DIY sliced smoked turkey sandwich meat Plus

[johnec00]

Around the holidays, the supermarkets generally have frozen turkey as a loss leader. I picked up two 14-ish pounders for 49¢ a pound a while back and made smoked sandwich rolls this week. Worked out real good, here's some pics:



Two frozen commodity turkeys with brine, so no added salt.


Boned out the carcass and thighs, reserved the drums and wings for something else.


Cut up the meat into fairly large pieces and mixed in some poultry spice and 2 grams transglutaminase (meat glue) per pound. I've used Knox gelatin before, but it does not bond real well. This is the first try with the transglutaminase sort of like suggested by Chefsteps.


Stuffed very tightly into 90mm collagen sausage casings, vacuum bagged and sous vide 12 hours at 140º.




Chilled to near freezing in ice water bath, then smoked to nice color (~2 hours at 225º) over apple chunks.
transglutaminase glued pieces together much better than gelatin.


Made almost 6 pounds slices at ~$2.25 per pound.


Plus 9 pints stock - free.


Plus 4 drums and 4 wings - free. Turkey leg confit coming soon!.

[Steve B]

That's pretty cool. Nice write up too. Did you leave the casings on or remove after the cook?

[johnec00]

Thanks, I thought I already answered this, but maybe I failed to hit "post". I removed the casings before slicing. The Collagen casings were stuck pretty bad, but wrapping in a damp towel for a few minutes made them easier. Fibrous casings would probably work better, but I used what I had.

[jgreen]

Those look great!

[klflowers]

That looks excellent. How did you stuff it into the casings? By hand?

[johnec00]

Thanks. Pretty much by hand, I cut the bottom off a 24oz disposable plastic cup and dropped the meat in. Roughly interspersing the dark and light meat. Then squeezed it in as hard as I dared without bursting the casing.

[klflowers]

johnec00, thanks. I am going to try this. I had never seen that meat glue before either.

[grantgallagher]

Oh my! That looks freaking awesome.