Turducken #Thanksgiving by Maya Corrigan

We cooked the holiday turkeys in our family for 30 years, always for Thanksgiving and often for Christmas when we had large gatherings. Our numbers are way down now. With older relatives passing on and younger ones moving away, we've had no more than five at our recent Thanksgiving dinners. Not enough eaters for a turkey. We cooked a turkey breast once and a large roaster chicken a few times, but last year I spotted something different in the supermarket—a five-pound turducken roll.

A turducken is a deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck, stuffed with a deboned chicken, which often has a bread stuffing inside it. Bird-in-bird roasts have a history going back to 19th-century France and were popularized here in the last few decades by Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme. 

You can find recipes online for making a turducken from scratch, but for the rolled version, the boning and stuffing is done. Rolled turduckens are usually on the pricey side. I probably wouldn’t have bought one except that the supermarket had heavily discounted it. Apparently, the Louisiana favorite wasn’t selling well in the Mid-Atlantic where I live. 

The instructions for defrosting and roasting the turducken were on the box. 

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Cover the roll with foil and roast for 2 1/2 hours.

Remove the foil and roast for 30 minutes more or until the internal temperature reaches 165°F.

Take the turducken roll from the oven and let it rest for 15-20 minutes before slicing and serving.

The roasting pan had enough juices for me to make gravy.

THE VERDICT

The poultry was a success with my family. They all tried the three meat options and settled on different ones as their favorite. I found every bit of it too salty. For years I've been on a low-salt diet (not a no-salt diet). I lightly salt tomatoes, eggs, and some meat, depending on how much salt went into the cooking of it. Luckily, I ignored the cooking directions that said to salt the turducken before roasting. Still, when I was making the gravy, I had to add a lot of liquid to keep it from being too salty. I ended up eating small bites of the duck with lots of the Pepperidge Farm stuffing we always serve. Everyone else at the table conceded that the meat was a little salty, but that didn't stop them from enjoying it. 

READERS: Are you staying with traditional dishes or are you trying something new for this Thanksgiving?

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The 9th Five-Ingredient Mystery is out!

"Thanks to Val’s and her grandfather’s talent for exposing the truth, even a “perfect crime” will be uncovered...a satisfying read and a riveting murder mystery with a sweet ending."

Library Journal​

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a Victorian house, a love of the culinary arts, and a talent for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in the freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at their house to get to work—and enjoy Granddad’s five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad try to retrace her final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler . . .

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords. 

Visit her website for books news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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