AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: Our Thanksgiving marathon begins early—very early—on Monday of that week. We’ve found that the easiest, least traumatic time to get the birds onto the truck is while they’re still snoozing up on their night-time perches. The trailer backs up to the barn annex that serves as the turkeys’ dormitory just before 6 a.m. and in the pre-dawn half light we stealthily enter, reach up, grab each bird by both legs, lift it off its perch (sort of like picking a very heavy apple with flapping wings) and hand it into the truck. They are generally so groggy and unaware that we can get more than half of them quietly onto the truck before a flurry of concern sets in among those remaining. This year, our hundred or so birds were loaded in less than half an hour. From there, as always, Peter and I take divergent paths for the day. Peter, after tending to the needs of the sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese, makes up the waterproof name tags that will be affixed to the dressed turkeys as we sort them. He picks vegetables for Thanksgiving orders, does final organization of the sorting area in the garage, and responds to the usual last minute slew of phone calls. He does not enjoy seeing what will happen to the turkeys. I proceed to the slaughterhouse to hand the birds out of the truck to meet their fate, always a traumatic event, and then, unless my help is needed, I usually catch a break to prepare for the afternoon and evening of sorting and invoicing that awaits. This year, however, my break was replaced with a special mission: processing the turkey gizzards.
Some people would question the sanity of this mission, but the imperative to do it was really quite logical and straightforward. Last year, Richard van Wie of Ghent, who processes our birds, told me they simply didn’t have the time or staff to deal with the gizzards. Another lesson in the economics of small-scale agriculture. His solution last year was to give us the bags of gizzards, without processing, to distribute as we saw fit. We put them aside, not knowing quite how to approach distribution of random gizzards in the rush of Thanksgiving, but soon enough heard the complaints rolling in: Giblets are missing. Yes, the heart, liver and neck are there, but where are our gizzards? How can I make my giblet gravy? I didn’t understand the disappointment at not receiving what appeared to me to be just a fatty hockey puck. But we take our customers’ satisfaction seriously, and I vowed that this year the gizzards had to be done. The only problem: when I insisted that I wanted the gizzards in the cavity this year with the other giblets, Richard reminded me that he didn’t have the staff to do that. I have frequently had to help in the processing, but never with such a formal and specialized role. And while I expected to feel resentful and bored, it turned out to be oddly fascinating. It wasn’t the company I was in, although the two young women doing the bulk of the processing, themselves part of the new small agriculture economy (and therefore in need of the cash), were perfectly interesting and pleasant. No, it was the gizzards that engaged me. Wikipedia, the usual source, provides a pretty good technical explanation of what the gizzard is—an organ (which seemed to me more like a muscle) that grinds food before it reaches the stomach. It is found in certain poultry, reptiles, earthworms, and other creatures (such as dinosaurs and some fish) that don’t have teeth. Some of these, including turkeys and chickens, swallow small stones that are used as the internal grinding tools within the gizzard. I took the first gizzard and started carefully removing all of the external sinew and fat. It looked so unattractive I figured that was what “processing” the gizzard was all about. Then I thought I’d better check whether I’d done it right, and Richard kindly set me straight. First of all, he told me, people who value the gizzard for culinary purposes value the fatty stuff on the outside. As I should have recalled, fat is flavor. Then he demonstrated the real goal of processing: cutting the gizzard open and removing its inner membrane, which forms a sort of sac, and the sac’s contents, which is what the turkeys had been working on digesting when fate intervened. And here is where the fascination began: At first, I tended to slice all the way through the inner membrane, breaking the sac and exposing its contents. I had anticipated seeing corn kernels, soybeans, and the other grains and legumes contained in their feed, along with little pebbles. Well, the pebbles were there but to my surprise, other than the rare corn kernel, the rest of the contents looked much like very short grass clippings (about one sixteenth of an inch long) from the bag of a lawn mower. All the clumps of deep bright green grass confirmed that grazing is a primary part of the turkeys’ diet (or maybe the hardest to digest).
After doing the first dozen or so, I got a feel for the process, similar to the benefits of shucking a large number of oysters. In oyster-shucking, the trick, learned only with repeated practice, is to use your knife to cut the muscle just right, which allows you to loosen and flip open the shell without incident (either breaking the shell or slicing fingers). With gizzards, the trick is to slice just deeply enough to pull the organ open, thus revealing the intact inner membrane. You then pull the entire sac from the surrounding muscle, without revealing the its contents. And here is where the most fascinating part occurs. When opened this way, the gizzard is an object of considerable beauty. The inner sac, with its ridged membrane, resembles a taupe-colored squash blossom. Once removed, the sac leaves behind a ridged slightly yellowy, flower-like impression, which contrasts with the deep red of the surrounding, pleasantly symmetrical muscle. The opened gizzard is as colorful and pleasingly symmetrical as any still-life subject—an opened fig, an oyster, or a skull by Georgia O’Keefe. Later I went on-line looking for images of gizzards, fully expecting that they must have engaged some artist, somewhere, some time. What I found instead was a dizzying array of recipes. It seems that pickled gizzards are a great treat in the upper Midwest, and deep fried gizzards a specialty in southern cuisine. There were plenty of pictures of cooked gizzards, but nothing like what I had seen. And here, I thought, is another lesson in our food culture. The few of you who cared enough last year to call about the missing gizzards are a distinct minority. Most of us overlook or reject such perfectly edible parts of the animals we produce, and it turns out that the loss is not only that we miss out on tasty and nourishing food, but also on aesthetic experience. Despite its ugly name, the gizzard is a piece of real eye candy. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
