Vending Turkey legs

Tinybud said:

Hey all, we got our first big vending oppurtunity coming up for labor day, menu is set with pulled pork, and briskets sammies, and then a platter with sammie, smoked beans, and chips. Question is, I'd like to add smoked turkey legs to the menu, but worried that while holding them at temp. they'll get funky, (rubbery skin, start falling of the bone),, Any suggestion on how to vend the smoked turkey legs?.. Thanks

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Good question.
I have a hard enough time holding chicken.

Talk to Dr KY he did 200 of them in the last couple of weeks......

Poobah, Sledneck and I vended about 150 turkey legs at the Harpoon contest last year.. We used the pre-smoked legs from Restaurant Depot. We re-heated in Spicewine and then high heat on Weber Kettle, with light glaze and wrapped in foil...

we thought they sucked but the public loved walking around with them and liked them a lot.

I would definitely recommend pre-smoked legs as well. Just heat and serve.

we staggered the cooking using differnet temp zones. the ones towards the end of the day were falling apart.. we made pulled turkey out of it.

For a recent festival we used simple raw turkey legs, rubbed them down in Yardbird then placed in the cooker. Let them hit about 160 and slapped a little sauce on the. The legs were moved to the holding side of the cooker to with a bit of juice in a hotel pan and lightly covered in foil. My cooker is built to work this way for such events and isn't run as a smoker as such. Just before placing the legs in the cooker I hit the unit hard and heavy with smoke wood.

The plan was to take the legs that held too long and make shreaded turkey rolls with them but we never had that issue. For service we wraped a 4" tall section of foil around the bone (no burnt hands) then placed in a serving bag.

Because we were set up to do other things I places a large baking pan on the cold side of the griddle and used a mixture of juice, sauce and rub then reduced. The legs recieved a quick bath just before being served.

This is the holding side of the cooker.







We flipped our banner over and used it as an extended menu board...
Hey ya gotta do what you gotta do to get the customers in.




Being a professional, the Doctor was willing to sign any bone.



We found that turkey holds very well due to it's overall mass.

Notice the triangle in the left of the picture? Every time someone ordered a turkey leg we rand it like crazy yelling 'turkey leggggg!' or if it was a child or teen we let them ring it. This bought us a few moments to give it a quick bath in the mixture, wrap and hand over to the customer. Doing so brought plenty of attention and more customers helping us to sell out a product people here have never had before.