easily twice as meaty as the frozen ones. In this case I had to take what Alex could get.

Now, we get to the recipes for the three stuffings we were using. Actually, these are more like guidelines than recipes - we weren’t really following a recipe, and stuffings lend themselves to improvisation particularly well. Also, I’m not a very good recipe writer. It’s important to note that the stuffings you’re going to use in your turducken need to be fully cooled before assembly. Warm stuffings will increase the chances of incubating food poisoning. Keeping everything cold until you put it in the oven is key here.

The first stuffing we made was the Andouille Sausage Stuffing, inspired by Prudhomme’s recipe:

* 2 1/2 pounds of Andouille Sausage (that I made in the last 2 posts)
* 4 green bell peppers, seeded
* 4 large onions, peeled
* 1 head of celery, trimmed
* chopped garlic
* Avvio black pepper sauce
* fine breadcrumbs made from 2 very stale baguettes

Pulse the peppers, onions and celery in a food processor until they are medium-to-finely chopped. Take the sausages out of their casings and cut them into 1/2″ slices. Saute them in a hot, dry pan - they will start exuding fat almost immediately. Keep tossing the sausages, and breaking them up, until all of the sausage appears browned. Add the chopped vegetables and saute them in the sausage fat until they are translucent. Add the garlic and saute for a few minutes more. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl and add about half a bottle of black-pepper sauce. Mix in breadcrumbs until the mixture is pasty. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

Next came the Cornbread Stuffing. Prudhomme’s recipe was too complex for me, and I didn’t want giblets in my stuffing:

* 4 green bell peppers, seeded
* 4 large onions, peeled
* 1 head of celery, trimmed
* dry cornbread cubes (I was using 3/4 of a double recipe, cubed and dried)
* 1 T ground sage
* salt and pepper
* poultry stock

Pulse the peppers, onions and celery in a food processor until they are medium-to-finely chopped. Saute them in oil until they are translucent. Add the cornbread cubes and toss. Add the sage and salt and pepper to taste. Add stock until the mixture is pasty but pieces of cornbread still remain. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

Finally, the Wild Mushroom Kasha Pilaf. This one is the most vague of the ‘recipes’ - my wife makes kasha (and varnishkas) regularly, and doesn’t ever look at a recipe. If you need guidance, check out this recipe. We used about 2 cups of uncooked kasha in our recipe, and later added bow-tie noodles to whatever didn’t fit in the chicken:

* About 4 pounds of assorted mushrooms (we used baby bella, oyster, shitake & white button), cleaned and stems removed if necessary
* Kasha (we used a mix of whole and coarse ground because that’s what was in our pantry)
* beaten eggs
* onions
* poultry stock

Pulse the mushrooms and onions in a food processor until finely chopped. Saute in olive oil until the mushrooms have exuded all their moisture and gotten fairly dry again. Set the mixture aside. Mix kasha with the beaten eggs until all the kernels are covered. Saute the egg/kasha mix until dry. Add stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered until the stock is absorbed. Mix in the mushroom-mixture and salt and pepper to taste. Put the mix in the refrigerator to cool.

In my next and final post in this saga, I’ll detail the assembly and cooking of the Turducken - complete with actual pictures of the process and my final product. See you then.