How an OVM employee does Thanksgiving
What the Marketing Guy Made for Thanksgiving
I spend a lot of time every fall talking about Thanksgiving food. So this year, I figured I'd show you what actually ended up on my own family's table.
A little different from the usual sales pitch
This is what Thanksgiving looked like at my house.
Hi, I'm Hunter. I run the marketing at Ottawa Valley Meats, which means I spend a frankly unreasonable amount of time talking about Thanksgiving food this time of year.
Most of my workday is spent finding ways to tell people why the food we sell is worth bringing home. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is just to bring it home myself.
So that's what this is. Not a photo shoot or three perfectly polished recipes. This is what Thanksgiving actually looked like at our house.
An OVM Heritage Turkey became the centrepiece and gave us the stock for our stuffing and gravy. Our Mennonite Sausage Patties went into the stuffing. And my wife took our bacon and turned it into the top of an apple pie made with apples from our backyard.
Here's how it all came together.
Spatchcocked, dry-brined and covered in herb butter.
I started with an OVM Free Range Heritage Turkey and spatchcocked it, removing the backbone so the bird could cook flatter, faster and more evenly.
Then it got a full day in the fridge with a dry brine of salt and herbs. The next day, I worked herb butter underneath the skin and rubbed more over the top.
425°F for roughly 90–105 minutes, until the breast reached about 155–162°F. Then I let it rest for 20–30 minutes while carryover cooking brought it to its final temperature.
Spatchcocking also gave me something else I wanted: a backbone, neck and turkey remnants I could turn into stock.
Shop the Heritage TurkeyDon't throw that backbone away
The turkey started the rest of dinner.
The backbone, neck and other turkey remnants went into a pot with celery, celery leaves, carrots and onion.
I browned the onion in a little vegetable oil, added the turkey and vegetables to get some colour on everything, then added chicken broth and let it reduce by about half.
That homemade turkey stock ended up doing double duty. It went into the stuffing and became part of the gravy.
Sourdough, herbs and deeply browned pork sausage.
A few days before Thanksgiving, I picked up sourdough and a baguette from the Orleans market. I cubed the bread and dried it in a 200°F oven for about 30–40 minutes.
For the base, I diced celery and onion and sautéed them in about ¼ cup of butter. At the same time, I cut up OVM Mennonite Sausage Patties and browned them in a separate skillet.
I wanted the sausage pieces small enough that you'd get some throughout the stuffing, but not so small that they disappeared. More importantly, I wanted a really deep brown colour on them.
Then the sausage, bread, vegetables and herbs all went into the pot together to get familiar before I added chicken stock and some of that homemade turkey stock.
I assembled everything ahead of time, moved it to the fridge and then baked it around 350–375°F for about 30 minutes before dinner. If it starts drying out, add another splash of stock. Mine didn't need it.
Shop the Sausage Patties
And Then My Wife Put Bacon on the Pie.
Full disclosure: I can't take credit for this one. My wife made the entire pie, and absolutely killed it.
She made the crust from scratch, and the apples came from the tree in our backyard, which made this one feel particularly homemade. If you don't have an apple tree handy, Granny Smiths would be the way to go.
She peeled and sliced the apples, then mixed them with brown sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves and lemon zest. Really mix everything together with your hands or a wooden spoon. You want the apples, spices, sugar and everything else to get really familiar with one another.
Then came the completely reasonable decision to cover the whole thing in bacon.
Instead of a traditional pastry top, she wove strips of OVM Pork Bacon into a lattice and laid it over the apples. If the bacon extends beyond the edge of the pie, trim it back. It'll shrink a little while it cooks, so if it's sitting right around the crust when it goes into the oven, you're in good shape.
And then comes perhaps the hardest instruction in the entire Thanksgiving dinner: leave it alone for at least an hour before cutting it.
Shop OVM Pork Bacon
The OVM part
Three products. One Thanksgiving table.
The point wasn't to work meat into every dish. These were simply the OVM products that made sense for the Thanksgiving meal we wanted to make.
Free Range Heritage Turkey
The bird that started the whole thing, including the homemade stock.
Shop Turkey →Mennonite Sausage Patties
Pork sausage, deeply browned and folded into the stuffing.
Shop Sausage →Pork Bacon
Bacon woven into a lattice and turned into the top of an apple pie.
Shop Bacon →
That's ours. Now show us yours.
How are you celebrating?
That's what Thanksgiving looked like at our house. Now we'd love to see what it looks like at yours.
Whether you're cooking for a packed house, keeping things small, travelling somewhere else for dinner, or celebrating Thanksgiving entirely your own way, we hope it's a good one.
From my family and everyone at Ottawa Valley Meats,
Happy Thanksgiving.
