Barbecue Turkey

Not really on the Barbi, but cooked in a barbecue sauce, anyway.



When my wife said she was marinading a turkey leg in barbecue sauce, I was a little skeptical. I have to admit, it came out well, though. It was juicy, flavorful and the texture was good.


This summer we raised turkeys again. We did more this year because last year's turned out well and we sold them easily. Again, they sold easily this year. My wife says she couldn't do any more than we did this year. I don't blame her doing all the slaughter and butcher ourselves was a lot of work.


We have eaten four turkeys for various holiday gatherings, one went to my brother, two went into our freezer as parts and the rest we sold. The turkey along with the goat from bucklings, roosters and the occasional pig we buy are most of our meat. We don't look a gift piece of beef in the mouth, but we don't by beef because we have enough of our own meat. It makes it that much more special to get it on rare occasions.

It's just an interesting juxtaposition for me. I can remember how long it's been since I bought a 29 cents a pound loss leader turkey or dollar ninety nine manager's special pork loin. Contrary to a lot of assumptions, raising our own food isn't so much about saving money. It's about knowing what food our food eats.

Now there are none

We finished off the last four the turkeys today. Along with the turkeys, we culled our older hens and slaughtered this years roosters.

We've been plucking the turkeys by hand all fall, but for this slaughter we rented a plucker. We wanted to try one out and see what they were like. See which styles work well. I have seen tiny ones to attach to a drill advertised, rotating drums and tub varieties like we rented. We rented a tub style one. I do think the tub style should work well for turkeys, but the one we rented didn't work out well for us. It worked OK for the chickens, but not for the turkeys. The turkeys would get stuck, a foot or head or whatever getting caught between the spinning plate and the tub wall. The turkeys just didn't tumble effectively, so they didn't get plucked. The guy we rented it from said it would handle upto 35 pound birds, and ours were only about 25 lbs live weight.

In all fairness, I think our scalding wasn't optimal either, but this plucker just banged the birds up too much. Even the chickens got beat up.

I am glad the birds we did today we not for customers, they wouldn't have been saleable.

I still think that a tub style plucker will work. I have heard very good things about the featherpro machines. We'll be looking to try one of those next year. I am glad there won't be another opportunity till then. I am done with processing turkeys for a while.

And then there were four

We're down to four turkeys still kicking. There are still four not kicking in the market fridge pending pickup.

We did twenty five turkeys this spring. We lost five chicks in the first week, no losses beyond that. We have been doing a slaughter day each week for about a month. Hand plucking makes for long slaughter days. But having an extended window for slaughter has meant we met the window for each customer's desired weight. We had requests for < 12 to 22 pounds dressed weight. Our smallest bird was a little over twelve, the largest has been 23.5 lbs dressed.

I talked to a nearby farmer and he talked about having commercial white toms coming in at 39lbs live weight, which I would guess would be close to 30 lbs dressed. I am assuming the major difference from his max weight to ours is more grain. Interestingly, it sounds like his hens weighed in at about the same as ours. Whatever led to his big toms did not translate to bigger hens.

We have sold 12 birds this year. Our goal had been 10, but it seemed like a good idea to satisfy our available market. That's without any advertising outside word of mouth. My wife does all the selling, connections she makes at the farmer's markets and the community. After giving two to family, two for the harvest party, one for our thanksgiving and another one at Christmas, there are two for our freezer to enjoy later. I like eating roast turkey, its a big meal that carries us for days after that isn't hard to do. And during the winter, it is hard to beat the way it satisfies hunger.

We are thinking about renting a plucker for the final slaughter day. We want to try one out as we think a plucker is in our future. I'd like to get an idea for how the different styles compare. We have some roosters that will help make it worthwhile. I think about making one of those Wizbang pluckers, but I haven't gotten up the motivation.

Windfall

My neighbors down the way let me pick up their windfall apples for my turkeys. There were probably between 75 and 100 lbs of apples. I am hoping the apples will help finish the turkeys this year. Last year our first turkey was a little on the dry side. We slaughtered the first about mid September as a test bird. Given that turkey had virtually no fat, we started adding cracked corn to their grain ration. It had the desired effect, the subsequent turkey's were much more moist. This year I am hoping we can fatten the turkeys on apple, at least in part. Apples are a crop we have on our land and our neighbors. And I hope apples add something special to these turkeys.

Last year was our first with turkeys. We did ten, mostly for ourselves. This year we have twenty, enough to sell some. They are looking pretty good, we'll probably be able to slaughter a few by October. The plan is to have one or two on the table for our harvest party in October.

Turkey Poults

These are our newest addition, turkey poults. It is always a struggle to get a local turkey in the fall. They are in short supply and expensive. Last year they were between three and four dollars a pound. That makes a good sized bird as much as $80, which is getting too expensive for us. We like turkey and like to cook several between October and March, for holiday meals and family gatherings. Turkey's are a great way to put on a big pleasant meal. Turkey's at the supermarket are often cheap around Thanksgiving, but now that they are explicitly marked as a product of US / Canada / Mexico, I can no longer buy them in good conscience. It was bad enough knowing they were feed lot / poultry barn birds. Now that they might be foreign made industrial ag animals, it's just too much.

So, this year, we are trying raising our own birds. It's not a big difference in cost over buying a local organic bird since we are feeding grain. The ten poults were about $50, 50 lbs of grain is about $10, even our inexpensive stock panel housing costs money and the opportunity cost of choosing to spend our time raising turkeys instead of something else. We are starting with ten with the hope of getting at least six birds out of the season. Since we don't know a lot about turkey's I wouldn't be surprised if we have some losses.

These are broad breasted birds, bred for more breast meat. Bronze and Polish White's. Heritage breeds were not as readily available and after plucking Guineas, I was willing to accept the broad breasted birds. Maybe we'll try heritage breeds in the future for their ability to reproduce. But we'll start with these and see how it goes.