When I grew up in South Kona Kealia, we had no refrigeration. Everything was either salted, smoked, or dried to help preserve our fish, beef, pork, or lamb meats. One Thanksgiving when I was 13 years old, we decided to have Kalua Turkey for our family. We didn’t raise turkeys, but there was a flock of wild turkeys that used to roost in a Ohaihai (Monket Pod) tree at night near our Kalahiki graveyard about 1/4 mile from our house. We would use a long coffee stick that had a u-hook shape on the very top to snag a turkey’s leg in the U joint of the coffee stick while a turkey was sleeping at night.
There was a dozen turkeys sleeping in the tree of various sizes, and I chose the biggest turkey close to the top of the Ohaihai tree that weighed almost 50 lbs. Anyway, the day before Thanksgiving, we caught and harvested this huge Tom turkey, de-feathered and dressed him out, burned off the pin feathers, and put him in our underground oven, or Imu. We stuffed this huge Tom Turkey Cavity with breadfruit stuffing with carrots, celery, the gizzard, liver, and meat from the neck bone and also stuffed a huge red hot imu stone that we heated up, red hot that we found near the ocean down at the beach. We then covered the imu adding taro, sweet potatoes, Uhi-wild yams, green bananas, and fish from the ocean that we would later add fresh squeezed coconut milk to for our Thanksgiving.
There were a lot of smaller turkey’s that I could have caught for our Thanksgiving dinner! But I wanted to serve the biggest to our 26 cousins & our 25 Aunties and Uncles, great-grandparents, and grandparents. Any way we lined the earthen underground with hot rocks, then placed mashed banana stumps and green ti leaves on the hot rocks to insulate out huge 50 lb. Tom Turkey and all the taro, green bananas, sweet potatoes, and Uhi wild yams, plus some Uhu parrot fish.
We covered the imu at 6 pm. We opened the imu (underground oven) at 6 am on Thanksgiving morning, the night before, to shred the huge Tom Turkey. Our turkey was cooking for at least 12 hours, and we wanted to shred the turkey meat & add Hawaiian salt before serving.
Everything turned out perfectly cooked in the imu, except the Tom Turkey! We couldn’t shred it because it was so huge, tough, and chewy that it was like eating rubber bands. We sliced him paper thin just so we would get some turkey to eat. The breadfruit stuffing was delicious and thoroughly cooked throughout.
Any way my great-grandfather told me next time, choose the smaller, younger turkeys that were under a year old vs. the grandfather, 50 lb. turkey that was over 5 years old! Anyway, at 13 years old, I learned that size does matter! Go for the smaller, tender, younger turkeys!
Not the kingpin of the lot! So I learned that bigger is sometimes not better.
