I actually had some advice for the turducken but seeing where this is going I’ll just carry on.
Don’t experiment with your guests.
Hm, it looks as if the Mods take a dim view of Turduckens and Ammonius Saccus has now been banned.* I hope I’m not in trouble because my wife cooked one.
Zsofia, from our experience it was very juicy. The fat from the duck kept is very moist. (Note - I said “moist”, not “healthy”.)
Parthenokinesis, you’re right. I had not thought to do the math. That’s a lot of pepper!
- This is not intended to be a serious comment of a banning event. Just an attempt at Doper humor.
search on Turduckens. IIRC, Scylla did one of these a couple years ago.
I got a butcher to make me a turducken once. It was very disappointing, as it all just tasted like “some kind of bird meat”. Should have just done the turkey on its own and saved a fortune.
Camel Dolma, however:
Mmmm.
To Zsofia and Mycroft H., at 225 f. it would do good. If you tried to cook it harder, I’d suspect it would be nasty.
And just to say, I felt kinda bad for Ammonius, getting piled on and all, me just as guilty… I tried to engage him in this thread. Then he goes and pits Cecil! 
What a maroon!
There is the lame version of turducken which basicially involves making successive galantines. That is, splitting the poultry and deboning them and then stiching them back up again. This is not especially difficult and anybody with any experience in boning poultry and a bit of patience should be able to do it.
The proper version of Turducken involves a technique called tunnel boning which requires the removal of all the bones without breaking the skin. I’ve tried tunnel boning chickens a couple of times before, out of boredom more than anything else and it’s quite a challenge. You pretty much just have to go slow, be careful not to tear anything and know the anatomy well enough to know where to cut. It takes about an hour for me to tunnel bone a chicken as opposed to maybe 10 minutes to butterfly and bone it and maybe 3 minutes to break it down into pieces and bone it.
My sister’s family and I teamed up on a couple of the bird beasts last year. We split division of labor thusly: She bought the birds, I made the stuffing (esentailly three half sheet pans slightly overflowing.
We then got together a few days prior to the event to do the deconstruction/construction phase.
The birds themsleves were fanstastic, very jucy with good flavor and differing flavors as you went into the different layers.
That being said, I hate stuffing and ate only very little of it.
The stuffing phase was a half day affair and the whole house smeled like cooked onions. Assembly was actually quite fun talking only a couple of hours (if you do mulitple birds deboning gets much easier with practice.
Summation:
Glad we did it. Would do it again some time but only if:[ul]* I had an army to feed
- I had help
- Hi Opal
- I wasn’t doing all the stuffing[/ul]
I merely note how disturbing this phrase is out of context.
I have made The Turducken
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=351109&highlight=turducken
If you make one, you get to call it “The Turducken,” the same way veterans get to say they fought in “The War.”
This year I’m just deep frying a turkey.
How disappointing. This is what I entered this thread to say.
I especially like the instruction “Salt to taste.”
Here is an excellent instructional video on how to make a Turducken. 
contemplates making a Cowpigen
Anybody know how to debone a cow?
I had a commercially prepped one this Thanksgiving at my brother’s house. In the end it was just a big, overwhelming wad of meat, and had a “cooked too long” aspect to it because of the extended cooking times involved. Besides that the turkey, duck, chicken meats are not (IMO) all that complementary flavor-wise, and bonding them all together in cooking really doesn’t help any of them. Standard turkey and stuffing (made in the turkey) would have been far preferable .
To be fair, yours was a commercial effort which may have been a bit overweight in the preservatives or salt.
The one that I made was tender and perfect and the flavors did compliment nicely. On the other hand, the recipe I used called for like 10 sticks of butter in the various dressings. During cooking this butter just oozes through the birds, blending flavors, keeping things moist and what have you.
What doesn’t taste good soaked in butter?
“'Mah boy say he kin eat a Turducken made with 10 sticks of buttah, he’ll eat a Turducken made with 10 sticks of buttah!”
Well, first you . . . no, wait. My mistake. I know nothing about deboning a cow . . .
Well, I cooked a Turducken yesterday.
After de-boning the 3 birds the day before, I feel that I could perform avian autopsies if required. This wasn’t a horrible task, but it did get to be somewhat tedious. The bigger the bird, the easier the task. Ducks have surprisingly little meat on them. Raw turkeys have a gamey kind of scent to them.
There was a surprising amount of drippings while the thing roasted. About a litre each of fat and a very tasty broth which makes excellent gravy.
The final result took about 8 1/4 hours at 225F to reach and internal temperature of 170F.
If I do say so myself, it was excellent. Very juicy and the flavours blend nicely. It fed about 15 people and I have 1/3 of it left over.
No reported ptomaine yet, which was my biggest fear. After all - the meat is at room temperature for quite some time during the preparation process.
It was a very large project. Best done by two people. The results were good enough that I’ll try it again.
Congrats qwest, especially about the lack of ptomaine. Your experience was the same as my wife’s except for your last four words.