Plucking nightmare: Kosher turkey
Kosher birds aren't plucked as thoroughly as their non-kosher counterparts. Here are some of the feathers the photographer had to extract, with needle-nosed pliers, from her Kosher Valley turkey. (Nov. 12, 2011) Credit: Newsday/Erica Marcus
Here in the Newsday food department, we’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving for weeks. I’m currently working on a “leftovers” story (to run on Thanksgiving Day), that required me to roast a bird over the weekend. Since I wasn’t going to serve the turkey whole, I decided to cook the breast and legs separately, as I did for this 2006 Thanksgiving story. I’ve done this a few times since then, and every time I do I feel like I split the atom.
But anyway. I decided to buy my bird at Whole Foods in Jericho, and there were a number of varieties to choose from. I selected a fresh Kosher Valley turkey. Now I am well aware that a kosher bird (already brined) will have more residual feathers than its nonkosher counterpart. Here’s why: Once conventional chickens and turkeys are slaughtered, they get dunked into scalding water. This opens up the birds’ pores and allows the plucking machine to efficiently extract the feathers. (Ladies, it’s the same principle that makes your eyebrows easier to pluck if you’ve just gotten out of a hot shower.) Kosher birds, however, cannot be dunked in hot water because that would be considered cooking, and since the bird’s not kosher yet, it can’t be cooked. Kosher birds must be plucked without the benefit of that hot shower, and that’s why they often come with a few feathers still attached. Often the skin will be torn as well — the result of overenthusiastic plucking.
None of the forgoing prepared me, however, for the superabundance of feathers still attached to my little turkey. I spent more than an hour armed with a pair of needle-nosed pliers plucking and I was not happy about it. I collected about half the feathers (see above) in a plastic bag and this morning I showed them to the unlucky Whole Foods employee who happened to be manning the customer-service counter. She gave me a store credit immediately — and I got the feeling she would have done so even if I hadn’t produced such damning evidence.
Have you cooked a kosher turkey? Am I being unreasonable? Leave a comment below, or email me at erica.marcus@newsday.com.
