We know what a turkey ready to be eaten looks like as it is served up.
If the bird is well-cooked, the legs are easily removed and breast meat can be sliced off both sides of the breast bone. But a few days after Thanksgiving, it is time for the full demolition and stripping.
I keep a scale handy and a set of small plastic lunch bags. When doing the full job, I get meat and other parts, the skin, bones and a little meat that I can't really separate off. We have an efficient electric knife that slices meat nicely. Having a small paring knife at hand is useful. Often when pulling a nice chunk of meat off the body, a bit of tendon or joint is stuck to the actual meat and a small sharp knife separates off what is just good meat nicely.
It surprises me how much of the job gets done by sensitive, strong fingers instead of by blades. My fingers can tell right where the muscle is and tear the whole thing free. I fill a small plastic bag with about 10 ounces of meat and sit the bag on the scale to verify the size. Because of the virus situation, we had just the two of us at Thanksgiving dinner. Today, the stripping gave us five lunch bags of meat from an 11 lb. bird. We have a large zipper bag of bones, meat bits and skin that Lynn will make into soup.
Pulling meat off the bones for sandwiches, turkey tetrazzini or a mixture of cubed meat, rice and a vegetable is as close as I get to the basic job of butchering and arranging cuts and pieces. As a kid, I did get to help move some pigs onto a truck to be taken to the slaughterhouse but I didn't make the trip there.
