turkey legs
I was inspired by this post from Alex and Aki Talbot on Ideas in Food to make some turkey legs that were good to eat rather than filled with tendon, small bones, and other inedible crap.
So first I peeled back the skin from six legs and removed the meat. I separated out all the nasty bits and cubed the meat. Then I made sausage out of it, combined with a good portion of cubed pork fat, a pile of carmelized onion and garlic, a handful of olives, a handful of roasted poblanos that I had pickled a couple weeks ago, a handful of rasins, a bunch of toasted corriander seed, a fair bit of toasted fennel seed, a small amount of cumin, a tiny bit of allspice, and an appropriate amount of salt. I think that was everything but it was all just selected haphazardly so I can’t be so sure.
I prepared the casing by cutting off all but an inch of bone with a cleaver, about as close to the peeled-back skin as I could get. Then I stuffed each leg with the sausage, trying to mold it into as normal a turkey-leg form as possible. at the big end, I used an Activa GS slurry to coat the skin before wrapping it around the sausage, and then wrapped each leg in plastic wrap. Activa GS is transglutaminase (aka “meat glue”) mixed with gelatin and apparently works well for attaching skin to things; it’s also safe for Tavian, as compared to the normal Activa RM, which contains milk protein.
After the stuffed and wrapped legs sat overnight in the fridge to let the Activa bond, I put the still-wrapped legs into a ziptop bag with some turkey stock to fill the extra space. I figured vacuuming them would crush the carefully crafted forms. I cooked in the circulator at 65 C (149 F) for three hours and then put the bags in an ice bath to chill. Once the legs were fully chilled I pulled them out and unwrapped the plastic wrap. I rinsed off the gelatinized goop and put them on a rack in the fridge to dry. This is what they looked like:
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Some of the legs had collections of fluid under the skin, which now that they were chilled was a kind of meat jello. I figured that would make the next step less successful, so I hit each with a torch to locally warm it and then sucked out the juice with a combination of a 19-gauge needle on a syringe and my fingers to milk the legs out the needle holes. It was delightful. But in the end, the legs were free of their subdermal fluid.
The next day, now Thanksgiving, I pan fried the legs as best I could. I put them in the hot oil straight out of the fridge, in an attempt to keep the sausage from overcooking while I browned the skin. It didn’t really get all that crispy (not much at all) but it did brown nicely and tasted good. Here is the frying process:
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And here is the final product, both before and after slicing:
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They were, by all accounts, delicious. I highly recommend it. The most annoying part is separating the meat from all the other junk that turkeys carry around in their legs. And that is the only important part really. Thuy’s uncle Be noted that they were in principle similar to the stuffed chicken drumsticks that are known in Thai cuisine. The general method is certainly extensible to a multitude of flavors and other bird legs, although turkey legs are, to me, the best motivation. Thank you Alex and Aki for the motivation.