Make A Turducken - Step by Step Instructions

There’s this video, a time lapse that shows a team of butchers at Black Hill Meats debone a whole hog. Led by chef and rancher Felix Florez, they carve out the rib cage, remove back and neck bones, slit open back legs to lift out all bones and do the same with the front legs. They work meticulously fast and efficient, carving intricately close to the bone so no meat is wasted. 

It is spellbinding.

At the fourth annual Butcher’s Ball, held at the beautiful Rockin’ Star Ranch in Brenham, one of the butchers in that video, Chef Jessica DeSham Timmons of Cherryblock Butcher & Seasonal Kitchen, is in action again. She demonstrates how to debone a turkey for turducken. “Once you know your bird,” she says, “deboning a turkey isn’t any different from deboning a chicken.” For her, used to deboning whole hogs, turducken is child’s play anyway.

Turducken. For anyone not familiar with the culinary tradition in these parts of Texas and Louisiana, a turducken is a boneless turkey stuffed with a boneless duck stuffed with a boneless chicken. Packed in the cavities is a cornbread or rice dressing, popularly enriched with spicy sausage like andouille but oysters and crawfish are also common. The whole thing is baked until succulent and crisp-skinned.

Who came up with turducken is a matter of local opinion. Many credit Louisiana’s iconic chef Paul Prudhomme with its invention, in the 1970s. But engastration—a culinary technique of stuffing one animal inside another to cook—exists at least since the Middle Ages, and examples can be found the world over. Even in the arctic: In Greenland I learned about a traditional Inuit winter food known as kiviak, which is seal stuffed with whole, unplucked and head-on seabirds left to ferment. I’ll take turducken any day.

Chef Richard Knight of Atlas Diner HTX  is in the same tent, looking on as Chef Timmons debones her turkey. Stuffing birds with birds is nothing new to Houston’s uncrowned king of nose-to-tail. He used to do as many as six birds, he tells me: “Turkey, duck, chicken, Cornish hen, poussin and quail, all deboned.” And he would add an anchovy-stuffed olive inside the smallest bird, a nod to Alexandre Dumas’ Anchovy Monte Cristo.

One of the most absurd engastration examples is perhaps the much-written about Rôti Sans Pareil, or “roast like no other”. It lists a mind boggling 17 birds, all stuffed one into the other. Rôti Sans Pareil sprang from the imagination of an early 1800s French gastronome, with a name almost as long as his list of birds: Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimond de la Reyniere. Outside the more kitchen-common birds like turkey, goose, duck and chicken, his selection includes species that should be on a birder’s list, not a cook’s. Think plover, thrush, lark, garden warbler, bunting and ortolan. 

Ornithologists will be relieved to learn that the 17-bird behemoth is a description rather than a recipe, and not likely to have ever actually been made, at least not like that. But different multi-bird roasts exist, typically using different game birds and various duck species.

Compared to an engastration of 17 flying, waddling and wading birds, turducken may seem boring but it nevertheless makes quite the piece de resistance in its own right. And it is something we can actually do at home.