WE SURVIVED!! All it took was James standing in the kitchen alone for about ten minutes, staring blankly at a massive pile of ingredients before he sheepishly admitted that maybe he could use just a PINCH of help.
He and his teenage son Garett did a great job injecting and dry brining the turkeys the day before (they got less spray on the ceiling than I usually do when I inject, so that was a winner!)
Here are our two turkeys next to each other (they were both like 8-10 pounds). The heritage turkey in on the left, and the domestic turkey on the right. We raised both on the farm, but you can definitely tell a difference between the two breeds just from breast size. The heritage turkey was actually a number of weeks older than the one on the right, but since the domestic turkey (this was a broad breasted white) was bred for big breasts, there is a remarkable difference!
I lined the boys out for what needed to get started first, and they got to chopping like madmen.
James spatchcocked the turkeys (he got a BIG kick out of pretending to do CPR on them while flattening them), and we got them set up on the MAK. I'd read that heritage turkeys do better when they're cooked to a slightly lower temp than 'normal' turkeys, so I put that one on the bottom, and the domestic one up top.
We'd also done some "Disney style" cured turkey legs from Meathead's recipe the night before to get us in the turkey mood.
James, again, getting REALLY into the spirit of things
I didn't get any particularly good shots of the turkeys when they were done (well... I got one shot, but they got tangled together in an unfortunate manner on the platter and the picture looked a little too risque for our PG rating here.)
Breast meat on the two birds was really comparable (turned out juicy and just oh so good), but the dark meat on the heritage free range bird was definitely more flavorful. Even still, both were far better than the turkeys we've had in the past, and we will definitely be raising these again! We still have several of each type of bird, and I'll butcher the two domestic birds in another number of weeks when they get REALLY big.
These type will top out at like 40-50 lbs (live weight), so I'll post pictures of those behemoths when we get to that point!
