Deconstructing Turkey

describes experience of deboning turkey - ideal for Thanksgiving or Christmas parties - squeamish people or vegans should avert their eyes - not a how-to manual

In the beginning...

9th October 2008
Ben and I were helping out at the foodbank on Thursday because they were short of staff. At the end of the day, Sairah, the coordinator asked us if we could do with a turkey on Thanksgiving. Apparently a local church was doing the friendly blessing thing for the needy.

"Sure," said Ben. "And if Tim doesn't want his, we can take it too," he joked. He jumped at the chance because neither of us have had turkey on Thanksgiving before, and I suppose we had quite a bit to be thankful for this year.

I figured the turkey would be cooked, but Ben insisted that it wouldn't be. So either way, we went home, wondering how we were going to cook the turkey, considering our oven doesn't work.

We found out about the oven the hard way. One day, a few weeks before, I had decided to make us a casserole. I can't quite remember what I put in it, as it came out as quite a bit of a disappointment, but I do remember that there were potatoes in them. Lots of potatoes. Potatoes that ended up not being cooked, because our lower element wasn't working. It was quite a tragic dinner.

The turkey cometh

11th October 2008
It was a Saturday, and there was a lot of things to do at home. Cleaning up, for the most part. There was a knock at the door. It turned out to be someone from the Korean Church delivering the turkey. It wasn't cooked at all. Looks like Ben won that one. We took the turkey into the kitchen, placed it on the counter and had a good look at it.

"It's a biggun," I said.

"Ahuh, must be about 27 lbs," said Ben. I grew up on the metric system, so I had no clue what that meant. To me, it was a tremendously large bird.

I read the card it came with. It was a simple card, with a rough drawing of a cross on it and a scarecrow-like figure. It was scrawled on with a child's handwriting, in blue ballpoint ink. It said: To the Aubry family. It also encouraged us to be thankful to God, but I didn't really notice that bit.

The Aubry Family. That had a nice ring to it. It's a long story meant for another post, but Ben and I struggled for many years before we could spend this time together, and we may have more struggles to come. Either way, we're taking everyday as it comes, and to be referred to as a family, even inadvertently, well, that was touching. Ironically, the Korean Church may not even have approved of us living together.

I left the card on the fridge door and it's still there today. I meant to send the Korean Christians a Kamsa Hamipda (thank you) card, but I got distracted. And, well, even though we're not Christians (we were both born in Roman Catholic families but we sort of wandered away from that), we've both been through enough not to be affected by the Godly blessings. To be honest, I really only like the bit that called us a family.

I turned to look at the turkey. We can't possibly roast anything in our oven. I mean, if the thing can't do potatoes, chances are, we'd still have a raw turkey in the oven the next day.

Still, all was not lost. The night before, I had chanced on an article mentioning alternatives to roasting a whole turkey, and one of it was on deboning it.

Deboning.


It pretty much means removing the bones. Neat. Some people actually remove all the bones, stuff it and sew it back, and roast the whole thing. An interesting concept that I may consider for another year, but the idea disturbs me somehow. I mean, if we are going to eat meat, we should be reminded that we are indeed eating meat (I'll leave my thoughts about the sanitization of meat-eating to another time)

Since there's only two of us, and there is that oven problem, we decided to just cut up the turkey into bits and store it into the freezer. I was left with the knife, because I seemed more keen about the whole deboning idea, and because I have had experience in such matters i.e. I mutilated lots of rats in the laboratory plus I have a general idea of what a bird skeleton should look like.

Now, an interesting point that not many people know about, is that the method for deboning a turkey is actually patented! Amazing, isn't it? United States Patent 6572467. I considered briefly whether what I'm doing here, writing about deboning a turkey, is violating that patent. But I've already found the method in a few places and they didn't mention the patent. In fact, who's to say they didn't come up with it first.

Either way, what I'm doing here is cutting up a bird. Again, this isn't a how-to manual, but a description of my experiences. So if anyone has any problems, I'll deal with it when it comes. For now, enjoy the turkey fun.

Deboning the turkey (or bye-bye birdie)

The first bit, after removing the plastic wrapping, of course, was to figure out which was the head end, and which was the butt end of the turkey. Simple enough that. I won't insult you by giving instructions.

And before I forget, I should note that deboning is better done with a fully thawed out turkey, or one you had just shot and killed and plucked. The turkey I was working with was neither freshly killed, nor was it fully thawed out. It was warm to the touch, for sure, outside. But inside, as I found out later the hard way (pun not intended), it was still frozen.

Now, the other thing you need to know about chopping up a bird, is that it works better if you just sliced the meat near the joint area, and once you reach the joints itself, to just saw around it. At home, mum uses a gigantic cleaver, but all I had here were paring knives and some meat knives. Still, it did the job. I think the most difficult thing was trying to cut up that weird piece of plastic holding the legs together.

There were points where I just peered into the turkey's, well, you know, nether regions. All the jokes I've read point to there being something nasty hiding in there, and sure enough, I found a packet of mystery meat. It's either gizzards or turkey giblet. I haven't figured out if they're the same thing yet. Back home, in our roasted turkey from the deli, we'd find something that looks a lot like a salami. This turkey ritual, plenty of mysteries left to solve...

The instructions tell me to cut off the turkey butt next. I didn't do that though, because it didn't have one. The turkey butt is where all the glands are that make it the most delicious and gross bit to eat. Probably quite unhealthy too, because it's all oil. But did you know that they synthesized the oil from ducks? It's good for your skin apparently.

I had to make the turkey dance. Yeah, I know, the turkey's dead, but it's still sort of stiff and all, and I wanted to chop off the legs. So I grabbed both legs and sort of wiggled it about a bit. That loosened it up enough. I figured it was time to start the slicing and dicing. Taking a deep breath, I picked up a sharp knife, and started slicing around the drumstick area. I reached the bone, and just sawed around the joints as I mentioned earlier.

There, one drumstick ready. Time to rock and roll! I repeated the same thing on the other side. The turkey is symmetrical after all. On the outside anyways. Remind me to tell you about my asymmetrical labrat. Boy, did my teacher make me feel stupid that day even though it wasn't my fault at all.

I lied when I said all turkeys are symmetrical on the outside. This turkey only had one wingtip. I sliced that out and put it in the "bone pile". Then I sliced out the other wing bits on both ends, and tossed it into the same pile as the drumsticks.

So then, I was left with a turkey with no appendages. I turned the turkey unto it's belly (or breast down), and made a slice down the back. This part came out quite well for me, actually. And then, I started working my way to the breastbone from the cut.

Here's the bit that got pretty confusing. I'm supposed to make a slice on the shoulder bit, and work my way to the breastbone through the single slice I made on the back. And then I'm supposed to do the same thing on the back areas and then pull out the hipbone. This all did not happen. And since I wasn't all that concerned about sewing the turkey back into one disturbingly deboned pile, I decided to just hack at the whole pile, rituals and traditions be darned!

I rested, because by now, I'd been standing and cutting away at a cold turkey for more than an hour. I needed the break. My photographer, Ben, had wandered away vaguely by now. He tends to do that from time to time, when he thinks he's not needed in the kitchen.

I managed to corral him to take more pictures, and after warming my fingers on warm water, went back to the job of hacking up meat. I wondered what this would be like if it was freshly killed game. I suppose the smell and the head of the animal would bother me.

I did half of the bird, and then moved to do the other half. Had I been less tired and less cold, I would have remembered that the whole thing was supposed to connect together (if I wanted to sew the bird back together). So if you want to do this, just be mindful and keep the breastmeat together.

I removed all the meat around the shoulder area, and managed to slice my way to the breastbone, despite the bird being quite frozen at that point. I did the same in the hipbone area, and, seeing as I wasn't sure how to break the hipbone, just left the whole thing on the carcass. The meat on the hind areas of the turkey is redder than the breast area, so I put it in a separate pile, figuring that it'll probably taste different. And that was true in the end, the meat had a bit more fat in it too.

And then, suddenly, I was done.

Putting the meat away

On the counter was various bits and pieces of meat, and some piles of bone. I wanted to work fast to put it away, before Salmonella and such would grow on the meat. I had to corral Ben again to help me with this.

I have this technique of putting the saran wrap on a plate, placing the meat on it, and then wrapping it up. It saves us from a lot of useless flapping around. After wrapping the meat in saran wrap, I placed it in a bigger freezer bag to ensure that the juices does not leak.

The drumsticks were wrapped separately. The wings put together. The breast meat chopped up in blocks enough for one person to eat for dinner. I even had a bit with lots of fat and meat together. I thought of deep frying it or something, so I dumped that in a separate pile. We ended up with three freezer bags full of turkey, all in all.

Eventually, these bits of turkey ended up being various sorts of dinners. We had them diced with creamy sauce in pasta or with rice, or pan broiled in a huge block and eaten as a "roast" (albeit a more juicy one than if it was a full bird), and then we had stuffed turkey breast wrapped in bacon. I'll post the recipe later for some of these.

Bones

I stared at all the bones. There was still some raw meat stuck to them. And I decided we could do with some broth. So I dumped the bones into a big pot, put in enough water to cover the thing, and boiled it at a rolling boil for about 20 minutes. Then I left the thing alone, and whenever I felt like it, repeated the method. I think I boiled the thing at least three times that night.

The next day, I fished out the bones, and with my fingers, pulled all the meat out of the bones. The bones I tossed away. And as for the meat, I turned them into turkey burgers. No tofurkey for me! (I like my tofu to resemble tofu, thank you very much, turkey burger recipe to follow.) As for the broth, I put them into containers and froze it for use another time.

One more thing I should note about. Remember when I mentioned weird turkey rituals, and also about the surprises that you can sometimes find when you stick your hands up a cleaned-out turkey's ass? Well, there's a reason all the photos stopped after awhile, and that's because I found something I didn't want to take a photo of.

When I was deboning the bird, I had to allow for some thawing out to happen, because it was frozen on the inside. Eventually, I managed to stick my hands in, and because there was something hiding inside, I pulled it out.

Shock and horror, it turned out to be turkey neck. Ack! I don't know why that grossed me out especially considering all the blood and gore I had gone through by then. But the thought of the poor turkey being killed and then nicely wrapped as meat with it's own neck inside it's body cavity, shoved up through it's ass, well, that just turned my stomach in a weird kind of way. I don't know why that is, but well, I'll leave that bit of philosophising for others, I guess.

I just wanted to share my happy experiences cutting away at a dead bird, and it looks like I did my job. Happy Turkey Day!