My Meals are on Wheels

One of America’s Favorites – Turducken

30 lb. roasted turducken

Turducken is a dish consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, further stuffed into a deboned turkey. Outside of the United States and Canada, it is known as a three-bird roast. Gooducken is an English variant, replacing turkey with goose.

The word turducken combines turkey, duck, and chicken. The dish is a form of engastration, which is a recipe method in which one animal is stuffed inside the gastric passage of another—twofold in this instance.

The thoracic cavity of the chicken/game hen and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird. The result is a fairly solid layered poultry dish, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing.

The turducken was popularized in America by John Madden, who evangelized about the unusual dish during NFL Thanksgiving Day games and, later, Monday Night Football broadcasts. On one occasion, the commentator sawed through a turducken with his bare hand, live in the booth, to demonstrate the turducken’s contents.

Sausage-stuffed turducken cut into quarters to show the internal layers

Credit for the creation of the turducken is uncertain, though it is generally agreed to have been popularized by Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme. The most common claimant is Hebert’s Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, whose owners Junior and Sammy Hebert say they created it in 1985 “when a local man brought his own birds to their shop and asked the brothers to create the medley”.

In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a “three-bird roast” or a “royal roast”. The Pure Meat Company offered a five-bird roast (a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, stuffed with sausage), described as a modern revival of the traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie, in 1989; and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990.

Gooducken is a goose stuffed with a duck, which is in turn stuffed with a chicken.