Turducken — Tweet showing a chicken combined with crab legs and octopus tentacles, dubbed the 'Cthuken.'

Turducken

2012novelty food / viral videoclassic

Published October 4, 2026

Turducken, also called the Three Bird Roast, is a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck stuffed inside a deboned turkey, closely tied to American Thanksgiving. The dish was claimed by a Louisiana butcher in the late 20th century, but a 2012 BuzzFeed instructional video and a wave of imitators like the Cthurkey and the lamb-pig-cow pushed it into internet novelty-food lore.

food memes portmanteau memes food trend memes seasonal memes youtube viral

Overview

Turducken, also known as the Three Bird Roast, is a portmanteau of turkey, duck and chicken, built by deboning all three birds and nesting them with stuffing between the layers1. The cut shows three concentric rings of meat, which is most of the appeal, since slicing a turducken for a Thanksgiving table looks like a cursed anatomy diagram2.

The format travels well as a meme because the recipe invites one-upmanship. Once BuzzFeed Food's butcher broke down the technique for a mass YouTube audience, imitators started piling on more and weirder animals, from octopus-stuffed turkeys to a lamb inside a pig inside a cow34. PETA even countered with a tofu-only version called Tofucken, keeping the joke alive from the opposite side of the dinner table2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Louisiana butcher shop (dish origin) / YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2012

The exact origin of the turducken is contested, but Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana claims to have invented it after a customer walked in with three birds and asked for a custom roast1. The dish spread through Cajun cooking circles for years before mainstream internet audiences picked it up.

The meme-side origin is cleaner. On November 16th, 2012, the BuzzFeedFood YouTube channel posted "How to Make a Turducken," with butcher Armande Ferrante walking viewers through the deboning and nesting process5. That video pulled in over a million views and became the go-to explainer link whenever the dish came up around the holidays2.

How It Spread

After the BuzzFeed video circulated through 2012 and 2013, the turducken template got remixed into stranger forms. On December 16th, 2013, Twitter user @damana posted a photo of an octopus hanging out of a crab-leg-flanked turkey with the caption "the turducken is obsolete. Behold the cthuken," naming it after Cthulhu6. Gothamist tracked down the cook that same day, identifying him as database administrator Rusty Eulberg, who said he had actually built the Cthurkey two years earlier7.

The stuffed-animal arms race kept going. On January 21st, 2015, Redditor pixeldustnz posted a picture to /r/WTF of a whole lamb stuffed inside a pig stuffed inside a cow, under the title "Move over turducken," and the post climbed past 4,500 points with roughly 260 comments before the subreddit archived it4. PETA's YouTube channel uploaded "Tofucken: The Vegan Turducken" that same November, pulling over a million views with a tofu-only build2.

The format kept surfacing in food-YouTube bits for years. On October 25th, 2017, Jon Tron released a "Turducken Chef" video that drew around 4.7 million views and tens of thousands of comments within a year, keeping the dish in rotation as a Thanksgiving reference long after the original Hebert's claim2.

Timeline

2012-11-16

BuzzFeedFood uploads 'How to Make a Turducken' with butcher Armande Ferrante, the video that introduces the dish to a mass YouTube audience[5].

2013-12-16

Twitter user @damana posts a photo of a crab-and-octopus-stuffed turkey calling it the 'Cthuken,' and Gothamist traces the dish back to cook Rusty Eulberg the same day[6][7].

2015-01-21

Redditor pixeldustnz posts a lamb-in-pig-in-cow roast to /r/WTF with the title 'Move over turducken,' racking up 4,500+ points[4].

2015-11-26

PETA's YouTube channel publishes 'Tofucken: The Vegan Turducken,' a tofu-only variation that pulls over a million views[2].

2017-10-25

YouTuber Jon Tron releases a 'Turducken Chef' video that gathers roughly 4.7 million views within a year[2].

2017-11

CityLab publishes a feature tracing the dish's roots to Hebert's Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana[1].

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