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Like everybody else, I have many reasons for hating turkey. It's too big. It's too dry. It has no flavor. You only make it once a year, so your odds of doing it well are slim at best. Because it is so enormous, nothing you can do to it will matter much. Brine it for weeks! Spread Thai hot pepper paste over its skin and cram Alba truffles under its ocean of breast skin! Shtup it with preserved lemons and potpourri! Nothing you do will matter. At the big moment, you will still be standing in front of a morbidly obese surgery patient, followed by a mountain of tasteless white meat and the most unwieldy animal leg this side of a mantis shrimp, a Cambrian arthropod with the most powerful limb in the animal kingdom. And the mantis shrimp is at least tasty.

 

In past years I have recommended replacing the turkey with something equally imposing: a baron of lamb, say, or even a whole roasted piglet. If you want, you can have a show turkey, one to present and then throw into the alley like Paulie Pennino in Rocky. This year, though, I am doing bison. I am an ardent supporter of this animal, and am even a founding member of the Bison Council, and committed to eating these large and delicious animals, and promoting the eating of them. Thanksgiving is an ideal time to start. Insofar as Thanksgiving is meant to recall the country's founding, bison is a much better symbolic choice. There was never a period when hundreds of thousands of turkeys covered the Great Plains, nor do the bloated and buxom birds we eat today much resemble the scrawny things the pilgrims were reduced to eating. No, the bison you eat now is more or less the same animal shot at from trains by our forebears. It's also infinitely more flavorful than turkey, and has all the flavor of grass-fed beef without the gnarly, tough texture. I was skeptical of bison at first, but I got the celebrated Dallas chef John Tesar, a good friend, to cook it at Meatopia Texas and it was one of the best things there. This recipe, which includes potato chips fried in bison tallow, will be the one I am using this year, and I recommend it to you. It also works for prime rib, should you be unable or unwilling to get bison. If you don't have a way of getting three cups of rendered bison tallow, I would suggest using canola oil with some trimmed-off bison fat dropped into it for flavoring purposes. If you don't want to slice up potatoes into chips, you can use tater tots, which is what I will likely do. Anyway, this recipe is sick, as the video suggests. (It also includes a picture of a bison running alongside some guy's car; it isn't clear whether he took a potshot at it. I hope he didn't.)

Read more: Bison Thanksgiving Recipe - Why You Should Eat Bison - Esquire
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