Chupallo

Lisa and I were walking one day when we came upon a fowl gathering of turkeys, ducks, and chickens. It was a living Turducken.

I explained to Lisa that which is the Turduken—a chicken enveloped in a duck further wrapped in a turkey. I could see her mind working, imagining a heavenly world where simply having meat wasn’t enough of a treat that the people had to create bigger and better ways to consume more of it.

“So with every slice you get three kinds of meat?”

“Yep, three different meats with every slice.”

“How do they do it, Seño?”

“I have no idea.”

I too am unable to wrap my head around the physics of this Christmas dinner marvel of modern food science. But it is probably best that I don’t know exactly how they stuffed those birds inside each other. That might ruin Christmas.

But should this poultry orgy ever reach the Guatemalan market, Lisa and I have already devised a name for it: Chupallo—chunto (turkey), pato (duck), and gallo (chicken). We have been talking about making our own, but although I have successfully slaughtered a turkey, I think a chupallo is out of my league.

After a little research, though, I discovered there are instructions on the internet (of course there are) for making Turduckens. The problem is the instructions assume you are working with already dead birds of certain weights. Though not an impossible obstacle to overcome, the rural Guatemalan version of making a Chupallo would involve lining up some turkeys, ducks, and chickens of different sizes in the market, imagining them without feathers, limbs, innards, and bones, and trying to decide who would fit snuggly in whom. And of course after selecting the perfect sized birds, there is the whole bit of having to remove those feathers, limbs, innards, and bones.

Yes, constructing my own Chupallo is definitely outside the range of my culinary expertise (which basically consists of making turkey sandwiches). But with Thanksgiving right around the corner, and the help of my very ingenious training group of volunteers, we might just try to pull it off. And if the tri-bird ends up being a flop, then of course we will have the frozen Butterball there as a backup.