Prepackaged Turducken

Found in the Hannaford supermarket in Brattleboro Vermont last Saturday:

Yeah, a ready-to-cook fifteen-pound turducken.  The price tag was $49.95.  No, I didn't buy it.  I've had enough turducken for the time being.

My Heinous Turducken

Not everything that I make is an unqualified success.  Last weekend, for example, I put together a turducken for a big family dinner.  A turducken, you may know, is a medieval-style feast of poultry - a chicken stuffed within a duck, stuffed within a turkey, each of the birds having been carefully boned and layered with bread dressings.  It was a lot of work, and required a lot of resources, and when it was all said and done, I was less than happy with the results.  Oh, the family and friends gathered around the table thought it was fine.  I just didn't think it measured up to my customary standards.

This turducken came about because of a marvelous alignment of events.  I had originally planned a simple turkey dinner featuring a bird I had purchased and frozen a few months ago.  A day or so into the thawing cycle, I was at Stop & Shop and found a plump duck on sale - a Manager's Special - for less than half the normal price.  I took that duck home with visions of Five Spice Crispy Duck dancing in my head.  Only after getting the duck home and placing it in the fridge next to the turkey did the thought of turducken cross my mind.

And so it was that on Saturday morning, I made up three large batches of stuffing: one of traditional sage-and-onion, one of cornbread, and a third with sausage.  On Saturday afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table with a sharp boning knife and got to work on the poultry, removing all of the bones from the chicken and duck, and all but the wings and leg bones from the turkey.  I guess the idea is to have the finished turducken look like a regular stuffed turkey.  It doesn't quite work out like that, though - without a ribcage in there supporting the exterior, my turducken looked less like a stuffed turkey and more like a very pale obese midget had been beheaded, hogtied, and dropped into my roasting pan.  It weighed a bit more than 38 pounds.

The next morning, with all the stuffing and trussing done, I stabbed a couple of temperature probes into the frankenbird and slid it into a 300F oven, covering the roaster to prevent the meat from drying out during what I figured to be an eight-plus hour cooking time.

It did, indeed, take eight-plus hours.  Closer to nine.  And despite my best efforts - low heat, covering the roaster for most of the cooking time, frequent basting - the turkey still came out dry.  At a couple of places, the skin had burst and allowed stuffing to leak out and slowly harden in the heat of the oven.  The outside quarter-inch of turkey had been dessicated into turkey jerky, and the thin meat around the lower legs and cavity were mummified.

Luckily, my family was pretty understanding, especially my mother (the veteran of no few culinary disasters of her own) and still willing to give the final product a try. 

As I cut slices from the monster, it became clear that this turducken was really no worse than any of the others that people have photographed for the Web.  And, although the outermost bits of turkey were dry to the point of inedibility, it improved somewhat towards the duck layer.

While I thought of it as only a marginal success (if that) the other diners were pleased.  I attribute that not to the turducken, but to the deliciousness of the peripherals - the stuffings, helped along by fat and juices from the chicken and duck skins, were stellar and simmering the bones from the birds for so many hours yielded an awesome stock to make gravy.

I think if I ever make a turducken again, it will be a much less bothersome version.  I will use only the breasts of the various fowl and pound them out flat before layering them with the stuffings and rolling them up into the form of a normal rolled roast, tying it the same way.  The roasting time will be much shorter, the prep will be easier (much more like rolling and tying a pork belly for pancetta) and everyone will still get lovely slices of turkey, duck, chicken, and stuffings.

Turkey Croquettes

So, Thanksgiving is over and the Festival of Leftovers has begun.  I'm actually a little short on turkey at the moment, because a houseful of family and friends pretty much wiped out my 23-pound bird - which came out awesome, by the way, thanks for asking.

When I was a kid, my grandmother - Grandma Billie - always made turkey croquettes from leftover turkey on the day after Thanksgiving.  I decided to dig out her recipe and honor tradition by making croquettes myself on Friday.

Actually, the recipe I'm going to share with you is my adaptation of her version.  Grandma Billie was a great cook, but her croquettes were a little bland.  Also, I like to crumb fried stuff with panko for extra crispiness, and she just used to use dry bread crumbs.

Turkey Croquettes
Serves 6

6 tablespoons butter
½ cup flour
1 cup milk
1 cup turkey or chicken broth
a handful of chopped parsley
1 small onion, grated, include the juice from grating
½ teaspoon Bell's poultry seasoning (or other poultry seasoning)
½ teaspoon celery salt
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
Freshly ground pepper to taste
4 cups cooked turkey, ground
2 eggs, beaten with milk to make an egg wash

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter, then blend in the flour to make a roux.  Cook the roux for a few minutes, then add the milk and broth and whisk over medium heat occasionally as the mixture begins to thicken and bubble.  Stir in the parsley, onion, and seasonings and turn off the heat under the pan when the gravy thickens up.  Set the gravy aside to cool.

Meanwhile, run leftover turkey through your food chopper to make 4 cups of ground cooked turkey.  Mix up light meat and dark for best flavor.

In a large bowl, fold the gravy into the turkey and mix well, like you would a batter.  When the ingredients are thoroughly combined, refrigerate the mixture until it is well chilled.  This is important, because the croquettes will fall apart in the pan if they are not well chilled before being fried.

Wet your hands and form the croquette mixture into small cylinders.  (I know cone shapes are traditional, but really, cylinders are so much easier to work with.)  Roll each cylinder in panko crumbs, then swirl it around in the egg wash and finally, roll around in the panko again.  Fry the croquettes in shallow oil, turning frequently to brown evenly, until crispy golden-brown.  Drain on paper, and serve with turkey gravy.

After making the croquettes, I have even more admiration for Grandma Billie than the considerable amount I had before.  Those little bastards are a lot of work. I think they take even more effort than making the turkey to begin with.

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow, and like most Americans we'll be having a large dinner with family and friends.  In recent years, I've taken over the cooking and hosting duties from my mother, and as in years past we'll be enjoying a smoked turkey.

This time around, we're having more people in for dinner than usual.  In addition to family members, several friends are joining us.  I like to send everyone home with some leftovers, so when I started looking for a bird, I kept my eye open for something a little larger than our usual 16- to 18-pounder.

I wound up with a very decently-sized 23-pound turkey which was gifted to me by a friend.  Because it's a natural bird without any injected "solutions," I have it on the porch right now, brining in preparation for tomorrow's slow roast in the smoker.  I use a very simple brine for my turkey: to every gallon of water required, I add 1 cup of kosher salt, ½ cup of brown sugar, ¼ cup of mixed pickling spice, and 2 tablespoons of peppercorns.  This year's bird required three gallons of brine to cover it, and to make sure it brines evenly, I give the bird a turn each time I pass by the cooler.

But a complication arose:  I wanted to make sure that the bigger turkey would fit into my smoker, and when I tested it, I found that with the turkey in standard position on the rack, the door of the smoker won't close.  O NOES!!1!  WAT DO??

Photo by
Spectrum Diversified

I decided to stand the turkey on end for the roasting time, but wasn't quite sure about how to do it.  I keep a spool of heavy-gauge baling wire on hand to custom-make hanging hooks and racks for smoking, but I was worried about properly supporting the full weight of the bird hanging from a rack in the smoker.  Obviously, the best thing would be a vertical roasting rack , but I'm not sure anyone locally has them in stock and besides, the 30- to 40-dollar price tag of those contraptions rubbed my penny-pinching, broke-ass fur the wrong way.   But a company called Spectrum Diversified makes a simple and inexpensive nickel-plated paper towel holder of steel rod which they sell online and at Bed Bath & Beyond.  It is very sturdy, tall enough that the central loop passes all the way through from the base to the neck cavity of the dressed bird, and stable enough to keep the bird from tipping over during the cooking time.  I bought one last night at the local BB&B and tested it out, and it looks like that will do the trick.

I've had my smoker for several years now and I'm fairly happy with it.  Only in the past couple of years has it begun to seem a little small for my needs, but this kind of gave me the incentive to move up to a larger size.  Looks like I'll finally be doing something about it - I've got the design for a much bigger and more versatile smoker in my head, and if the weather holds up, I'll probably start working on it after the holiday.

The Pot Pie Buyer's Guide

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved pot pies.  Back then, my mom used to buy Banquet pies because they were infinitely cheap - something like 20 cents apiece, on sale - and a bunch of hungry kids could be fed for a couple of bucks.  Although Banquet pies aren't anything like the best on the market, I still buy them now and then.  We had them often enough as kids that they're comfort food.

Anyway, over the past couple of months, I've been buying and eating various brands of commercial pot pies in an effort to rank them by taste and quality.  Price and overall quality are pretty closely related with pot pies, so when you go shopping for any of the brands I've reviewed you'd be safe in assuming that the lowest-ranked pies are going to make the smallest dent in your lunch budget.  But even with that in mind, you should know that any of them, even the worst of the bunch, are still enjoyable in their own way. With only one perhaps surprising exception, I liked every pie I tried and would buy them again.

So, let's take a look, starting at the bottom.

LOWEST QUALITY:

Sharing last place are Valu-Time (made for and distributed by Topco,) Banquet (made by ConAgra,) and Bremer (one of ALDI's house brands) 7-ounce frozen pies, which are so similar that they are virtually indistinguishable.  All three have top and bottom crusts, a large amount of salty, artificial-tasting gravy, and little squares of soft spongy "meat" which are actually cut-up bits of processed, pressed, and formed poultry loaf.  The meat also varies in color from light to dark, simulating actual white and dark meat from poultry. Vegetables include potatoes, carrots, and peas, but like the meat, they are in small pieces, thinly distributed.  Although the crusts of  these pies are thin, the top crusts at least cook up fairly flaky.   I've found that the bottom crusts, of the Valu-Time and Banquet pies seem to  have a tendency to remain undercooked and a little gooey even after the rest of the pie is ready when the pies are prepared in a microwave.  For all their faults, however, I still keep coming back to these cheap pies - especially Banquet - for nostalgia's sake. 

Banquet pot pies can be found just about everywhere, usually for about a dollar when they're not on sale.  Valu-Time pot pies can be found at any supermarket that sells Topco products, such as Big Y, Harris Teeter, and Price Chopper.  The price varies depending on the store, but Big Y was selling them for under a dollar and I suspect that's close to the going rate.  And Bremer pies, of course, can be found at ALDI in the frozen prepared foods section.  When I bought them, they were a pretty good deal at 85 cents each.

SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN LOWEST:

There isn't a lot of difference between the Swanson 7-ounce pot pie and the low-quality pies I've already mentioned.  The crust is just about the same and the fillings are similar.  But the gravy in the Swanson pie seemed thicker and more natural-tasting to me, so I thought it should be in a slightly better category.

However, all things being equal, I pass up the Swanson for the Banquet most of the time because Swanson is priced higher, and the difference in quality is not at all commensurate with the difference in price.



GOOD QUALITY

Marie Callender's 7 ounce pies are made by ConAgra - just like the Banquet pies - but the difference is so striking that you'd never guess they were produced by the same company!  These pies have white meat only (still cut from formed loaves) in much larger cuts and more generous distribution, and much better gravy.  These pies also have top and bottom crusts, but the pastry is thicker, flakier, and just overall better than the low quality versions.

These 7-ounce pies can be a bit harder to find than their slightly-larger 10-ounce version, but you can usually find them in multi-packs at Costco.

Marie Callender's 10-ounce pies are exactly the same composition as the smaller 7-ounce version.  The same good gravy, the same big chunks of white meat and larger vegetable cuts, the same flaky pastry - just 3 ounces more of it.  Ten-ounce pies are easier to find in the stores than the 7-ounce sizes.

Bremer Select 10-ounce pies (by ALDI) are sold in 4-pack boxes only. They are 2-crust pies with excellent pastry (thick and flaky) good chicken gravy, large chunks of real white-meat chicken, and generous vegetables.  I was pretty impressed by the quality of these pies, but while I consider them to be superior to the Marie Callender pies, they are similar enough to share a rating.

VERY GOOD QUALITY:

Boston Market 16 oz pie, top and bottom crust.  The pie has lots of meat (white and dark) but also seems to have odd chunks of cartilage.  The gravy is quite good, and the vegetables - carrot, corn, and green bean. - are generous and fresh-tasting. The crust is flaky and decent, even on the bottom. This pie should be a winner, but there is something about the Boston Market pies I've tried that almost nauseates me. The  gravy has a "slippery" mouthfeel, a vague and unpleasant gumminess that triggers my gag reflex. Because the other aspects of the pie are so good, though, I'm willing to give Boston Market the benefit of the doubt - it's possible that there's something about the recipe that I don't care for, but you won't mind.  So here it is, in the "Very Good" category.

Meanwhile, the Stouffer's 16-ounce pot pie is really great.  It's loaded with lots of big pieces of white-meat chicken, great veggies, and the gravy tastes, no kidding, like homemade.  The crust is just the right thickness, delicious tender and flaky.  I guess the only fault with it would be that it's a bit saltier than the Boston Market (still less salty than the bottom-rated pies, though.)

EXCELLENT QUALITY:

It is a testament to the outstanding attention to quality at Budd Foods of Manchester New Hampshire that all three of the pies rated "Excellent" are their products.

Bistro Cuisine chicken pot pies are made by Budd and advertised as "The World's Finest Chicken Pie."  That's not too much of an exaggeration. The single crust on top is a generous circle of awesome puff pastry which sits atop delicious gravy, true white meat chicken, and vegetables including corn, peas, and carrots.  My only complaint about Bistro Cuisine was that the gravy was very thick - thicker than I like it - but the other qualities of the pie are so outstanding that I can't take points off.

Mrs. Budd's Fully Baked White Meat Chicken Pie is usually sold in the refrigerated prepared meats section.  All they require is a thorough heating in the oven and they're good to go, but they do include microwave instructions.  After our local Shaw's supermarket closed, I hadn't realized Mrs. Budd's were still available around here until I got a Tweet from Sproffee one afternoon:  "This microwave pot pie is surprisingly and delightfully delicious."  She pretty much summed up Mrs. Budd's pies right there.  Big chunks of chicken breast meat, fresh-tasting veggies, and homestyle gravy bubbling under a delicious shortcrust pastry.  Well worth the $3.50 or so at the store.

I have similar high praise for Mrs. Budd's Fully Cooked White Meat Chicken Pie with broccoli, carrots, and pearl onions.  Once again, this is a single-crust pie which is topped with an excellent, flaky, tender disk of shortcrust pastry.  The homestyle gravy is just as delicious in this pie as in the other Mrs. Budd's offering, though it has a bit of a greenish tinge to it from the broccoli.  There are big chunks of white meat, and the broccoli isn't in tiny little mushy bits but rather in two or three generous florets which still maintain their shape and their almost-crispy texture.  I was quite favorably surprised at that (I expected soft and squishy overcooked broccoli.)  The only problem I had was that I just couldn't find any pearl onions in either of the pies I bought.  Maybe they melted away into the gravy during the cooking time?  No matter what happened to those elusive onions, though, it won't stop me from recommending the pies.

BEST IN SHOW:

As I said in the beginning of this post, I really like pot pies and I'd gladly enjoy even the worst ones on this list.  But there is one brand I tried that is head and shoulders above the rest.  It is also by far the most expensive of the pies - but remember, I did warn you that quality and price are quite intimately related when it comes to pot pie selection.


Willow Tree Chicken Pot Pie, made in Attleboro MA and distributed primarily in New England, is a top-crust-only pie which comes frozen in an aluminum pie pan and must be baked in either a conventional or a toaster oven, no microwaves allowed.  The crust is gorgeous and tastes homemade, and so does the splendid chicken gravy.  But what is most noticeable about Willow Tree pies is what's missing.  There are no vegetables or filler of any kind in them, they're just meat, gravy, and crust.

There are no tricks here, no compressing white chicken meat into an easily-portioned rectangular mass, not even any slipping in smaller irregular bits to round out the weight for the packing scale.  The picture speaks for itself and shows you exactly what you get under that pastry: big chunks of chicken breast meat, cooked absolutely perfectly, with a generous portion of gravy (enough to dress a scoop of mashed potatoes) and a delicious circle of pastry as well.  This pie truly deserves its "Best In Show" honors.
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Thanksgiving Turkey: To Brine or Not to Brine?

Thanksgiving Day is a couple of weeks away, and food writers everywhere - newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV and radio - are passing along their "essential tips" for making the perfect roasted turkey.  Over the past few years, it seems like the most common piece of advice everyone gives is:  Brine The Turkey!

Brining, as everyone from Alton Brown to About-dot-com will tell you, helps a roasted turkey stay juicy and delicious.  The salt in the brine causes the meat to absorb water (and any flavorings you may have added) while partially breaking down proteins in the meat.  With more water in the bird to start with, the meat can lose moisture during the long cooking time without becoming dry or stringy.

For the past ten or twelve years, my family has sat down to a turkey dinner featuring delicious smoked turkey.  I use a hot smoking process, keeping the smoker at about 250 degrees F over pleasant fruitwood smoke (apple or citrus) until a meat thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh reaches about 160 degrees F or even a little less.  (That whole 180-degree thing?  Yeah, that's  a holdover from the "Let's Cook The Living Shit Out Of Everything We Eat" culinary school of the early 20th century, and it's way too high a temp  if you don't want severely overdone bird.)

Generally, I brine everything that goes into the smoker.  Brining is a great method for curing pork cuts, bacon, tongues, corned beef, and so on, and there's no doubt that meats held over the heat for a long time don't dry out if they're tanked up with water to begin with.  The first few turkeys I smoked were brined.

And then one Thanksgiving, in the hectic swirl of preparations, I forgot to brine the damn bird.  I didn't realize it until I actually went into the fridge to fetch the turkey and put it into the smoker.  There was no help for it - the turkey had to go in right then to be on time for our dinner guests and there was no time for the luxury of a soak in a seasoned saltwater bath.

The turkey came out perfect nonetheless, and I think I know why.

First, I held the smoker at a low temperature, and I kept a pan of water just over the heat source.  The "moist heat" environment kept the bird from losing too much moisture over the 5-hour-or-so cooking time.

Second - and this is probably equally important - the turkey was "pre-brined" by the processor.  Take a look at the label of most supermarket turkeys and you'll find a statement in very fine print that tells you that the turkey "contains up to n% solution" with n varying depending on the brand.  Really, if the processor is already adding a brine to the turkey before it gets to the store, there isn't much point to me adding additional brining to it.

Since then, if I'm smoking a commercially processed turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, I don't bother with the brine.  I still brine it if I'm using a free-range or backyard flock bird.  But my advice to you is read the labels carefully.  The label will always note if the bird has an added solution or if there is a percentage of retained water from processing (and you should know that even some poultry labeled "minimally processed" can still contain retained water.

Wild Turkeys

The company where I work is located at the edge of town in a fairly rural area.   We regularly get visited by a variety of different wildlife.  Today a flock of wild turkeys strolled right up to the building to graze on tasty dogwood berries from the tree at the entrance.  They were making happy clucking noises as they fed on the berries and were fairly unconcerned as I walked out the door and past them to take some pictures.

Strange Gizzards

So I get my chicken home and pull out the gizzard bag from the cavity and open it up.  Every time I buy a chicken, that little bag is like a lottery ticket.  Most of the time, I get pretty much what I expect - a couple gizzards, a heart, a liver, and a neck.  But sometimes there's a bonus...extra livers maybe, or two necks.  This time there wasn't any liver or necks.  Just hearts.  Eleven of them.

Eleven hearts!  I got the One-Eyed Jack of chickens!

Balut: The Most Hardcore, Bad-assed Hard Boiled Egg On Earth.

So, last weekend I finally got up the courage to try balut, which is the Filipino name for an embryonic duck cooked in the shell and served warm.  They're quite a popular "street food" in the Phillippines, where they are sold just about everywhere, and they are equally popular in Vietnam, where they're called hot vit lon and considered quite a delicacy.

My snack began at A. Dong Supermarket in West Hartford CT - the largest and most fully-stocked Asian market in the area.  In the main aisle in front of the cash registers, there is always a case of what they call "Baby Duck Eggs."  Lynnafred and I were there Saturday, and on the way out I bought two duck eggs.  Lynnafred made a gagging noise.  "You're going to make balut, aren't you?  I don't want to be anywhere near the kitchen when you start that shit."

 The next morning I brought a pot of water up to a full rolling boil and eased the eggs into the boiling water.  As I expected, they bobbed around at the top of the pot when they went in - after all, these eggs were "past their prime" for omelets.

Instructions I found on the web mentioned that I should cook the eggs for 20 to 30 minutes.  I set the timer for 20 minutes and moved on to other cooking duties, making breakfast for Maryanne and Lynnafred.

When the timer went off, I removed the eggs with a slotted spoon and set them in a small bowl to cool a bit.  But I couldn't quite wait to see what they looked like inside, so I tapped the side of one of the eggs and took a peek.  Hmm.  Couldn't see much - just the inner membrane pulled over a kind of lumpy-looking yellowness inside.  Not very unusual looking, really.  I set them aside to cool while the rest of the family finished their standard sausage-and-egg breakfast.

When they were cool enough to handle (but still warm) I peeled off some more of the shell and then carefully tore open the inner membrane to "open" the egg.  I took a sniff.  It smelled - and tasted - like strong chicken broth that had simmered for hours.  Quite delicious, though I admit the glimpse of what was hiding within the egg unsettled me a bit...

I peeled the remainder of the egg and took a look at my delicate tidbit.  This is where cultural conditioning took over and I started to have second thoughts.  North Americans tend to think of developing eggs as "chicks," "babies," or "peeps," not as a munchie to be casually NOMmed with a beer.  Lynnafred, as promised, left the kitchen when I first started cracking open the shell, but Maryanne had stuck it out up to this point.  She took a look at the yellow and white lump in my hand and said, "Eugggh.  That is really...eeww.  Sorry, I can't stay in here any longer."

The grey area at the top of the egg is the neck and head of the developing chick - the fine grey lines are actually partially-developed feathers.  The round white bump on the upper right is the eye socket of the head.  From this angle, you can't see the tiny wing folded against the body.  As I bit my way through the egg, I did find identifiable duck parts - wings, legs, feet, and so on.  The "innards" were cooked pretty uniformly throughout; they looked and tasted like chicken liver.  The yellow parts - formerly the yolk of the egg - was solid and rather waxy, reminding me a little of lobster roe (but without the oceanic taste or crumbly texture.)

Overall, the flavor was quite good - very much like strongly-flavored liver paté.  The only unsettling parts - other than the looks - were some of the textures.  The rib cage of the chick was fairly well-developed and, although the bones were soft, had a kind of "bristly" texture that I found a little unsettling.  There were, though, only three parts that proved more or less inedible.  In the picture at left, top to bottom:

Eggwhite - as hard as a rubber eraser and just as difficult to bite and chew.  I did take a bite out of it, as you can see in the picture.  I've discovered that many regular balut eaters don't really care for the whites, and I understand why.

The "wishbone" - That V-shaped bone in the center of the photo.  It was sharp at the ends and very hard.

The beak - Those two nubby-looking things at the bottom of the picture are the beak.  They were also well-developed, hard, and sharp - especially the "egg tooth" on the top surface of the upper beak.

And then there was that last unidentified bone in there, which was also kind of strange and stabby.  But there was only one of them, which makes me think that I just encountered it at an unfortunate angle and ate the other one without realizing it.

I liked it.  And I'd do it again.

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Smoked Guinea Fowl

Continuing on from where I left off earlier...I had a brace of guinea fowl which I bought at Impoco Poultry Market in Springfield, and I decided to smoke them.  This decision was made partly because I love smoked poultry, and partly because it was so uncomfortably hot and humid that I really didn't want to make the kitchen any less comfortable by running the stove.

The birds were plump enough and young enough that I decided not to brine them first.  Although not as fatty as common domestic chickens, some areas of the skin had thicker layers of subcutaneous fat, mostly at the joints (just like most birds.)  Guinea fowl also have much more dark meat on them - they haven't been selectively bred over the past 70 years to be mostly white meat and to pass their entire lives in tiny cages. I felt that the meat would be more resistant to drying out during the relatively short time and low temperature it would be in the smoker.

I mixed up a dry rub to use on the birds:

Dave's Poultry Rub

¼ cup brown sugar

¼ cup kosher salt

2 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper

¼ cup sweet Hungarian paprika

2 teaspoons dried thyme

2 teaspoons onion powder

2 teaspoons garlic powder

1½ teaspoons Turkish Aleppo pepper (or use crushed red pepper) - optional

2 tablespoons coarsely ground mustard seed

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly; this makes about 1½ cups of rub, which is enough for four or five chickens or fowl.  Keep leftovers in a tightly-covered container and they'll stay at full potency for a couple of months.  It's great on all poultry, not just guinea fowl.

Once I had the rub ready,  I cleaned and prepped the birds, removing the heads and feet (which I froze, reserving for later) and rinsing out the cavities.  That's when I found out that one of my "guinea hens" was a "guinea cock:" His nads were still inside, clinging to the backbone.

(Fun trivia:  When you get a whole broiler or roasting chicken and find two little yellow kidney-shaped things in the cavity, you've got a male bird.  Those aren't the kidneys, they're the testicles.  The kidneys in a bird are the dark brown livery bits tight up against the backbone, tucked in where the ribs and backbone meet.)

Anyway, I rinsed and dried the birds and spread some newspaper down on the kitchen table to make cleanup easier, and rubbed the fowl well with the spice mixture.  Then I put the birds, neck side up, on a pair of heavy-gauge wire hangers I made for hanging chickens in the smoker.

I always cover the work surface with newspapers before applying a barbecue
rub to meats.  The paper absorbs excess liquid from the meat and the paprika
and other spices stay off the table so they don't leave stains.

 This is the chicken hanger.  I have a roll of fence-tensioning wire that I use for general purposes - whenever I need a hook, a hanger, or metal loop I cut off a length and fashion what I need.

You can form the shape of the wire with a bending jig, a pair of fence pliers, or just any set of pliers you have on hand.

To use it, pass the hook through the cavity of the chicken, from the ventral opening up and out through the neck.  The small hook at the end is to hang from the rack in the top of the smoker.  The big round loop at the bottom stays outside the bird and supports it.

Here's a picture of the guinea fowl hanging in the smoker.  You can see how the top hooks of the hangers link up with the rack in the top of the smoker, and how the legs and tail of the birds fit inside the bottom hanger loop to support the poultry while it cooks.

They went into the smoker for about 2 hours at just under 300 degrees over apple and citruswood smoke.  I used a remote digital thermometer to monitor the temperature of the meat and took them out when the temp reached 160 F.

And here they are, beautifully browned and fresh from the smoker.

Sliced and ready to eat, the white meat of the guinea fowl came out juicy and meltingly tender from the slow cooking and low temperature.  The spice rub gave the meat a good spicy enhancement, but the smoke flavoring and the rich gamebird flavor of the fowl were the real stars.

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Impoco Poultry Market, Springfield MA - And Fresh Guinea Fowl

A couple of days ago, commenting on my "chicken paws" post, reader Marc recommended that I stop at Impoco Poultry Market in Springfield.  I had no idea that kind of specialty store existed so close to me, but a quick Google check got me plenty of info - location, street view, Facebook page, business hours.  I made up my mind that I was going to get over there that afternoon, right after work.

Impoco Poultry Market is located somewhat off the beaten path, at 468 Walnut Street in Springfield.  The single-story concrete block building stands back from the road, behind a gated fence and a small parking lot.  Lynnafred and I arrived about an hour before closing time.

As we entered the immaculately clean sales room, we were greeted by owner Tony Impoco.  I asked about guinea hens, and he brought out a beauty, which had been killed, dressed, and drawn that very day, on the premises.  You don't get fresher poultry than that.

The market carries a good range of poultry which varies a little depending upon availability.  Chickens and soup hens are usually available, and guinea fowl, ducks, and geese are offered for sale as they come in.  Impoco's price for fresh local eggs are unbeatable, and there are often guinea hen and duck eggs for sale.  I'm keeping my eye on the Facebook page for the announcement when duck eggs come in.  They're the best for baking (larger and richer than hen's eggs.)  I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, I bet Impoco is going to have some top-notch turkeys.

Tony is a friendly and interesting guy.  The time passed quickly as he told us about his grandfather's poultry market which had been located a short distance up the street when it was founded in the 1920's, and about his current operation which includes a Pioneer Valley poultry farm.  I wouldn't mind sitting down with him at a barbecue and sharing a few beers and a conversation about his trade.  But it was getting near to closing time by the time he wrapped up and weighed our hens and we said our goodbyes. Awesome place.  I can see I'm going to be a regular here.

Impoco Poultry Market

468 Walnut Street

Springfield MA 01105

413.734.6359

Open Tuesday - Friday 9 - 6, Saturday and Sunday 9 -3

Link:

Impoco's Poultry Market Facebook Page

And now, a quick look at my guinea hens (Note:  Tony asked me if I wanted the heads and feet removed, and I said "no thank you."  I have plans for those flavorsome parts and to tell the truth, I am mighty pleased to find a place that leaves 'em on.)

Today, I will be trimming them a bit and giving them a brisk massage with a delicious and flavorsome rub before smoking them over a mixture of apple and citrus wood for a couple of hours. 

Click here to go to the post with the recipe and more pictures.

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