Every turkey should be pardoned by the president.
Each Thanksgiving, millions of Americans sit down to lavish American Gothic-esque spreads of turkey and its accouterments.
And every year, a good number of people ignore the elephant-sized bird in the room: Turkey, for lack of a better word, sucks.
As Momofuku chef David Chang once advised on his podcast “Recipe Club,” “Don’t cook a turkey; order fried chicken.”
This year, we’re also flipping turkey the bird, because culinarily speaking, this turkey is a bunch of gobble-de-gook.
To put it plainly, gobbler just doesn’t taste good: What other bird do you need to baste with copious amounts of cranberry sauce and translucent, viscous gravy as if pumping Botox into a celeb who is decades past prime? Fowl is foul.
In fact, every turkey I’ve ever had — no matter if vacuum sealed or dry rubbed with unicorn horn dust — has ended up chewy and desiccated, like a seagull that got caught in a jet engine. How does such an obese bird have so little fat?
Even bona fide food scientists admit that gobbler is hard to salvage due to its aggressive leanness and sprawling surface area, which makes it difficult to cook sans ending up with an arid breast, frozen center — or both.
”A Thanksgiving turkey sets you up to fail,” Houston-area chef Jason Kerr told Vice in 2015. “It’s so much work, not the type of thing you can throw in the oven and then go suck down a beer in front of the football game and forget about.”
That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried: The New York Times recently reheated a potentially combustive recipe wherein one deep-fries this bland bird in a stockpot brimming with four gallons of peanut oil.
However, with some exceptions, making a turkey taste good seems as futile as trying to play Rachmaninoff on the washboard.
It seems symbolic that a popular recipe every year involves roasting turkey in a garbage can.
Before you levy accusations of trying to smear a time-honored tradition, let me point out that this reflection attacker wasn’t even a fixture at the original Thanksgiving.
The gobbler-centric approach came 240 years after the original Thanksgiving in Plymouth 1621, the culmination of a years-long campaign to get Americans to eat indigenous foods, such as turkey, to, in part, differentiate them from British holidaymakers (who don’t even celebrate T-day).
By a similar token, Butterball hasn’t caught on outside the Americas. During my eight years reviewing food in China, I didn’t see one turkey on local menus, despite the country’s penchant for co-opting exotic ingredients they like (see the tanks full of Pacific Northwest geoduck clam in Shanghai markets).
Even NYC’s Chinatown — which stocks markets with hyperlocal ingredients from lobster to largemouth bass — shuns the T-bird. And you won’t find many of them in France, another culinary mecca, that has historically served every bird under the sun from woodcock to ortolan bunting. (To wit: French Canada’s unofficial anthem “Alouette” is about plucking feathers from a lark.)
When else do people even eat turkey in the US besides T-day dinner, middling deli sandwiches or as bacon and minced-meat substitutes? If it was good, wouldn’t we eat it more than a few times a year?
It’s not just this curmudgeonly author telling gobblers not to get stuffed. Food writer Alison Roman, who has multiple recipes for turkey, once admitted in an Instagram story that she just enjoys the pageantry of preparing it.
“The best part about making a turkey is the sort of majestic theatricalness of it,” she said. “And turkey is not even that good, so when you roast [just] the parts you’re like, ‘Why did I do that?’”
In fact, Thanksgiving as a whole has always been the holiday middle child. Unlike Christmas and Halloween — which boast unique traditions — Thanksgiving amounts to eating an obscene amount of grub and watching football. For many Americans, including yours truly, that’s any given Sunday.
Except in those instances, I’m eating food that I actually like.
In fact, a 2018 poll found that 65% of people would prefer an alternative to this bloated holiday bird.
Now this isn’t some “woke” war on T-day; we’re not pushing to cancel Thanksgiving. But for a holiday whose primary custom seems to be the food, why not make it good?
So, what should you serve on your Thanksgiving table instead?
We propose Cantonese squab, the far more flavorful domesticated baby pigeon with livery meat that’s cooked evenly, so it’s both crispy on the outside but with a rosy breast. Chinese home-cooking blog “The Woks of Life” offers a great recipe for the Hong Kong banquet classic.
Or — cue the iconic scene from “A Christmas Story” — how about a bronze roast Peking duck? Ironically, duck was likely more prevalent than turkey at the original Thanksgiving day.
With crackling skin and luscious dark meat with a patina of white fat, swaddle the succulent skin in wheat-flour pancakes with hoisin and scallions, and go crazy. No cranberry sauce is required.
Duck aficionados can even take out a half roast quacker at Sun Sai Gai restaurant in Chinatown for around $18 for a “lazy girl” Thanksgiving.
Those looking for something more exotic can go for the roast pheasant, available at various butchers around Manhattan. While not as supple and tender as their wild brethren, these domestic birds should do just fine.
I also recommend this simple but sumptuous roast pheasant recipe from James Beard award-winning chef and author Hank Shaw.
Too off-the-beaten palate for your taste? How about a good old-fashioned holiday ham or roast chicken, which ranked as the respective No. 1 and 2 most preferred alternatives to gobbler for Thanksgiving Day in 2019?
Any of these are enough to make us quit cold turkey — because even with prices on the decline, this bird’s just not enough bang for your cluck.
Turkey is fowl — you should eat other more delectable birds this Thanksgiving - New York Post
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