Hi All, I’m a newbie and need advice, please. We would like to cook a ready rolled turducken as our main course, for our Xmas dinner this year. Any help and advice will be gratefully appropriated.
Because it’s a mixture of poultry and you want your chicken in the middle to be pasteurised I’d use the Baldwin poultry pasteurisation table. The time really depends on the thickness of your product. Estimate the diameter of your roll and the temperature you want to cook at and then select the time based upon these.
I’d probably be considering 140F/60C for around 8-10 hours. Or you can go for a higher temperature to bring the time down a bit.
I’ll have to admit, I’ve never cooked a Franken-fowl, so I’ll be interested to hear your results.
I would suggest looking up the individual temperatures for each bird, then using the highest one to be safe. Time-wise, I heard that heat penetrates an inch every half hour, so use that as a guideline I guess? Though if in doubt, opt for a longer cook time.
Serious highly perishable stuffing and size alert Rickard.
My first thought is: - Don’t do it!
And be prepared to be disappointed, they are very difficult to cook properly from fresh because of the mixture of meats, and i would judge just about impossible to cook competently from the frozen state. I suggest you never ever attempt to thaw and cook one unless you are looking forward to having serious GI tract challenges.
I attended one of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s culinary workshops, Turducken’s inventor, where he demonstrated one and i thought it was just a messy and not particularly good but interesting novelty. I see his company no longer sells them.
The SV danger is in low temp cooking of such a large item, if you have the genuine product. The authentic turduckens i’ve cooked yielded about 30 portions each. Far too big for any SV cook.
Now if you want to cook a toy Turducken, it may be doable. I’ve seen some small frozen ones using just bits of the birds wrapped around andouille stuffing, but never considered trying one. They were small enough to cook SV, about 3 or 4-inches thick, but only just.
If you have a small one consider taking it to a butcher and ask that it be cut in half on the band saw. Unless you are a very good and regular customer it’s going to cost you because it takes about a half-hour to clean and sanitize the saw after cutting raw poultry. Vacuum seal the halves and cook as Ember suggested above. That would give you the Turducken experience without much risk. You might even enjoy it.
Happy cooking.