Kosher Blog

Making a Turducken, Chapter 5 – Assembly & Cooking

(Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4). All of my work has led up to this point – it’s time to build a turducken. This post has my pictures – click them for a larger view.

MATERIALS:
* 3 deboned birds, as cold as you can keep them.
* 3 cold stuffings
* oval foil roasting pan (preferably with reinforcing rack)
* twine and a poultry sewing needle
* heavy-duty aluminum foil
* turkey baster
* 2 long, thin, sharp skewers.

NOTES:
* All the deboned birds have their skins on them – even the ones going on the inside. If they didn’t have the skin, they would just be a pile of cutlets. You might be concerned (as my wife was) about putting all that skin on the inside of your turducken. Based on the end result, I have to say that it wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, it contributed nicely to the juiciness of the end product – the chicken & duck skins rendered fat that soaked into the surrounding stuffing and meat. By the time the turducken was finished, the skin was almost unnoticeable. If eating skin bothers you, it was a simple matter to peel out the small pieces that each slice had.

* The turkey still had the wing-bones and leg-bones when the butcher was done with it. I hacked off the inner ¾ of the leg-bones, so that the cavities could be stuffed as well. I left the wing-bones in – taking them off wouldn’t give me anything to stuff.

* My butcher deboned our turkey without slicing down the backbone, so my turkey was more of a ‘turkey-sleeve’ than a flat piece. This made it harder to get the duck in, but we still had to sew up a section that had been cut. My instructions will assume that your turkey is a flat piece, which is the easier way to do it.

* Find yourself a ‘turducken-buddy’. Maybe make a ‘turducken assembly party’! Assembling a turducken is a 2-person job, if not more. You will need at least 4 hands at many of the steps. My wife was graciously helping me assemble this behemoth.

* The amount of stuffing that goes into each stage is obviously variable. A few times, we would draw up the sides of the bird we were working on to measure – and then stuff it some more. You are going for a finished product with no empty spaces.

Lay the chicken flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Pile as much of the Wild-Mushroom Kasha Stuffing on it as you can fit and still close the bird. Pick up the sides of the bird and bring them up to the top, so you have a stuffed bird cylinder. Use a skewer to hold the flaps together, being sure to pin it together far enough, so it can be moved around without losing stuffing. Carefully, set aside.

Lay the duck flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Cover the duck with a good amount of the Andouille Sausage Stuffing. Carefully, pick up the chicken-cylinder and rest it on top of the stuffing, seam side down, in the middle of the duck. Pick up the sides of the duck and bring them up to the top, over the chicken. Use a second skewer to hold the flaps together. Again, be sure to pin it together far enough, so it can be moved around without losing stuffing. Carefully, set aside.

Set the turkey flat on your work surface, legs toward you, skin side down. Cover the turkey with a good amount of the Cornbread Stuffing. Be sure to stuff the leg-cavities. Carefully, pick up the duck-chicken-cylinder and rest it on top of the stuffing, seam side down, in the middle of the turkey. Pick up the sides of the turkey and bring them up to the top, over the duck-chicken. Have your partner hold the sides of the skin together as you use the needle & twine to sew the sides together.

Sew the neck of the turkey closed. Remove the two skewers, via the leg cavity. Tie the legs together, to keep the stuffings in the bird.

Carefully lift the turducken and place it in the roasting pan, seam side down. Ours fit perfectly in the pan – if there’s space in yours, use balls of foil to fill the spaces. Keeping the bird compressed will make it look more like a normal bird when it’s served.


We finished this step on wednesday night, and refrigerated the turducken overnight. The finished product weighed in at more than 25 pounds. Whew!

Roasting any whole bird is a matter of internal temperature, rather that strict times. This was going to be easier than a normal turkey, because the inside of the bird was solid – with no cavity, the heat would permeate the turducken evenly. I wouldn’t need to measure the breast meat or the thigh meat. I placed my trusty digital thermometer probe as close to the center of the bird as I could, then covered the pan with heavy-duty foil. The cord of my probe went outside of the oven to the readout. You could poke it everytime you wanted to know the temperature, but it’s safe to say that it won’t be necessary for at least 8 hours. It went into a 225° F oven at 5:30 AM. My family and I went to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at this point. (Wouldn’t my remote-thermometer have been useful here?)

The target temperature for the turducken is 165° F. When we got home from the parade, it reached 130° F. It was only 11:30 AM, so we were on time. I took the foil off and turned the oven up to 300° F. We used the turkey baster to siphon off the fat that was pooling around the bird, so it wouldn’t overflow.

After another 4 hours of cooking, we were still short of the target temperature, so I pushed it up to 350° F. By 5 o’clock (after more than 11 hours of cooking!) the bird was exactly 165° F. We took it out of the oven and let it rest for a while. (Actually, we transported the bird to my parents house for dinner – but the details of that aren’t important. The bird traveled in it’s roasting tray, covered again in foil, then wrapped in some towels to keep warm until dinner. Let’s say for argument’s sake, that the turducken rested for 1 hour, covered with foil.)

At dinner time, we attempted to remove the turducken from the pan for carving, but it wouldn’t come out without tearing apart. So we cut it in half crosswise, and took out only the lower half. Here’s the cross section. Isn’t it beautiful?. After we finished the first half the servings weren’t as neat.


Of course, we tried hard to get all three meats in everyone’s slice. How many did we feed? 12 people Thursday night and 5 people for Shabbos dinner. The leftovers still lasted another week and we gave away a sizeable amount to people who couldn’t make it. 25 pounds is a lot of food!

How did it taste? Incredible! The flavors of three different meats and three different stuffings combined beautifully. All the meat was juicy & flavorful. Since we didn’t have a cavity inside the turkey, everything reached doneness together.

Mission accomplished.

EPILOGUE:
We have come to the end of my Thanksgiving project – what did I learn from all of it?
* Is a Turducken delicious? If you choose the stuffings well, it turns out great.
* Was it difficult? It was, but by no means impossible. Having a butcher do the deboning was key. It takes a lot of planning.
* Would I do it again? I might, but not for a while. This was a lot of work, and in future years I might be responsible for cooking the rest of Thanksgiving dinner – this year my parents made everything but the bird. It was lots of fun to do something so unique – I wonder what dish I can make next year. ;)

I hope I’ve given you the encouragement you need to go out and build one for yourself. I leave you with this very funny cartoon…