Sales of free-range turkeys and speciality poultry products are soaring as North East home cooks go traditional for Christmas this year.
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Wangaratta meat processor Your Everyday Gourmet’s turkey sales have doubled this Christmas.
Your Everyday Gourmet owner Dan Wallace said in the week leading up to Christmas they had sold 160 rolled turkey breasts and six turduckens.
Mr Wallace said they had offered turduckens – a boned out chicken stuffed in a boned out duck stuffed in a boned out turkey – for the past three years.
He said they were prepared to order and weighed up to 6 kilograms.
“People are looking for something different for their Christmas lunch,” Mr Wallace said.
“All of the cooking shows get people thinking about trying something different and people are more confident about cooking turkey than years ago.
“People thought turkey was hard to cook but now rolled turkey breasts and buffes make it easy and there’s no waste.”
Mr Wallace said he used Numurkah free-range turkeys and Milawa free-range and organic ducks and chickens to make up their turduckens.
“Some people like to have them stuffed here; others like to make up their own stuffing,” he said.
“We make all of our own stuffing with local ingredients like cranberries from JimJam Preserves at Stanley.”
The word turducken is made up of turkey, duck and chicken. The dish is a form of engastration, which is a recipe method in which one animal is stuffed inside the gastric passage of another.
The thoracic cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly-seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird.
The result is a solid layered poultry dish, which is suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling or barbecuing.
Mr Wallace and his wife Brodie opened Your Everyday Gourmet about six years ago to supply free-range and ethically-grown meat to the North East and Border.
Its local suppliers include Londrigan Beef, Cornwall Farm Lamb, Warby Free Range Pork and Milawa Poultry.
Among other specialities are Tomahawk Steak – a 1.5-kilogram rib eye beef steak attached to the bone – and crocodile tails.
Mr Wallace said customers bought Tomahawk Steaks for special occasions.
“We’ve had people come in and buy them for Christmas gifts,” he said.
And if you’re still wondering how a turducken might taste.
It tastes like chicken, of course!
