Tradition! If you read that with the rich baritone of Chaim Topol (aka Tevye) resonating in your head, you understand where I’m coming from with this article. I believe in tradition, especially when it comes to the holidays. It provides us with an anchor in an otherwise turbulent world. Tradition is something that reassures us no matter how much we are surrounded by change, some things remain the same, and I take comfort in that. And by tradition, Thanksgiving turkey is dry, and it is bland. I get into why that is so in this post, and later this week I'll share some tips on what you can do to change that tradition. Change isn't always bad. Even Tevye eventually accepted that change can be good. And when it comes to your Thanksgiving turkey, change can be very good.
Now…let’s talk turkey!
As far back as I can remember my family's Thanksgiving dinner tradition was an oven roasted turkey with all the usual side dishes. Even when I was in the military and spent two Thanksgiving holidays in Turkey (the country) I had turkey (the bird) for both Thanksgiving dinners.
When I was a kid, my family was poor. I mean really poor. My father worked hard to provide for us, first in the Army and then after retiring as a security guard. And my mother worked even harder to keep the bellies of her seven children full while staying within her meager food budget. To their credit, I didn’t realize we were poor until I became an adult. My parents made sure we never lacked for the basics, even if it meant wearing thrift shop and hand me down clothes. And we almost always had a turkey on the table for Thanksgiving.
When it came to that Thanksgiving turkey, my parents didn’t enjoy the luxury of choice. When my father served in the Army our turkey came from the commissary, which meant it had probably been sitting around in a freezer for a couple of years. Not the best source for a tasty turkey. When my Dad retired and took a job as a security guard, he started getting our holiday turkeys from the back of a truck. Every Thanksgiving his employer…the Bata Shoe Company of Belcamp, Maryland…arranged for a truck full of frozen turkeys, usually Butterball, to be delivered to the plant. Each employee got one turkey to take home to their family as their annual holiday “bonus.” I honestly don’t remember how it tasted, just that we had turkey at Thanksgiving most years. Tradition!
While my mother was constrained in her kitchen by a hopelessly tight food budget, I am not. Through the years I’ve tried almost everything in a BubbaGump-esque attempt to find culinary turkey perfection…fresh turkeys, kosher turkeys, wet brined turkeys, dry brined turkeys, un-brined turkeys, free-range turkeys, name brand turkeys, store brand turkeys, generic turkeys, hormone and antibiotic free turkeys…you name it, I’ve tried it. I’ve paid as little as $13 for a frozen generic store brand bird, $120 for a fresh never frozen pick-your-own-from-the-field free-range hormone and antibiotic free turkey that was slaughtered the day before I picked it up, and an eye watering $275 for a heritage breed turkey bought from a specialty poultry house. Spoiler alert: the $13 turkey was the best of all of them.
Note about costs: The above prices were from between 4 and 10 years ago. The cost of turkey post-COVID has skyrocketed, more than 50% above what it was when I went through the Bubba-Gumpesque search for the perfect turkey I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I'll get into that in the reasons for that in my final article in this series.
The only turkey that tasted different than the frozen birds my father brought home from the bottom of the commissary freezer or the back of that truck at the Bata Shoe Company was the heritage breed turkey I bought recently. A year or so ago I bought a Bourbon Red heritage breed turkey. Much to my disappointment, this turkey did not taste like bourbon. The breed is named after the color of its plumage and the breed's origins in Bourbon County, Kentucky. It was pricey, but it had flavor. Trouble is, after having spent a ton of money on it, I discovered that I didn’t like that flavor.
Why do we observe such an important holiday with a dish as bland as turkey for the centerpiece anyway? We have our choice of entrées nowadays, so why not eat lasagna for Thanksgiving? I like lasagna. Or manicotti…Janet makes a really good manicotti with shells stuffed so full of ricotta they explode. I mean, I get why turkey was the main course at the first Thanksgiving…work with what you got and all that. And wild turkey surely has plenty of gamey flavor to it. But not the commercial turkeys we’re stuck with now. Oh yeah...Tradition!
The reason it is nearly impossible for a home cook to get any flavor from a turkey has to do with Big Agra (aka Big Ag), the agricultural industry which is responsible for producing most of the food we eat. In the early 1960s, not long after I was born, the poultry industry endeavored to develop a breed of turkey that was cost effective to raise, and that had a higher muscle to bone ratio. Flavor was not something they worried about. They set out through selective crossbreeding to genetically engineer a turkey that would satisfy consumer demand for a higher ratio of white to dark meat, while at the same time grow big and fast allowing producers to save on operating costs.
Their efforts resulted in a marvel of agricultural bioengineering…the broad breasted white breed of turkey. This is a breed that goes from egg to mature 16 pound bird in 5 short months. During that time the turkey develops a ridiculous amount of muscle mass, mostly concentrated in the breasts…hence the name. In the process of genetically engineering a bird with an accelerated growth rate and massive breasts, they engineered out taste. Broad breasted white turkeys have no taste. They just don’t. None.
All turkeys sold in the grocery store these days are broad breasted whites, and they are raised from artificially inseminated eggs. Why artificially inseminated? Because the genetic engineering of the 60s resulted in a breed of mutant freaks that are physically incapable of mating. Wait…what? Yep…they live incredibly short lives, and they don’t get to have sex. Not even once. It would kill them if they tried…literally. The undersized bones in those little drumsticks can’t support the weight of their huge breasts. If they tried to do anything as strenuous as mating, their legs would snap in half. And even if they didn’t, they still couldn’t do the deed…their massive breasts would get in the way.
Their huge breasts are also the reason broad breasted white turkeys cook up so dry. By the time you get the inner most portions of the breasts to the USDA safety standard of 165 degrees F, the rest of the bird is hopelessly overcooked. Whatever flavor your bird might have had to start with gets cooked out by the time it makes it to your table. I suppose that’s a small price to pay in return for killing off all the salmonella that commercially raised turkeys are infested with. Big Agra raises them in such closely confined pens that they spend the entirety of their short and sexless lives wallowing around in their own salmonella-infested feces. You have to overcook them to render them safe to eat. Thanksgiving lasagna is sounding better and better, isn’t it?
I want to close with a few comments about marketing and labeling. Most of the things you read on a turkey packaging label are for marketing purposes. The more stuff on the label, the higher the price per pound. Sadly, none of it translates into a moister, more flavorful turkey. Here are some of the more common labels you’ll find on turkeys that jack up the price without contributing to improved flavor:
“Free Range” or “Free Roaming”: This labeling does not mean your Thanksgiving turkey lived its best life (short and sexless though it was) roaming across a farm’s idyllic grass-covered hills foraging for bugs, worms, and seed. The only requirement for a poultry producer to use this label is that they provide a door to the turkey pen that is open to the outside, not that they force any of their turkeys to use it. In reality, most turkeys raised as free range, or free roaming birds never leave the main pen. Why would they? Their legs barely function and would probably break if they strayed too far. By staying inside the pen, the turkeys have a steady supply of food and water, and they get to keep their legs intact. Well, most of them do. Some still suffer from broken legs just by standing at the feeding trough. Freaks.
Cage Free: This claim is meaningless for turkeys raised for meat, as they are not typically caged before transport and slaughter.
No Growth-promoting Antibiotics: While technically true, this claim has little practical meaning. The USDA prohibits the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in poultry. Which is not to say birds with this label have never been administered antibiotics. Turkeys with this label may still have been administered antibiotics ether to treat illness or for disease prevention. Just not to promote growth.
Antibiotic Free or No Antibiotic Residues: These claims are not approved by the USDA and should not appear on turkey labels. Yet they do. Just because the label says a turkey is antibiotic free doesn’t mean the bird never had antibiotics. It just means enough time has passed since their last exposure to antibiotics to allow the drugs to be purged from their system. All turkeys sold are free of antibiotic residues due to mandatory USDA enforced withdrawal periods.
All Natural: This is another meaningless claim. It isn’t regulated by the USDA, and the only thing it means is that the turkey contains no artificial ingredients, added colors, and is minimally processed. It is something that applies to just about all commercially raised turkeys, whether it is on the label or not. There is nothing “natural” about any broad breasted white turkey.
Raised Without Hormones: Yet another meaningless label. The USDA prohibits the use of steroids or hormones at any point in the life cycle of all turkeys sold commercially, whether it says so on the label or not. This labeling is at best redundant and at worst misleading if it is used on a bird priced higher than turkeys without similar labeling. Let me make it simple…whether the label says so or not, NO TURKEY SOLD TO CONSUMERS IN THE US HAS EVER BEEN EXPOSED TO HORMONES OR STEROIDS.
Premium: There is no USDA standard or definition for this term, rendering it meaningless on a turkey label.
Shady Brook Farms: Just because the label says your turkey came from a specific farm, doesn’t mean your turkey came from a specific farm. Case in point…Shady Brook Farms is not a farm. It is a brand owned by Cargill, one of the largest Big Agra producers in the U.S. They source the turkeys sold under the “Shady Brook Farms” brand from 700 independent family farms. You’ll find Shady Brook Farms branded turkeys at a number of grocery chains across the country, generally for a higher price than generic or store brand turkeys, even though the generic birds may have come from the same farms.
Fresh Never Frozen: I'll address this labeling claim in greater depth in my next post. For now I'll just say that unless you buy your turkey from a local farm where it is slaughtered the day before you pick it up, it has been frozen at some point no matter what the label claims.
In all my years of sourcing turkeys, I have found only one exception to my generalization that all broad breasted white turkeys have no flavor. There are probably others, small producers and hobby farms, but this producer is particularly special…Jaindl Farms. In fact, their birds are so special the White House uses them for the official annual National Thanksgiving Dinner. These aren’t the birds that get pardoned for the TV cameras...these turkeys get cooked and eaten.
Jaindl Farms is a family owned and operated farm in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley area. It is a legit local operation, but it isn’t small. They are a medium sized operation producing 750,000 turkeys annually, though their production pales in comparison to the largest producers like Butterball, Jenny O and Cargill, each of which cranks out between 50-80 million birds each year.
What makes the Jaindl Farms turkeys so tasty is that the family controls all aspects of their turkey production, from growing their own feed to inseminating the eggs to growing and then slaughtering the adult turkeys. They treat their turkeys as though they are a small hobby farm operation rather than the medium sized producer they are, and that comes through in the flavor of their turkeys.
Distribution of Jaindl Farms turkeys is limited to a handful of grocery chains...Wegmans, Whole Foods, Stew Leonard’s, and Bell and Evans. At Wegmans, Jaindl’s turkeys are sold under a store label as Wegmans Premium Holiday Grand Champion.
If you have a Wegmans or Whole Foods in your area, you’ll get the best value for your turkey dollar with a Jaindl Farms turkey. It is my go-to bird. If not, don’t stress. Pick up the least expensive generic or store brand bird you can find because they all taste the same…bland. And don’t pay extra for a fresh turkey unless you find it worth the price differential to avoid the hassle of a four- or five-day thawing period in your fridge. Modern packaging and freezing technology results in frozen turkeys that are no different than fresh.
No matter what kind of bird you buy or where you buy it, about the only good thing I have to say about turkey is that the carcass and left-over meat make great soup. I like turkey, I do. Especially for Thanksgiving. Not because it tastes good. It has no taste. I like it because it is…Tradition!
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