Turkeys

Heritage homestead turkeys

Meleagris gallopavo (or M. rooster-turkey if you were to literally translate their species name) is a truly American bird. Not a competitor for “official” American status like the Bald Eagle, regardless of what my second grader said after coming home from school in November, but a continental america bird. This guy was raised by central Mexicans, where it was discovered by the Spanish conquistadores and taken on a field trip to The Old World. The word “pavo” in Spanish can refer to the peacock (pavo real or Royal Turkey, certainly befitting their appearance, if not their intelligence) or the lowly gobbler turkey. The Mexica (or their own misnomer, Aztecs) called the bird “huehxolotl” and in Mexico today, there’s still a distinction between cooked turkey (pavo) and living ones, known as guajolotes. The “wild” turkeys that went on a field trip to Europe were likely blackish bronze and definitely smaller than the table-busting monstrocities served at Thanksgiving, but were still a hardy and tasty bird. Their beautiful cousin the Ocellated Turkey still lives in diminishing parts of Mexico and Central America, but that’s a post for another time (stay tuned).

When colonizing Europeans returned to North America, they brought with them this hardy staple with domestication under its belt. After having survived Thanksgiving (just kidding - most of the original Thanksgiving fowl was likely ducks or geese, nice and chubby for that time of year before beginning their migration vacation) these turks were allowed to mingle (re-mingle?) with the rangy wild turkeys and helped create some lovely color varieties we have today. All turkeys are turkeys, they don’t have breeds - their unique color schemes are known as varieties.

Today these turks are known as Heritage turkeys, a happy medium between the scrawny wild ones and the horrid factory/industrial Butterballs everyone loves/hates at Thanksgiving. Allow me to pull up my soapbox for a little bit to discuss why no one should ever support or consume the factory turkey industry.

One-your health. Factory raised poultry consists of animals genetically manipulated to hatch, grow and die in a span of weeks (notice I didn’t say “live” because that will be addressed in point three). Birds are slaughtered in an assembly line process uncarefully inspected (if at all) by an employee paid to let as many corpses make it to sale as possible (time is $$). They are injected with saline water (to increase their flavor after cooking and add weight so the consumer pays a higher amount for what they’re actually getting) and washed with acidic solutions intended to kill bacteria resulting from the factory they were raised in and the one they’re processed in. Then, they are *hopefully* packaged and preserved properly from truck to store to shelf to your cart to your home until you decide to cook it. This method of eating, unfortunately, is a continuous assault on your immune system and longterm health. We are lead to believe that meat = protein that’s healthy and safe. The turkey industry is also way less transparent and regulated than even the chicken industry, which is heavily guarded by the big companies that own chicken genetics, eggs, breeds and shipment to factory farms.

Two: the environment. Factory raising poultry, even for just the weeks before slaughter, is a messy, infectious, contaminating process. If we were to tally up the real cost of eating those nuggets or the turkey leg at the fair, it would not be worth it for all of us as a planet, and it’s not worth it personally. Any animal combined in small spaces will spread diseases between themselves and the humans handling them. Using robots to detect and remove deceased birds (because finding humans to do this job is notoriously difficult and soul-sucking) doesn’t help the awful conditions of factory farming. Poultry barns produce a lot of heat and require a lot of energy investment in large fans to prevent mass die-offs. The manure and soiled bedding created daily by the birds is impossible to get rid of, which can lead to stockpiling that leaks gasses into the air and nasty juices into our water. Medications in the feed designed to lower deaths also make their way into the flesh of the birds, their feces and the environment as well (finishing your course of antibiotics to prevent resistance has nothing on the effect factory farming has on creating resistance because of the contents of feed). The inputs of fuel, space for the barns, water for drinking and processing and human labor costs also make factory farming in general and poultry farming in particular not feasible. Why are we still like this today instead of studying this as a historical case we learned from? Meat industries in the interest of “national food and economic safety” are heavily subsidized. They are owned, managed and lobbied for by large agribusiness corporations that care for their bottom line instead of the consumer’s waistline, the health of our planet or these food animal’s lives.

Three - the animals themselves. The variety of food we eat in America (and globally) is rapidly diminishing - most of our diet is limited to 12 crops and 5 types of meat. These 5 animals (chickens by and large, followed by pigs, turkeys, sheep, goats and cows) are mostly industrialized breeds raised in cramped, unsanitary conditions, treated inhumanely and improperly slaughtered without ever living as their species should for even one hour. Turkeys of the Broad Breasted varieties that make up the industrial turkey business cannot breed naturally, raise their poults, fly or even walk well. These turkeys in order to maintain such an immense body and breast weight within a short life span have to be artificially inseminated (yes, someone has THAT job…think about that when you see those rows of Butterballs). Rescued turkeys of these varieties crush eggs they attempt to sit on and have leg and heart issues that usually lead to an early and sudden death.

I have purposely not delved into the dairy or egg industries to keep this post shorter, but these factory farms have their own devilish set of horrors tacked onto the meat industry’s farms. Baby bulls born on a dairy farm are repurposed into veal, a product created by overfeeding an animal caged to limit mobility so it develops fat instead of muscle in a lifespan that never exceeds babyhood. Females are kept but taken away from their own moms and artificially fed back their milk so they can join the production line for a bit - no one escapes the ultimate slaughter fate and are listed on menus as “retired dairy cow” to soften their sad reality. Salmonella on your eggs? Salmonella is present naturally in the environment and not usually a concern for properly handled eggs and meat. Why is it such a food baddie? The medications fed to the animals create resistant super bugs that are inserted into our food supply through the slaughtering and delivery process, right into our kitchens and our mouths. Eggs when laid are coated in a bloom, a natural shield that allows the egg to breathe (exchange gasses with the environment) while keeping a barrier against opportunistic bacteria. This bloom remains on the egg while mom finishes laying a clutch over several days, decides to incubate the eggs, all the way to the day they hatch a month later.

Our turkey hens lay an egg every other day, on the ground, until they have enough to sit on and hatch in ~28 days (one week longer than chickens).

The egg industry does not allow a normal egg laying timeframe in an appropriate nest, so it washes the egg of its bloom which then requires the eggs be refrigerated until they are used. These two examples (dairy and eggs) clearly demonstrate an industrial response not to a problem (is enough food available?), but to a financial incentive (creating a demand for mass produced meat that’s unhealthy, causes suffering and is heavily lobbied/subsidized, but makes money for the company). There would be enough milk from a cow if we used only the extra after feeding her baby and processed it carefully for maximum preservation and usefulness (my personal favorite methods are cheese and butter, since the only thing that needs to be drinking cow’s milk is just a. baby. cow. seriously.). The eggs produced on our homestead (turkey and duck eggs only, goose eggs are too precious to eat compared to getting a live goose) are for eating mostly, with notable exceptions. My two ducks so far have given me an egg each, every day, even in the cold weather. For this reason alone, they beat chickens feathers down (bad pun points for me!). These eggs are collected and stored unwashed at room temp until I’m ready to use them. Since I was starting up, I would label eggs with a date and after washing before adding to my recipes, would check for fertility. We have one male duck (known as a drake) whose sole responsibility on this planet is to make sure we have ducklings. After my turkey Bob hatched some duckies, he remains here because (only because) he fulfilled that purpose. If you’re used to using chicken eggs, duck egg whites have a thicker gel-like consistency, rich yellow yolks and larger size (every recipe benefits from more egg, prove me wrong). My ducks have a kiddie pool to swim in instead of a pond and free range all over the place, so the taste of their eggs is very creamy “eggy” and zero fish taste. It’s hard to get the whites to whip up for merengues and scrambling or frying the eggs makes them leathery, but duck eggs are the best cheesecake makers ever.

Our turkey’s eggs end up being 1.5-2 times the amount of a chicken egg with very similar taste and behavior for cooking. I only recently began eating their eggs (as opposed to letting them collect, sit and hatch) when my young hen began laying at six months old into the colder months. Being a color combination I didn’t want more of and not wanting to care for poults in the dead of winter, I removed her eggs every other day or so when she deposited them in the duck nest. Eventually, she committed to the nest and a month later hatched out duck babies she loves fiercely - see previous paragraph. {For more on Bob’s duck hatching story, check out her section in my posts} Generally, much like goose eggs, turkeys don’t lay enough eggs per year to eat and instead people prefer to hatch them out into poults.

Bob’s first time eggs are different while she gets the hang of it (small lower left, normal in the middle and a big double-yolker on the top).

Eggs are eggcellent nutrition in a not-as-fragile-as-you’d-think package, but once again, consumerism and industry cancel out common sense in the interest of turning a profit. Chickens in battery cages live a miserable existence until slaughter time. “Cage-free” eggs aren’t any better, since without cages, more chickens can be stockpiled in one place (no grass, sunshine or freedom), intended to pump out eggs until slaughter time. These labels and nicknames given to our food are researched and marketed to assuage guilt over what kinds of horrors happen to factory farmed animals so you keep purchasing them.

Factory farming must also make consumers forget or unaware of the “modifications” done to livestock in order to stockpile them. Poultry has beaks and combs burned off when they’re just hatched, or if they’re male, get tossed alive into a grinder. Pigs have tails cut off and mama pigs are forced into special crates that prevent them from lying down on their piglets because of the lack of space. Dehorning, fang removal and castration are all done without anesthesia or even skill in most cases.

These three reasons are actually the top arguments for a plant-based diet, although in inverse order. Used to be, vegetarians were barefoot hippies that didn’t eat meat for ethical reasons, but nowadays the main concern is personal health as a result of diet followed more closely by concerns for the environment. Animal rights have fallen behind as a concern that would lead to changes in diet and choice, because of the resilient lobbying and marketing by agribusiness to make us forget or not know where meat comes from. Slaughter byproducts are also a big business, which it would need to be as it’s such a large problem to deal with. Bloodmeal, bonemeal and feathermeal are sold as fertilizer and ingredients in other foods, pet foods or fed back to livestock. There are serious cross-contamination issues with this approach, as no livestock in nature would consume that much of its own species’ flesh and despite being processed, can pass dangerous bacteria, viruses and prions* back into the food supply. Hides are turned into leather products or treated with chemicals to make rawhides and other pet treats (see pig ears, bully sticks, horns and hooves). Human medications are even made from slaughter byproducts (insulin from pancreas and thyroxine from thyroid glands, for example). “Beef tallow” has made a fad appearance in cosmetics and skin treatments recently, but is really rendered fat from the slaughter industry (where all manner of nasty residues live - I wouldn’t want to slather that anywhere). While I applaud trying to use every part of an animal that was slaughtered for food, this is a backwards way of trying to clean up the mass amount of undesirable byproduct from slaughtering an excessive amount of animals daily.

The final hours of these animal’s lives are very dismal. They are packed onto shipping trucks, where if they survive that, are prodded off onto a killing assembly line. Death is not achieved before the butchering begins, since stunning or insensitivity at the least is not reliably done every time, even though required. Halal type slaughtering can be just as bad, since the cultural requirement is the animal bleed out while it’s alive and sentient. Poultry are usually hung by their feet and dunked into an electrified pool before continuing on down the line to be cut up. Slaughterhouse employees are subject to one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, are usually marginalized and immigrant people groups, and suffer extreme stress, anger and anxiety from the tasks they perform.

It is a hard subject to tackle and talk about, so my point here is not to enforce my points, but to increase awareness amongst consumers so they can make better choices for themselves. I believe educated decisions made by consumers will have a positive trickle down effect on these three reasons: health, environment and livestock management. Ok, soap box put away…back to the ranch:

The homestead setting on our small ranch requires management and welfare decisions every day. Even though our diet at home is plant-based by choice, with the exception of eating out or when someone cooks for us, managing the birds is necessary. Thanksgiving 2023 was a five month old tom from our own hatch and the first whole bird I’ve cooked in 23 years of marriage! Every step was done here on our ranch. Was it difficult? No…because following I can demonstrate the intentionality and care that went into it. I name hatches in batches I can trace and track together and these turkeys were named after the “Money Heist” show. This clutch was the second successful hatch of the year by tom Al and hen Bill. She sat all summer long during a very hot summer and most of the eggs hatched June 26. The original plan for this hatch was to see them develop (colors, sex) and sell or give them away. Five poults were making a go of it, three Narrangansetts (Moscú, Nairobi and Río) and two Royal Palms (Tokyo and Denver). Río at about two weeks of age was clearly a runt and development slowed compared to the others. This in itself would have ensured that he remained out of the gene pool, but he fell into a trough one day with triple digit heat and drowned. Someone contacted me about the two Royal Palms and bought them a few weeks later (ended up being two males). Nairobi during development was always meeker and a bit lackluster compared to Moscú and had a slight crook in his neck. As November approached, we discussed using him for Thanksgiving, keeping Moscú as a backup breeding tom and began making preparations. Heritage turkeys for eating should be seven to eighteen months old, depending on the level of fat and muscle development desired. I will say, attempting to work at all with an eighteen month old turkey tom is not high on my priority list - Al is a big boy for a Royal Palm, over 20 lbs and even though not aggressive, hard to catch and handle for exams and treatment. Nairobi was likely under 10 lbs at five months (I didn’t weigh him before, only after cooking and deboning to get an idea) and fully developed and feathered. Up to a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I wasn’t sure he was a he, but it was very helpful to have his siblings (Bob hen from April hatch and his brother, Moscú) to compare to since he was a bit of a late bloomer. Ultimately the Narrangansett coloring was the biggest hint (Bob has a grayer neck whereas Moscú and Nairobi stayed darker and shinier), along with size (at five months the boys were already larger than Bob is, three months older).

I had done a lot of research as far as methods, techniques and tips for dispatching, butchering and cooking turkeys to prepare. If this part makes you queasy, I encourage to push through, not to skip this part, in the interest of educating yourself where your food comes from and how it’s “made”.

My preferred method of dispatching turkeys is the “broomstick” method, which doesn’t describe the Wicked Witch, but instead using a stick behind the bird’s skull as leverage to dislocate the neck and spine. I had used this method once before on my Slate hen, Hilary, not for eating but due to an injury she couldn’t recover from. My first attempts on both of them were not successful, but didn’t result in any injury to the birds since they both jumped up and tried to run away. So that’s my first tip - tie up the legs just in this case, so they can’t run far away. I couldn’t tie Hilary’s legs or carry her upside down until calming down as recommended, because one of her legs had healed in a backwards position and she had lived a year pegleg pirate style. I would not have gotten to this point with her, except after helping Bill hatch out Bob’s clutch she didn’t regain strength enough to stand and was developing bedsores while being picked on by the flock.

Hilary in the foreground with her odd leg

Hilary I could catch and carry Heisman style, while Nairobi was allowed to sleep on a roost with the flock overnight as he normally did, even though I made sure they had no access to food after supper. I caught his legs from the perch and held him upside down until he calmed enough for Heisman, about ten seconds. Some people are concerned about the bird during this upside down period, but it’s important to me to be able to quickly get them under control and under my arm without flapping or struggling so they don’t injure themselves. Whether they’re slaughtered in a factory or at home in a kill cone, both of which require being upside down, here this part only lasts a few seconds and doesn’t stress the bird compared to other options. In the future, this would also be the time to tie the legs snugly only to prevent running.

For me as a petite person and considering the length of full grown turkeys, I need to have someone else hold the stick in place while I do the pulling. Instant death happens with this method if done right, as both the spinal cord and major blood vessels disconnect at the same time. What no one could ever prepare me for enough (so here it is for your benefit) is the amount of reflexive flapping that happens when butchering poultry. “Like a chicken with its head cut off” is not hyperbole, but also why any cutting or chopping methods were ultimately too bloody for me to attempt in this situation - I do keep a hatchet close as backup. Even though I checked to make sure death was instant (eyes closed, no breathing, neck bones clearly disconnected), the flapping of the wings can take minutes and be in phases. I lay them on the ground for this and let it happen until it’s fully over. There is bleeding out of the meat, but it happens into the neck skin around the dislocation and all of that area is cut out and discarded during butchering.

The next part - and this is seriously onerous - is plucking. The way I decided to do it was the scald and hand pluck route vs. the machines, mainly because I don’t have one and don’t do this enough to merit buying one. We used a wheeled muck cart filled with hot water from the tap, topped off with a boiling kettleful and the largest potful we own. The desired temp was 140F or a tad lower (we’re scalding, not cooking, which would result in the skin tearing) which we got with a laser thermometer. Any larger of a turkey would need a bigger bucket - we struggled even with this five month old. I tried dunking the entire bird in the water by the legs, but didn’t account for it floating, so I had to use something to push it down into the water for a few minutes to scald.

Because of this and a little bit of poo that came out, next time I will place the bird in the cart and pour the water over it instead of dunking. After the scalding, we placed the bird on a fold out game cleaning table that drained over the compost pile. I had prepared a double-bagged bucket for refuse and most of the feathers, but this way the flyaways and rinse water went into the compost. Plucking takes a long time, even with help and avoiding the tail (I cut this all off and threw it away, to the chagrin of some folks who claim it’s the best part to eat) and wings (I ended up cutting the primary feathers near the skin since they just would not pluck out). I had planned to leave the skin on during cooking, but not eat it - none of us like eating the skin anyway. I understood why most industrial breeds of poultry are white, because there was no way this Narrangansett would ever have the clean dimply skin look expected from supermarket birds (but again, we weren’t going to attempt to eat the skin anyway). Being five months old, there were some feathers that were still developing, especially on the chest and back area near the neck that looked like a feather inside a tube. Plucking these feathers out left behind a weird fatty plug, but after cooking I never noticed these anymore.

After plucking, butchering begins, starting with removing the head by cutting around and through the dislocated part (throw in the trash). A super sharp and slightly curved fillet knife is my go to for this, and wear a cut proof glove on your non dominant hand (trust me on this, no matter how confident you are). Next, go to the legs and bend them as if the bird was laying down, cutting through the ligaments at the back of the “knee”/hock. You should see the inside of the joint and the ends of the leg bones or keep slicing. Then, bend the knees the other direction (slice through skin to help removal) or even sideways to separate at the joint. I remove the tail at this point, along with the fan feathers I didn’t bother to pluck. Anything done at this end needs to be very respectful of the anus to avoid contaminating the meat with intestine juices. Cuts can be made through the skin away from the pucker part of the anus, but you want to keep it intact to flip the innards out without tainting the meat.

Way before this point, though, it’s important you have a very decent grasp of anatomy of birds especially. You need to be able to visually and easily identify important landmarks (windpipe/trachea vs. esophagus, heart, lungs, liver, intestines, crop/stomach and the green gallbladder that contains bile you really don’t want to get anywhere other than the trash can). You will need to be able to separate the organs from the bones and muscles by gently tearing away the fascia. This is also the time to be examining for disease or abnormalities in your flock. In this case with Nairobi, I already knew he had a kink in his neck, and examined it carefully while butchering to compare what I had felt externally during exams while the poults were growing. Examine eyes and nostrils (no gunk), the skin (bruising in poultry shows up as an unappealing green color that may or may not affect the meat underneath), legs and feet (no open sores/swelling in the joints), feathers (no mites or lice? even though these don’t affect the meat, but do require a better management strategy for the rest of the flock), and internal organs. The heart should be of normal size and the color of a cartoon heart. The liver should be a brownish red, smooth, shiny and with no lesions. Intestines should be uniform in thickness and color all the way through. In some cases, you can see internal parasites (worms) while butchering and need to treat the living birds if you see this. If you find something that makes you doubt eating the meat, abide by your instinct. You can still proceed with the butchering to increase your experience with that and training yourself to perform necropsies.

Being petite in this case is an advantage, as the best tool for this job is a small hand that can work at the fascia by wiggling fingers. If you want to keep gizzards for gravy, you’ll want to keep the neck (skin removed), heart and liver. Give everything a good rinse and store in a ziploc bag. Some people add the crop to the gizzards, but you must be able to locate it, half it, rinse out any grit or food, and peel the tough surface that does the digesting, only keeping the muscle tissue of the crop. I boil these parts with salt and bay leaves for the broth part of the gravy. Throw away the neck bones, strain it well before adding to the gravy roux and give the heart/crop/liver to your dogs - they are nutritious. The roux (a sautéed flour base for gravy or gumbo depending on how dark it gets) can be made with the fat drippings, wine and flour cooked in a frying pan until the desired color, add the broth to desired runnyness and serve immediately. No need for those nasty packets and even my gravy haters enjoy this gravy.

Unless you’re a fast butcher and cooking right away, you will have to deal with rigor mortis in the bird, which goes away after days. You know those campfire supper scenes in movies where easily recognizable shapes are being spit cooked? Well, that’s rigor. A floppy bird is easier to prepare for cooking regardless of method than a rigid one, but other than that doesn’t affect quality or flavor. Some people do this with turkeys by letting them rest in an ice water bath inside a cooler. I did mine by propping him up on foil balls inside a baking bag in the fridge. I was expecting the juices that run out of supermarket birds and wanted to elevate him above that, but there was none of that. Thinking back, I think the nasty ooze from those birds comes from the sodium injections and acid washes the birds get in the factory and this fresh bird simply didn’t ooze. Three days was not enough for rigor to pass, but a Thanksgiving timeline meant I needed to roast him the day before. I sprinkled the skin and whatever fell inside the cavity with seasoned salt. I sprayed the pan my roasting rack went into with cooking spray, added the rack and the bird, breast side up and legs tied at 375F for an hour. Then I took the bird out, tented foil over the breast area, lowered the oven to 350F, poured white wine in the bottom of the pan, and put the bird back in rotated around for even baking. After two hours, I temperature tested the leg joint and checked juices to ensure full cooking (it was) and let it rest with the foil on for 15 minutes. For this size bird, this ensured fully cooked without overdone while a lot of the wine evaporated into steam, but still leaving a lot of drippings for the gravy, no butter insertion or basting required. Those steps are necessary for fully cooking such a large bird for a long time without it drying out, but this heritage guy was ready after just three hours. My family doesn’t eat the skin, but it was mostly golden and crispy on the top side of the bird. I didn’t weigh the bird before, but after deboning and throwing away the skin and more “taste tests” than I could count from a family that is meh about turkey to begin with, we had 3.6 lbs of pure meat with a noticeable difference in color between white and dark meat. Our family Thanksgiving tradition (being meh about turkey, remember?) is to roll cooked turkey meat in tortillas and deep fry them to make flautas or ‘turquitos’. We had more than enough for that day and an entire week of school lunches afterwards. The flavor was best freshly baked and warm, not a hint of gameyness or overwhelming poultry flavor, mild and pleasant, neither dry nor overly juicy.

Credit to this hardy, large bird. Would I do it again? Yes, if I had a bird on hand that needed to be managed. Otherwise, I enjoy seeing them grow, the intelligence and societal dynamics of this truly American bird. Gobble, gobble!

Resources

This is what the ancient Mexicans thought turkeys looked like - I agree.

TCG site on turkey colors/genetics

Porter’s poults and feathers, an incredibly detailed study on colors and genetics.

A favorite time sink of mine, the turkey color calculator based on genetics!

A robot vacuum for dead poultry…shouldn’t even be necessary but it is.

Antibiotic resistance and its true source - educate your doctor on this one!

Food security dependent on limited foodstuffs from The Livestock Conservancy.

The data on the meat industry here.

Why American eggs are washed and refrigerated compared to other parts of the world where they are stored at ambient temperature. Read carefully where it says this washing and refrigeration treat bacteria ON the shell but does nothing for bacteria IN the egg, which is eliminated by any proper cooking technique. This washing and refrigeration is essentially attacking a red herring and wasting resources while not acknowledging the real source of contamination - a factory created super bug.

Drinking milk is for baby cows, not humans.

How Not to Die by Michael Greger, MD. 2015

Food Choice and Sustainability by Dr. Richard Oppenlander. 2013

Just one of the studies on slaughterhouse employees, there are a lot out there.

An excellent start to finish video guide on processing chickens by Self Sufficient Hub. I watched this multiple times and took written step by step notes. It will help you prepare, but nothing teaches better than experience and you will learn tricks or interesting things with every experience.

*Prions are really bad guys the CDC isn’t even sure what they are, but cause some really nasty and persistent wasting diseases in people and animals.