Jellied meat is a universal dish. Fits perfectly into the everyday menu, does not desecrate any solemn feast with its presence. What can I say. Not a single New Year's table is complete without this obligatory and, it should be noted, really tasty food. It is traditionally prepared from pork. But we would like to suggest that you pay attention to an alternative option - turkey jelly. It turns out that it is no worse, if not even tastier, and it has an undeniable advantage - it contains much fewer calories, which is very useful when the “belly festival” is on the agenda.
But before talking about how to cook jelly from turkey, I would like to dwell on some aspects, the incorrect interpretation of which sometimes leads to the appearance of culinary misunderstandings.
So still: aspic or aspic?
There is a difference between the two dishes. Not to say that significant, but still. So, aspic (from turkey, pork or another product), is prepared on the basis of natural gelling broth, while the preparation of aspic involves the use of gelatin. This is not to say that gelatin is a harmful product. Just the right approach to cooking jellied meat is the key to success. And what is this correct approach? In the choice of turkey meat - in our case. Rather, parts of her carcass. So, in order to get nevertheless not a thick soup, but a jelly, you need to take wings for cooking, in which there are a lot of bones and ligaments, giving the stickiness so necessary to this dish. But since there is not much meat in the wings, they usually boil shanks with them. Sometimes, however, they also make jelly from the neck of a turkey. Not to say that it turns out tasteless, just this option should be considered as budgetary due to the lower cost of this by-product.
Well, now that we have finally and once and for all figured out what we need in order to properly prepare the jelly from turkey, we go directly to the recipes.
Classic option
To cook jellied meat according to this recipe, we stock up:
- turkey wings (six pieces);
- drumstick (four pieces);
- carrots (1 pc.);
- onions (1 pc.);
- bay leaf (several pcs.);
- cloves (5 pcs.);
- black pepper (8 pcs.).
Cooking process
The turkey meat should be washed well, clean the legs from the skin (with wings this number will not work, so leave them as they are), put in a saucepan and pour water. A lot of liquid is not needed, pour so that it only covers the meat. We put on the fire, after boiling we throw the peeled uncut carrots there, a whole onion without husks, salt, leave to simmer over low heat. After a few hours, you need to get the vegetables, and we cook the meat for another hour. 10 minutes before the end we throw bay leaf and our seasonings into the broth. A sign of readiness - the meat is easily separated from the bone. If we find this, it's time to get it.
The rest is just as simple. After cooling, the meat is removed from the bones, disassembled into pieces, laid out in bowls or trays. Filter the broth, fill it with turkey meat. If you wish, you can also put boiled carrots, greens, sliced in circles, and add finely chopped garlic.
Everything. It remains to put our jelly from turkey in a cold place, wait until it solidifies completely, and then serve. By the way, it can be easily removed from the forms - just go with a knife along the edges of the dish and gently turn the contents onto a plate.
There is another cooking option when not only turkey, but also chicken is used as the main component of the dish - meat. By the way, a very interesting way that deserves attention.
Jelly from turkey and chicken
Before presenting this recipe to you, you will have to conduct a short lesson in literary literacy. Many housewives very often make mistakes when they start looking for answers to the question of how to cook jelly from turkey legs. The fact is that our culinary experts under the word "legs" mean just the shin and thigh, while in reality these are the real legs of the turkey. So, this part of the body in cooking somehow, to put it mildly, is not quoted. And from them nobody prepares anything, except, perhaps, the most desperate. But the recipe for jelly from turkey and chicken legs is very popular. And you know why? Because the paws give the necessary stickiness, and due to this, there is no need to use certain parts of the turkey carcass (in our case, wings) for cooking. To put it simply, we can say something like this. When chicken paws are used in the preparation of this dish, you can take any turkey meat, even breast.
Will we try?
To prepare such a combined jelly, we take:
- a kilogram of chicken legs ;
- turkey meat (any, 2 kg).
The remaining ingredients are the same as in the previous recipe.
How to cook
Cooking turkey meat is identical to the previous version, so we will not repeat it. But what about the paws, a few words need to be said. First, they need to be processed: wash well, scald, do a “pedicure” (remove the claws), remove the skin. And then put in a separate pan, add water, salt and simmer for three or four hours. When the legs are cooked, they need to be removed from the pan, and strain the broth and combine with the one in which the turkey was cooked.
The rest of the cooking process is exactly the same as in the first case, only our meat is already poured with such a combined broth.
The jelly made from turkey, prepared both in the first and second ways, is a very tasty and beautiful dish. Give it a try!