The Case for a No-Turkey Thanksgiving

You can stop pretending. We know you don’t like turkey (and you’re not alone). If you dread cooking the elephant (bird) in the room, we’ve got you covered. A handful of respected food authorities—Melissa Clark, Joe Yonan and Monti Carlo—sat down with Chris Kimball in a recent Milk Street Radio episode to talk turkey trash and share what they’re making instead.

Read on for highlights and be sure to listen to the full Thanksgiving special here. You’ll get to hear heart-warming stories, and detailed prep notes on duck, whole-roasted vegetables, pork shoulder, paella and more.

New York Times food reporter Melissa Clark makes the case for duck.

What are you trading turkey for?
My hot take this Thanksgiving is ditch the turkey—roast a duck. Turkey is really hard. It’s a challenge to make and if you don’t love it, and your family’s kind of on the fence about it, then it’s a lot of work for not such a great reward. You have the white meat, which cooks at a different rate than the dark meat, and getting them to both be done at the same time (while the white meat’s still juicy and the dark meat is cooked through) is a real challenge. Duck is easier and tastes better. You can just keep cooking it and it’s gonna taste delicious. It has dark meat all the way through, so you just don’t have to worry. It roasts much more quickly than turkey, because it’s smaller and it’ll just cook itself. You don’t have to tend it, you don’t even have to worry about it.

If you cook duck, you are a queen among cooks. People will bow down to you. It seems really challenging, but it’s actually easy and a glorious holiday food. You’ll present a duck right out of the oven—it’s so golden, so rich, tasty and unexpected. It feels really celebratory, in a way that turkey feels expected. Duck is a surprise!

What goes with duck?
Duck works with all of the traditional Thanksgiving sides. It’s great with sweet potatoes, cornbread and Brussels sprouts. There’s pretty much nothing that doesn’t go with duck that you would normally have during Thanksgiving—even macaroni and cheese. The only thing about duck is that it doesn’t need gravy. Gravy is a mask for dry meat. However, if you would like to make a gravy, it’s not going to hurt! Mashed potatoes and gravy are so good with duck.

Some say leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving. Can duck hold up?
Leftover duck is so much better than leftover turkey. It’s amazing in tacos. I love to make it into fried rice. I put it in salads. You can make duck soup just as easily as you can make turkey soup. It’s fantastic, you know, chopped up into any kind of pasta sauce. There’s so much you can do with leftover duck beyond just a regular sandwich, which is also perfect.

Cookbook author Joe Yonan makes the case for roasted vegetables.

What are you trading turkey for?
I don’t make turkey for Thanksgiving anymore because I don’t eat turkey! And even though there are people at the table who eat turkey, it’s such a pain to make. I found that even before I was eating a plant-based diet, I experimented with not making a turkey—and it turns out that if you don’t make one, Thanksgiving ends up feeling just like a dinner party. It takes so many questions out of the out of the equation. You know, where you’re going to store it; where you’re going to thaw it; how big the brining bag needs to be and whether you’re going to wet or dry brine it. All those questions that kind of dominate your entire Thanksgiving dinner-making experience just disappear.

So no turkey equals no stress?
What I mean about it feeling like a normal dinner party is more about the way it felt to prep. I just was much more relaxed and didn’t have all of that stress about, “How am I going to fit everything in the oven?” and “Is everything going to come out at the same time?” You certainly don’t want cold turkey—even if you’re going cold turkey on turkey. With a lot of vegetable dishes, room temperature or slightly warm is usually perfectly great for serving. There’s no pressure.

Can’t plant-based guests just eat the sides?
I want to push back against this idea. While I do love all the side dishes, I think Thanksgiving is missing something if you don’t have a centerpiece or showstopper dish to gather around. The distinction between a vegetable dish that feels like a side and one that feels like a centerpiece is about that presentation. And often for me, that’s something that requires carving (as counterintuitive as it sounds). I like to do a whole-roasted vegetable at Thanksgiving. I’ve been on the whole-roasted cauliflower bandwagon for quite a while, but I did whole-roasted celery root last year. I wrapped it in phyllo and it has this cider glaze—it’s a package you get to cut for people at the table, which is great. I have a lot of friends who, even if they’re not vegetarian or vegan, love vegetables, so they were fine about it. I also have a lot of snobby foodie friends who get that turkey isn’t necessarily the tastiest thing. They don’t love it all that much anyway.

How do you make whole veggies the main event?
I like to cut it into wedges and serve it at the table. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. I don’t know if it’s my dad vibes, but I like doing something for people at the table. “Carving” the vegetable and having people pass their plates down so you give them a piece just seems to add to the whole nostalgia of Thanksgiving.

Chef Monti Carlo makes the case for pernil.

What are you trading turkey for?
I moved to the States from Puerto Rico when I was six—many, many, many moons ago. That was the first time I’d ever celebrated Thanksgiving. My mother would always have traditional Puerto Rican dishes at the table as a way to keep our island and traditions alive. The star of the show is called pernil—a huge roasted, skin-on pork shoulder. Pernil is an incredible dish that will bring any Puerto Rican home as soon as they smell that pork roasting. It’s a dish that is rubbed down and marinated with garlic, salt, annatto and spices that are very common in Puerto Rican cuisine. It’s roasted at a low temperature for many, many hours.

If pernil is harder to prepare than turkey, why make it?
Yes, there are turkey loyalists, and obviously turkey’s always going to feel like home. But I would encourage you to try pernil just to see how the people at your table react to this juicy, unctuous pork that’s so deeply flavored. It is a little more complicated than making a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s just one of those things that takes a lot of time to do correctly—and it’s a pure symbol of love.

You are going to have to marinate it for a couple of days, which is not really traditional with a turkey, unless you’re doing a wet brine. You’re going to have to open it up, braise it and take it out every once in a while to baste to make sure that it remains juicy. I make it with a baking powder on the skin, which ends up rupturing the cells and creates little, tiny air bubbles in that skin, so you have more of a pork crackling instead of the shiny glass-like skin that’s traditional. There’s going to be smoke, but it’s well worth the effort. No one will forget your Thanksgiving. Trust me on that. And if you’re inviting anybody who is a Latino and you bust out pernil—oh forget about it, you are on the Christmas list for life!

Is pernil a love letter to Puerto Ricans?
Pernil is quite possibly the most celebrated dish when it comes to holiday cooking in Puerto Rican cuisine. It’s used for every major event, especially the holidays. In Puerto Rico, we have the longest running holiday celebration in the world called Fiesta de San Sebastián; it runs from Thanksgiving all the way to end of January. Pernil is something we have nonstop those three months of the holiday season. It’s literally the thing that brings you back home as soon as you smell the incredible porky aroma. You know it’s about to go down.

These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.

And if you're looking for more Milk Street, check out our livestream cooking classes with our favorite chefs, home cooks and friends for global recipes, cooking methods and more.

Francesca Furey

Francesca Furey is the Commerce Editor at Milk Street. A writer passionate about the intersections of gastronomy and culture, she edits and produces content for the Milk Street Store, blog and more.