A Dinner Most Fowl

1/25/06

I made a Turducken for Thanksgiving this past year. For those of you that don’t know what a Turducken is, I recommend you watch the Food Network special, Things You Shouldn’t Make Unless You’re on Television and Have Access to an Unlimited Budget and Underlings Who Clean Up After You. It’s a classic.

A Turducken is—now stay with me here—a turkey stuffed with a duck, which has been stuffed with a chicken. Naturally the ribcage of the turkey and all the bones of the duck and chicken have to be removed in order to properly cram them into each other’s asses. Also, they should already be dead. This is an important step to avoid pecking injury. Each layer of boneless fowl is slathered with a layer of sausage stuffing between it and the following layer. If sausage stuffing is too trendy, health-conscious for you, I recommend just piling large bricks of butter into any available area. Or just eat the butter, that way you might have a heart attack quickly and thereby avoid having to make this culinary Frankenstein’s monster.

“Ryan,” you might be saying. “Why would you agree to make something so difficult and time-intensive?” Simple, I would respond with distain. I am an insufferable show-off, especially when it comes to cooking. I’m a pretty good amateur cook; good enough for most people to be mistaken that I know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s like meeting a guy who’s passable at algebra; he looks like a genius to the rest of us who waved bye-bye to that skill several seconds after it was jotted down on a test years ago, but that same fellow would look like a raving idiot to a quantum physicist. But, seeing as I have no inherent self-worth, I set about these overly-complex jaunts to impress other people. I admit, there was a part of me that just plain wanted to do it; cooking is one of the few things that I don’t have to “be in the mood” to do. Also, it’s easy to do drunk.

I’m so ambitious that I also decided, probably because of years of cocaine abuse and subsequent brain damage, that I’d add a step to the whole shebang and brine all three birds. (Brining is soaking meat in a salt water/seasoning solution to add flavor and color to the cooked bird.)

An hour and a half into de-boning, (or boning, for those of you like me who think it’s a funny word,) of the chicken, I began to lose a bit of my enthusiasm for the project. A total of six hours later I have removed the skeletons of all three birds, and have enough bones to make an elephant graveyard envious. The chicken and duck look like I ran over them with a steamroller and the turkey looks as though one of those larvae from Alien burst through its back in a very neat seam…a seam which I shall have to sew up—reinforcing the Frankenstein theme—with butcher’s twine once assembled. At this stage in the process, I urge you to keep anyone who will be consuming this monstrosity of modern science far away; nobody wants to see the way hot dogs are made, if you know what I mean.

There is nothing so strange as going down to the Kum & Go and purchasing a cylinder of salt, a Styrofoam cooler and a fifth of whiskey. Even stranger is going back an hour later when you need more salt because you failed to accurately calculate how much brine you needed. The girl behind the counter must have thought I was the worlds’ most adamant slug-killer.

Chicken and duck go into cooler with their brine, and the turkey is relegated to a 5 gallon trashcan—it was clean!—which, after removal of the crisper, went into the fridge. I drink half the fifth and go to sleep, letting the birds soak in Dead Sea water overnight.

This 26 pound mass of bird meat, (18 lb turkey, 5 lb duck, 3 lb chicken,) has to cook for some 8 hours at 220 degrees so the inside gets finished without the exterior becoming a blackened mass the texture of old tires. Conversely, you don’t want a perfectly polished golden outside and salmonella-laden chicken tar-tar in the center. Unless you’re trying to bump off Aunt Flo or something.

Wielding my trusty digital thermometer with the leave-in probe—it even has an alarm whenever you reach the correct temperature!—I was ready to cook the blasted thing…after doing a clumsy sewing job that left the Turducken looking as if it were wearing a skin suit a la Silence of the Lambs. The only problem was that I wanted it to be done around noon the next day, as I was to arrive with it at my mother’s around 2. Doing quick subtraction…with a calculator…I discovered I’d have to put this thing in the oven around 4 a.m. Which I did. Drunk. Very drunk, as it was the start of a long weekend and I am incapable of having time off without pouring libations all over it. Point of fact, I don’t even remember hoisting the behemoth into the oven, though there are numerous photos of my almost dropping it, courtesy of my roommate, who was also drunk.

To my utter shock and surprise, the next morning after remembering where I was, I discovered that I had set the oven to the correct temperature and even put the Turducken into the oven correctly instead of, say, with the cooler still wrapped around it or missing completely and inserting it into the cabinet. All in all the Thunder Bird of Thanksgiving ’05 turned out really well; perfectly cooked, perfectly juicy, and most important of all, wildly impressive. Especially when I related the above story upwards of nine hundred times and pointed out that it took me a total prep time of some twelve hours.

I will not be making one of those again. This year I think I’m cooking human. I think the chick across the hall lives alone…