Talking turkey in Indian accent

Turkey may be a celebratory bird in the US where it is indispensable for the ritual Thanksgiving meal, but it is practically unknown in India, where people in different parts of the country have enjoyed ‘murgi’ and ‘murgabi’ — farm bred and country birds of all kind. Kadaknath murg, jet black in colour, is enjoying a revival these days, and duck, once encountered only in Eastern India, is stirring up excitement in the cooking pots at hotels and homes lately. It’s a bit surprising that it has taken the terrestrial bird, turkey, so much time to take off.

Well, now that the big bird is in hand, let’s stop beating around the bush. The USA Poultry and Egg Export Council has launched a campaign to popularise turkey products in easy-to-use forms — raw as well as processed, and it looks like those who prefer white health meats will be spoilt for choice.

Nutritionists have, for a while, been recommending turkey as an alternative to chicken ham and fish; and there have been chefs who have unveiled turkey musallam with great fanfare. Truth be told, musallam is a time-consuming dish, difficult to pull off with squab chickens and few feel like embarking on this culinary adventure. Even duck roast deters most cooks. But we digress.

Turkey has sweet-tasting flesh that is easy on the stomach and absorbs flavours easily. It pairs well with fruits. This we discovered over a laidback lunch at Litchi restaurant in the Capital recently. Chef Ram Lama, joining hands with Chef Nishant Choubey, cooked up quite a storm with Pheel murg. Pheel, by the way, is Arabic for elephant, and seems apt for the extraordinarily large-sized bird. This is what the rook on the chessboard is called in Urdu. It also indicates that turkey was not entirely unknown in the subcontinent. As a matter of fact, many people thought that the bird had an Indian origin as poor Columbus thought he had landed in India when he anchored in America and confused native Americans with Indians.

What won us over were simple delicacies — familiar yet exotic, flavourful and healthy like the turkey tikka with Guo zong sauce and the open kathi roll. (Purists may miss the judo spring roll, but didn’t it start as a kebab? There are open tacos, open sub-sandwiches and even a deconstructed samosa on the platter on offer, so why not an open kathi?)

We have great pleasure in sharing one of the many interesting recipes with our readers this time. Our long spell of involuntary vegetarianism in Sawan was broken with this recipe.

Don’t be deterred by the long roasting time. Once the oven is pre-heated, it does the heavy lifting. All you need to do is to keep an eye on the timer.

Cheat sheet: If you loathe to exert even with the intelligent oven, you may use pre-processed turkey ham or juliennes and assemble the kathi kebab from scratch in a jiffy.

Pheel murg

Ingredients

Pheel murg/turkey 500 gm

Roomali roti (readymade, 2

cut into discs of 3” diameter)

Red bell pepper 100 gm

Yellow bell pepper 100 gm

Onion (medium-sized, sliced fine) 1

Eggs 4

Black olives (pitted) 50 gm

Pomelo 100 gm

(chakotra, flesh of the fruit)

Kasundhi 3 tbsp

(Bengali mustard sauce)

Olive oil 3 tbsp

Black peppercorns 1 tbsp

(freshly pounded coarsely)

Rosemary (fresh, chopped) 1 tbsp

Method

• Marinate the turkey with salt, black pepper, rosemary and olive oil for 4 hours. Place it in a preheated oven and cook for 2 hours. Allow it to cool down and pull meat off the bone. Dress it with kasundhi.
• In the meantime, wipe clean, halve and core the red and yellow bell pepper. Grate, shred or cut these in very thin strips. Slice the onion. Add these to dressed turkey, along with the pomelo.
• Boil eggs for 3 to 4 minutes, shell and slice.
• Arrange everything on a platter. Garnish with olives and sliced eggs. Serve on top of roomali roti.