I threatened to provide follow-up on our Thanksgiving turducken breast—and who am I to not follow through on my threats (or as my mom would say to us kids when she was mad, ‘this is not a threat, it is a fact.’)?
Let’s start out by saying it was my husband’s idea. Around July he began opining on how tasty it would be if we had turducken for Thanksgiving. Now, if you haven’t been previously informed—or don’t pay any attention to the “Popular Searches” box on Yahoo’s homepage, I’m happy to enlighten you. Traditionally, a turducken is a turkey wrapped around a duck wrapped around a chicken—with the appropriate stuffings filled in between each layer of meat. According to the always reliable Wikipedia, its origins are of some dispute (as is generally true of all excessive meat products worth their weight in fat), but it seems to have appeared on the scene earlier this decade. Of course if you have any idea who John Madden is, you’ll also know that the dude loves him some turducken.
For the purposes of our small Thanksgiving assemblage, an entire turducken would be, well, just too much meat. So, a little research yielded a recipe for a turduken breast. This is effectively the same thing but only the breasts and stuffing—a veritable meat roll.
While I knew I could be up to the challenge of paillarding multiple layers of raw foul and then wrapping it all in bacon, I almost wept with joy when the butcher at Whole Foods told me I could order one from their special holiday list.
Well, the idea was good in theory. There seemed to be some sort of confusion when I showed up at the appointed time to procure my pre-ordered turducken breast. After much shuffling and running around, the butcher on duty presented me with what looked like it could be a turducken. He also mentioned that he’d knocked off three dollars a pound for my trouble. Hmmm.
All was explained the next day when I went to prepare the meat for grilling. I opened the neatly packaged birds to find duck. And chicken. But not turkey. Ahha! That explains the apologetic look in the butcher’s eyes. I could have taken it back, but in the spirit of culinary adventure I figured we already had enough birds to feed four. So, I wrapped it in bacon and a baducken was born.
We then covered it in aluminum foil, threw it on the grill for a couple of hours and voila!
I’ll admit, it was pretty tasty, though turducken it was not. Will there be a rematch next year in which I do what I should have done the first time and make the thing myself? Perhaps. Until then, happy Thanksgiving. And, to those of you frying your turkeys this year? I hope you have homeowners insurance.