Turducken
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Turducken is a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The name is a portmanteau of those ingredients, turkey, duck, and chicken. The 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. Some recipes call for the turkey to be stuffed with a chicken which is then stuffed with a duckling. It is also called a chuckey.
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).
Turducken is believed to be Cajun in origin, although it may also have originated in eastern Texas or northern Louisiana. While such elaborate layering of whole animals, also known as a farce, from the French word for "stuffing", can be documented well back into the Middle Ages of Europe, and are even attested in the Roman Empire (e.g. the tetrafarmacum), some people credit Cajun-creole fusion chef Paul Prudhomme with creating the commerical dish. 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 making turduckens since 1985 when a local farmer whose name is lost to history brought in his own birds and asked Hebert's to prepare them in the now-familiar style. The company now sells around 3,300 turduckens a year. They share a friendly rivalry with Paul Prudhomme.
Turducken is generally associated with the "do-it-yourself" outdoor food culture also associated with barbecueing and crawfish boils, although some people now serve them in place of the traditional roasted turkey at the Thanksgiving meal. Turduckens can be prepared at home in the span of 12-16 hours 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.
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[edit] Variations
In addition to the aforementioned chuckey, some enthusiasts have taken it a step further, and come up with the turduckencorpheail. This is a standard turducken, which is then stuffed with a cornish game hen, which is then stuffed with a pheasant, and finally stuffed with a quail. The turduckencorpheail is not for the faint of heart; it is an extremely time consuming endeavor, as birds of the proper size must first be obtained, and then prepared.
Chef Paul Prudhomme brought renewed popularity to the Osturduckencorpheail with his own Osturduckencorpheail recipe. There is a similar dish in South Africa called the Osturducken, an ostrich stuffed with turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken.
A further variant is the gurducken, where the external bird is a goose, rather than a turkey.
The Turducken has also inspired variations, such as the hotchken. A hotchken, known as "the poor man's turducken," is a chicken stuffed with hotdogs.
In the UK the Turducken is commonly known as a three-bird roast. English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall expanded this into a ten-bird roast (a turgoduckmaguikenantidgeonck - turkey, goose, duck, mallard, guineafowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon, woodcock) [1].
The largest recorded nested bird roast is 17 birds, attributed to a royal feast in France in the 19th Century: a bustergophechiduckneaealcockidgeoverwingailusharkolanbler (originally called a Rôti Sans Pareil, or "Roast without equal") - a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an Ortolan Bunting and a Garden Warbler. The final bird is small enough that it can be stuffed with a single olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds. This dish probably could not be recreated in the modern era as many of the listed birds are now protected species. [2] [3].
A dish of animal and plant foods stuffed in layers is Whole stuffed camel.
[edit] Nutrition
Because turducken contains relatively high levels of fat and cholesterol and it is complicated and expensive to prepare, turducken is seldom eaten outside special holiday dinners, most commonly the American Thanksgiving. As such, a serving of turducken contributes a negligible amount of excess fat and cholesterol to the average person's annual diet.
[edit] In popular culture
The machinima series Red vs. Blue parodies the concept of the turducken. Starting from the smallest bird, a hummingbird is stuffed into a sparrow, then a Cornish game hen, into a chicken, a duck, then a turkey, then in Michael Moore ("a bigger turkey") , then a penguin, a peacock, then an eagle, into an albatross, then an emu, an ostrich, a leopard, into a pterodactyl, and then finished off in a Boeing 747.
NFL Hall of Fame coach and TV broadcaster John Madden used to annually enjoy a Turducken when he did the Thanksgiving Day broadcasts on CBS Sports and later FOX Sports. However, after having gone to NBC Sports, he no longer does those games.
An absurdist variation on the concept, proposed by internet legend James "Kibo" Parry in 2005, involves stuffing a tofurkey (a tofu imitation turkey product) with an actual turkey stuffed with another tofurkey to create a tofurkurkeyfurkey.
