Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Turducken

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. Wanted to give you all a little more insight about Turducken since I enlightened you all about it last class. From Wikipedia...

A Turducken is a dish consisting of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The thoracic cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with, at the very least, a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird.

The result is a relatively solid, albeit layered, piece of poultry, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing. The turducken is not suitable for deep frying Cajun style (to deep fry poultry, the body cavity must be hollow to cook evenly).

Some people credit Cajun-creole fusion chef Paul Prudhomme with creating the commercial dish as part of the festival Duvall Days in Duvall, Wa in 1983. However, no one has ever verified this claim. The November 2005 issue of National Geographic magazine in an article by Calvin Trillin traced the American origins of the dish to Maurice, Louisiana, and "Hebert's Specialty Meats", which has been commercially producing turduckens since 1985, when a local farmer whose name is unknown, brought in his own birds and asked Hebert's to prepare them in the now-familiar style. The company prepares around 5,000 turduckens per week around Thanksgiving time.[1] They share a friendly rivalry with Paul Prudhomme.

Turducken is often associated with the "do-it-yourself" outdoor food culture also associated with barbecuing and shrimp boils, although some people now serve it in place of the traditional roasted turkey at the Thanksgiving meal. Turduckens can be prepared at home by anybody willing to learn how to remove the bones from poultry, instructions for which can be found on the Internet or in various cookbooks. As their popularity has spread from Louisiana to the rest of the Deep South and beyond, they are also available through some specialty stores in urban areas, or even by mail order.

While popular in the United States, they are rarely seen anywhere else in the world.

So maybe not this Thanksgiving, but definitely the next, get yourself hold of one of these Americanized dishes!

Turducken

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