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While cooks in the U.S. get ready to roast their once-or-twice-a-year turkeys, a different scene is playing out in Taiwan. There, chefs are preparing turkey rice, a simple but fantastic dish of shredded turkey over rice, dressed with a rich, savory sauce that’s laced with rice wine and topped with golden fried shallots. In Taiwan, where my family is from, it’s the only way to cook and eat turkey. But unlike the American Thanksgiving turkey, turkey rice is a year-round street food dish, available 24 hours a day.
It wasn’t always that way. In Taiwan, the turkey has clawed its way up—over the course of 300 years—from an obscure, foreign protein into an iconic, ubiquitous dish. Before I co-opted it as a post-Thanksgiving solution for turkey leftovers, I regularly enjoyed turkey rice on my annual trips back to Taiwan, where turkeys are poached whole every morning, shredded to order, and dressed with a warming, peppery, and deeply-flavorful sauce.
How turkeys actually got to the island is a bit of an enigma. The bird is not naturally suited to the subtropical local climate at all: “Taiwan has high temperatures and humidity, which make raising this animal difficult,” says Shang Yu-ming, a coordinator at the Republic of China Turkey Association, which represents turkey farmers in Taiwan. Li Tung-shan, who owns a turkey slaughterhouse in Taiwan, agrees: “Sometimes only 300 in 1,000 turkeys will survive because turkeys can’t stand the heat.”
The general consensus is that Dutch colonists in Taiwan during the 17th century were probably the ones responsible for the initial introduction. Not much is known about these early turkeys, except that they were an occasional fixture in homesteads and farms across the country.
What is known is that the turkey industry didn’t take off until the 1950s. “There is a place in Chiayi called Shuishang, which was once a U.S. Air Force base. The U.S. troops who helped defend Taiwan [in the 1950s] were used to eating turkey, which encouraged the turkey industry,” claims Huang Min-hui, the mayor of Chiayi. Today, Chiayi is considered the epicenter of turkey rice on the island. Whether or not the soldiers at an American Air Force base really boosted an industry that wouldn’t have taken off otherwise is debatable, but their presence in Taiwan does coincide with the beginning of the island’s industrial-scale turkey production.
Because there wasn’t an established culture of cooking turkeys at that time, the big birds were categorized as just another type of chicken. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for turkey translates to “fire chicken,” or huo ji, and this fiery chicken—named such because of its big, magnificent plumage—was often used as a substitute in chicken over rice, a dish commonly found among the Chinese diaspora. Hainan chicken in Singapore and white-cut chicken from mainland China, for example, are both popular variations. But in Taiwan, specifically, chicken rice was considered a dish for blue-collar workers.
“Food vendors would sell the dish over shoulder poles,” says Chien Chang-chin, the chair of the turkey association. “It was a bowl of rice and chicken. Later on, because turkeys have more meat than regular chickens, it got changed into turkey rice.”
To meet growing demand for this larger bird—a particularly efficient source of protein—turkey eggs from all over the world were imported to Taiwan. Today, the process is centralized by the Taiwanese turkey association: Every year, it orders eggs in bulk—Nicholas turkeys, averaging 55 pounds each, are preferred for their huge size—from Aviagen, a multinational poultry company headquartered in the United Kingdom. The eggs hatch in a centralized nursery, and then the association distributes the chicks to farms across Taiwan.
While many turkeys in the United States are slaughtered at three months old, when they’re small enough to fit in a home oven, turkeys raised in Taiwan—destined to be cooked at restaurants to feed the masses—are slaughtered several months older. In Taiwan, says Liu Tsung-yuan, the owner of Liulizhang Turkey Rice, a popular restaurant in Chiayi, “there is no culture of cooking turkey at home: The turkey is too big, and a small family can’t finish the turkey of that size.”
Massive turkeys are great for restaurants, though: “If the turkeys are bigger, restaurant owners won’t need to handle as many turkeys,” explains Yang Hui-ju, the secretary of the turkey association. “They can just cook one time and get a lot of meat. So it is more time-efficient.” In Taiwan, turkeys are never frozen or sold at grocery stores: Roughly 200,000 to 300,000 turkeys are raised each year on the island, slaughtered, sent directly to the restaurants, and made immediately into turkey rice.
While every restaurant in Taiwan will claim that they have their own top-secret recipe, the meat-cooking technique tends to be similar: Turkeys are slow-poached whole in a large stockpot for up to two hours and then cooled down with a fan. The skin on the turkey prevents the bird from drying out, and when the bird is cool enough to handle, it’s shredded and dressed with a sauce. “There are hundreds of turkey restaurants in Chiayi. The turkey itself is not much different. The difference lies in the sauce and seasoning,” explains Huang Tai-teng, the owner of Heping Turkey Rice, another turkey restaurant in Chiayi.
The fragrant sauces spooned over the meat usually contain a mix of turkey broth, shallot oil, lard, sugar, soy sauce, and rice wine. Some restaurants will add a bit of goose oil as well to heighten the flavors. The final dish is then topped with a handful of fried shallots and sometimes served with some pickled bamboo shoots on the side. Each adult turkey can turn into 400 bowls of turkey rice, enough to feed a hungry crowd quickly.
You’re probably not planning to make 400 bowls of turkey rice. But it’s completely possible to replicate the dish at home—either with postholiday turkey leftovers or just a four-pound bone-in turkey breast from your local grocery store. If you’re starting with raw meat, you’ll poach the bird with some ginger, scallions, and star anise, being careful to remove it when tender and not overcooked. If you’re working with leftovers, you’ll miss out on those aromatics—don’t worry, the sauce provides plenty of flavor. To avoid dry meat, you’ll pour broth over the poultry before reheating it in the oven.
The sauce, made with reserved broth and enriched with animal fat, is perhaps the most important part. Restaurants in Taiwan often use the rendered fat from the turkey itself, but store-bought lard or duck fat are foolproof options for easily replicating the rich flavor at home. To give the sauce deep layers of flavor and warmth, you’ll season it with rice wine, softly sweet light soy sauce, herbaceous white pepper, garlic, and the oil from frying a smattering of shallots. After digging in, you may find that you wish you’d bought a bigger bird after all.
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