VanFoodies.com

Traditionally it’s not in our culture to celebrate Thanksgiving. Instead, we celebrate Moon Festival (aka Mid Autumn Festival). But this year, as newlyweds, we did something different and invited 4 friends over for a Thanksgiving dinner.

Courtesy of Echelon Foods, we received one of their Bacon Wrapped Turducken Premium Roasts and that was the star of our Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, it’s a turducken roast with Italian sausage stuffing and wrapped with bacon. A 3kg meaty goodness. It’s going to be an epic dinner!

Preparation was quite simple. We defrosted the frozen roast in the refrigerator for 3.5 days (instruction says 2-3 days). Then, we followed their low-to-high temperature cooking method, which took us 4 hours. Baked the roast in the centre of the oven, on a rack in a roasting pan for 3 hours at 220F, then turned up the heat to 350F for another hour. When the internal temperature exceeded 165F, we broiled it at 500F for a few minutes until the bacon strips became golden brown.

To complete our turducken dinner, we roasted some cauliflowers, made some mashed potatoes, and our friend NS brought over my favourite bacon brussels sprouts. We added the drippings to some gravy mix and the gravy was nicely seasoned and delicious – way, way better than a canned gravy. Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without a glass of wine or beer. We had both. 😛

And the verdict? Oh. so. moist. You can tell each type of meat apart, yet they’re all moist and juicy, and flavourful. The Italian sausage itself was heavily seasoned, slightly spicy and perhaps a bit too salty, but you’re not supposed to eat it on its own anyway. The perfect bite was a nice segment that included a bit of all 5 types of meat. All our guests really enjoyed the roast – it required a lot of willpower to stop ourselves from “having just one more slice” and over-stuffing ourselves (lol pun intended). In the end, 6 of us finished just over half of the roast.

Now I didn’t get to enjoy Peter’s homemade turducken roast but I rather liked this hassle-free, ready-to-go turducken roast from Echelon. The price tag may seem high (this bacon-wrapped roast costs CAD$99.99) but buying a comparable size ham roast from grocery stores would cost at least $50 and it’s just ham. This turducken roast has 5 types of meat, all deboned and seasoned, and the cooking part was quite straightforward. In fact, our friends were considering getting one of those perhaps for Christmas this year.

To wrap up our dinner, we also made some Apple Roses for dessert, but that’s for another post. 🙂

Disclosure: The roast was provided to me free of charge. However, the views and opinions expressed in this post are purely my own.