Turketta: An invented word for “turkey prepared porchetta style.” Sometimes spelled turchetta. Porchetta – the word is the feminine diminutive of porco (pig) – is a stuffed and rolled roast of suckling pig; the dish is associated with central Italy and Sardinia.
Turketta, aka turchetta, aka turkey porchetta. Photo by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt for Serious Eats.
U.S. Thanksgiving is celebrated this year on November 26, and the recipe glut has already commenced. I found turketta in a story in the November 15, 2015, print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Thomas Odermatt cut through a bronzed roulade and watched wide-eyed as a fat slice fell to the cutting board beneath.
“Turketta!” exclaimed the Roli Roti butcher and owner, his thick Swiss accent punctuating each staccato syllable. “Come, everybody. Come and look at this!”
Odermatt’s colleagues practically came running, anxious to get a look at the roast, a Thanksgiving version of his signature porchetta that glistens on a spit in his popular Bay Area rotisserie food trucks.
Turketta is a relatively new word, but, as the excerpt indicates, the concept has been around for a while under other names: turkey roll, roulade, galantine. Preparing turketta may take two days; it involves skinning, boning, and butterflying a turkey breast; rubbing it with spices and salt; stuffing it with thigh meat or sausage; trussing; and roasting.
The earliest citations I found for this definition of turketta are from November 2013, when the ABC-TV cooking show The Chew featured the dish. The coinage continues a recent tradition of fanciful Thanksgiving-related portmanteaus: Thanksgivukkah, turducken, cherpumple, turbaconducken, Friendsgiving.
In Italian, "tacchino in porchetta" or "tacchino porchettato".
Turchetta doesn't sound very enticing, it makes one think of a small squat toilet ("turca").
Posted by: Licia | November 29, 2015 at 02:09 PM