One of America's Favorites - Turducken

Turducken is a dish consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, stuffed into a

30 lb. roasted turducken

deboned turkey. Outside of the United States and Canada, it is known as a Three Bird Roast. Gooducken is a traditional English variant, replacing turkey with goose.

The word turducken is a portmanteau 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/game hen 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 fairly solid layered poultry dish, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing.



A New Orleans surgeon, Dr. Gerald R. LaNasa, was locally known for his use of a scalpel in deboning his three birds of choice sometimes adding pork or veal roasts in the final hen's cavity thus

Sausage-stuffed turducken cut into quarters to show the internal layers

preserving the turducken tradition as a regional holiday favorite of the southern United States. Andouille sausage and Foie Gras were always key ingredients of the LaNasa creations. The results of Dr. LaNasa's work can be found in the modern day mass-produced turducken or turduckhen (another variation adding or substituting a cornish game hen). His turkey, duck, and chicken ballontine is now widely commercially available under multiple trademark names. Dr. LaNasa's innovation and success with ballontine, Three Bird Roast and turducken began mid century, expanding in the 1960s and seventies long before many of the popular commercial Cajun/Creole chefs of today took the stage. In 1986 Louisiana chef Paul Prudhomme trademarked the Turducken name.

In the United Kingdom, a turducken is a type of ballotine called a "three-bird roast" or a "royal roast". The Pure Meat Company offered a five-bird roast (a goose, a turkey, a chicken, a pheasant, and a pigeon, stuffed with sausage), described as a modern revival of the traditional Yorkshire Christmas pie, in 1989; and a three-bird roast (a duck stuffed with chicken stuffed with a pigeon, with sage and apple stuffing) in 1990. Multi-bird roasts are widely available.