[Sca-cooks] smoked turkey necks?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>I've been seeing multiple displays of smoked turkey necks in my 
>grocery lately. Perhaps because of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, 
>although I don't remember seeing these in previous years. Maybe I 
>just didn't notice.
>
>Anyway, what can these be used for? Can these be used to flavor 
>other foods to give a smokey flavor such as is done with smoked ham 
>hocks? Or would the turkey necks disintegrate into a lot of tiny 
>bones? By the same reasoning, I suspect there are too many bones, or 
>not enough meat that these are actually used as a meat source. Or am 
>I wrong here?

Well, they're not something I'd expect a true carnivore to live on, 
but they do have some meat on them.

I hate to put it this way, but their actual, true purpose is to make 
money for the meat packers. Turkey necks are perhaps longer than 
convenient for packing inside the body cavity as with the other 
giblet items, and my suspicion is that smoking them is more a new 
idea that somebody came up with, especially as sales of things like 
hamhocks and fatback drop due to health concerns, to fill that 
particular niche. And to make money.

Yeah, they will eventually disintegrate into a lot of little bones: 
the trick is to cook them to a point before that happens, and then 
they're pretty edible. Probably their best presentation would be 
cooked in a pot of cabbage or greens, or beans or peas of some kind. 
Maybe cholent...

There are other ways to cook turkey necks, but the way they're smoked 
limits the options; you couldn't, for example, bone them out very 
easily, since they're hot-smoked, as far as I can tell.

I think my least favorite surprise on the weird-cuts-of-turkey 
department has got to be the drumsticks cut into steaks, though. I 
bought some of these recently, getting this idea that they looked 
kind of like osso bucco (veal shank), and might respond well to a 
similar type of cooking.

What I failed to take into account was the enormous amount of sinew 
and tendons in a turkey drumstick. They can be a slight problem, but 
because they're whole, they can be removed from the meat, at best, 
and at worst, removed from the mouth, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, when the drumstick is sliced across the bone into 
1/2 to 3/4 inch slices, the experience is more like eating a 
particularly bony fish, something like shad or carp, except the bones 
are sharp and painful in the mouth. Unlike a fish steak, their 
location proved to be unpredictable, too. I've never had a problem 
with fish bones: you get served a whole fish with bones, and you eat 
the meat from between the bones because it's usually pretty simple to 
figure out where the bones are.

In a sliced turkey drumstick, where the tendons are, is everywhere.

Adamantius