The Best Way To Cook A Turkey Drumstick

Wild turkey meat can be tough, especially the drumsticks. It’s why many hunters don’t even bother to keep their legs, which is a damn shame because they’re delicious. The best way to cook the drumstick also happens to be the easiest—pressure cook until the meat falls apart!

If you’ve ever made soup with the drumsticks before, then there’s a good chance you probably never did it again, am I right? Those pesky bones are the reason why I like to cook drumsticks separate from the rest of the bird. The bones I’m referring to are actually tendons that harden into bones through a process called ossification. When processing, some tendons can be removed at the joint where it connects to the foot using needle nose pliers, but there are still a bunch that can’t be taken out this way.

Cooking the meat in a pressure cooker with a little bit of chicken stock will cut the cooking time in half. Then, it’s easy to spend a couple of minutes picking out all the bones until you’re left with nothing but shredded meat. You can add the shredded meat to soup, such as the wild rice and turkey recipe, make a riff on chicken salad, or throw it in a taco.

For tacos, I like to season the shredded meat with my favorite taco seasoning, drizzle with oil, and then broil it in the oven at high heat to get crispy bits similar to carnitas. You can tuck these into tacos, sandwich between tortillas with loads of cheese for quesadillas, or stuff into empanadas like the ones in my cookbook, Wild + Whole. It’s excellent drizzled with a cilantro-lime crema and black bean and corn salsa.