Preparing, Cooking, and Eating your Wild Turkey

OK, you've just legally harvested your trophy gobbler and you have your hunting buddy take a few "hero" shots to post on your blog and preserve the memory of the hunt. What's next?

Well, it's time to take the edible meat from your bird so you can enjoy the fruit of your hunt. Below is the process of butchering your bird, preparing the meat to cook, and chowing down on it.

First, you will note the relative bloodless process of taking the breast meat from a wild turkey. You simply lay the bird on it's back, find the breast bone, make a one inch incision, then rip open the chest cavity exposing the breast meat- the only real edible meat on a wild turkey. The legs are not like fat, dark meat, domestic turkey legs, instead they are skinny and very sinewy. Not good eating unless you're a pilgrim who just came over on the Mayflower and haven't had fresh meat in 90 or more days.

With the meat extracted and in a plastic bag for transport home, you can have the rest of your bird for a cool mount, if you so choose. I have mounted several of my turkeys. When you get the meat home, it goes in the refrigerator immediately. I no longer freeze my wild turkey meat. I eat it within days of harvesting. I don't think wild poultry freezes well. I shot my bird on Monday, we ate it on Saturday. When I was ready to cook it, I took the meat out of the bag, washed it, and cut it in to strips.

This time I had several different seasonings I wanted to try, as you can see below. I made a hotter (more spicy) batch, and some that were just plain poultry seasoning. I have tried grilling, broiling, baking, and frying my wild turkeys. With no question, frying is the best. Frying in peanut oil is supreme. This time, however, I didn't have any peanut oil, so corn oil was fine.

I dip the strips in milk (buttermilk works great too), then bread the pieces. Then I plop them in to the deep fryer (not in view).

After one batch is done, I put them on a baking pan and keep them warm and crisp in the oven while the others are cooking.

BAM! They're done. Add a side of fried potatoes, and you have yourself a great meal!

How does it taste? Well, honestly, not as good as domestic turkey, but still very good. Remember that a wild, mature gobbler like the one I shot is 3-4 years old. Domestic turkeys you eat for Thanksgiving are less than 18 months old and the "Young Hens" so many people like are 6-9 months old. Further, domestic turkeys are usually penned up, fed grain non stop, and even injected with various things before and after they are slaughtered. Wild Turkeys live on the nervous run most of their days, eating insects and anything else they can forage. There's no way an old wild turkey is going to taste like a Butterball.

Despite not being as tasty as a domestic turkey, the satisfaction that goes with making a meal out of something you spent hours hunting is indescribable. I also think it's the proper way to honor the animal you harvest. Nothing should be killed if it won't also be eaten.