hi i'm armand ferrante and i won the
whole foods best butcher 2012
competition as part of the best butcher
competition i made a turducken in less
than 15 minutes here's how to make the
perfect turducken
okay first we deboned the turkey we're
just following the bone around
this is a little tricky here this is
where the thigh hooks into it so you
kind of break the joint
there we go
now it's important not to break through
the skin here when you get to the bottom
of this breast
just lightly stop at the end of the bone
spin it around
and do the same thing here
this is the thigh
where the thigh hooks into the back you
don't want to gouge into it because you
want to make sure the skin
stays intact for when you close it up so
you have to be a little careful here
there we go
now once you get down real low here like
this
you kind of pull it out
you don't really cut through you pull it
like that so you don't rip the skin
through here
it's intact
now we're going to remove just the thigh
bone
from the leg
down each side
and around and then again it's important
not to break through the skin
and the second thigh bone
okay
now the wings stay intact
can't really take those little bones out
and that's pretty much the base of the
turducken
some of this neck skin you could take
off it's not necessary now what i like
to do is open the breast a little
and get some stuffing in here
and fold it back over
so it's layered when you slice it every
every layer has a little bit of stuffing
to it
and it'll give you a nice full turkey
look
even put some in here where this bone
was
so the thighs
get a little stuffing makes it nice and
juicy
now we're going to remove the bone from
the chicken the same way we did the
turkey now this one here you don't have
to be so careful because it will be on
the inside
but it's not good to just tear it up
same thing go down to the bottom
and basically you could just pull the
breast off
now with the chicken
you're going to have to remove the whole
leg bone
even the drumstick
we'll cut the wings off at the second
joint because there isn't much meat and
it just would be too many little pieces
to try and bone that out but we'll take
the one big drum it's called a drumette
a winged drumette
because there's quite a bit of meat on
this one so we can get the bone out
there's our chicken boned out take a
little bit of this extra skin off
and we're going to put a little bit of
stuffing here
and here
and we're going to lay the chicken in
a bit of stuffing in the chicken now
we're using some duck breast instead of
whole duck because this is the better
part of the duck it's the the more
thicker meat we remove the skin from the
duck because it doesn't really crisp up
and it is fatty so we don't want all
that grease inside of our turducken
now we're going to lay these in
now that we have it all stuffed
gets a little tricky at this point
what we're going to do is close up the
back
and make it look like a turkey again
so
need a sewing meet sewing needle
what i'm doing with the needle is i'm
putting it through each side of the
turkey making sure i grab enough skin on
each side
and just passing the string through and
tying a simple knot no different than
you would tie your shoe just to hold the
back together i want to make sure you
get enough skin here and some meat so it
doesn't tear through
now once you have the back sewn up
pretty good
flip it over
and you can see it took some nice shape
just like it had all its bones in it
what i like to do is tie the legs
together
and we'll put a couple strings around it
so it's easier to take in and out of the
pan
i like to put one this way just to bring
the legs up so we try to get it to cook
most evenly
and one more back here
and we're done
and there's our turducken a wonderful
holiday dinner
once the turducken's ready for the oven
you can cook it for 25 to 30 minutes per
pound at 3.75 now you want the internal
temperature
to be 160
and you also want it to rest for at
least a half an hour so when you do
carve it it stays intact and each guest
gets a nice piece of chicken turkey and
duck in one slice