Recipe: One-pot roasted turkey with kumquats and wild rice

Looking for the perfect savory kumquat recipe? Try this delicious, savory, and simple one-pot recipe featuring kumquats, whole bone-in turkey thighs, and wild rice for an unforgettable meal! 

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Since we: a) love fresh organic citrus, and b) live in a climate zone (7b) where citrus doesn’t grow in-ground, that means we have no choice but to grow citrus in pots. One of our favorite and most prolific citrus trees is kumquats. 

In case you’ve never had them, kumquats (Citrus japonica) are a small, bright-orange citrus that you eat whole, skin and all. They pack a powerfully delicious sweet-sour combination. The sweet actually comes from the fruit’s skin and the fruit’s pulp provides the sour punch. 

We love eating kumquats fresh. In the winter when they’re ripe, we usually consume a couple handfuls of them each day right off the tree when they’re perfectly ripe and at peak flavor and nutrition. As such we’ve never done much with them in the kitchen, at least until this week… 

Instagram challenge: what can you make with kumquats? 

We recently posted a photo of our kumquats on Instagram. Some people then mentioned that they never know what to do with kumquats. Since we’ve only ever eaten them fresh, we didn’t have a good answer. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thus, we decided to take on the task of finding a delicious, simple, and savory kumquat recipe for dinner. Since it’s winter and we’re time-starved first year parents, we’re into one-pot recipes right now.

One-pot recipes basically mean you throw a bunch of tasty vittles into a pot, put them in the oven, then go do other activities until the pot is done cooking. Then you get a complete home-cooked meal (protein, veggies, starch, and maybe even fruit) to show for it at the end. Perfect!  

What one-pot recipe could we come up with using two cups of fresh-picked kumquats? Answer: roasted turkey with kumquats and wild rice.

We loved this savory kumquat recipe so much we’re sharing it here, both for your sake and ours. We’ll look forward to making this recipe for many winters to come, and hope you will too!  

Tips & process photos to help you make one-pot roasted turkey with kumquats and wild rice

1. Use fresh herbs and whole dark meat

Herbs – While we do use a dried poultry seasoning (we use McCormick’s gourmet organic poultry seasoning) in this recipe, we also recommend the addition of fresh rosemary and thyme. Make sure you finely dice them to extract maximum flavor and to provide a better eating experience. 

Whole skin-on, bone-in turkey thighs – We highly recommend you use dark meat turkey (or chicken) for this recipe AND use skin-on bone-in cuts. This helps ensure that the meat comes out moist at the end, and also adds wonderful flavor to the other ingredients cooking in the pot. 

If you have to use white meat and/or skinless boneless cuts, you’ll likely have better results submerging the meat in the other ingredients, rather than following the instructions below. 

Hopefully, it goes without saying, but get the highest quality, humanely raised meat possible. Always.  

2. Quarter and de-seed kumquats (or calamondin fruit)

It’s a good time to mention that you could also use calamondin/calamansi fruit for this recipe. They’re very similar to kumquats, although a bit more sour – and you eat them skin and all. Given the similarities between the fruit, you can substitute them 1:1 in this recipe. 

Regardless of whether you use kumquats or calamondins, the most time-consuming part of this meal prep is quartering and de-seeding your fruit. Quartering the kumquats serves multiple functions: 

• makes it easier to de-seed the fruit (most kumquat seeds are very small so you don’t have to get every single one);
• keeps the fruit from exploding in your oven; 
• allows the fruit’s flavor to begin more quickly infusing the other ingredients; 
• makes for smaller, bite-sized pieces at the end. 

3. Put the turkey on top, then cover. 

As the recipe card at the bottom of the article details, you’ll start by coating your turkey thighs in olive oil and seasonings in their own bowl. In your dutch oven or baking dish, you’ll stir together all your other ingredients. 

Then you’ll lay the turkey thighs on top of the wet ingredients in your *dutch oven. (*If using a cast iron dutch oven, make sure it’s well-seasoned so you don’t get too much supplemental iron in your food.) This helps you get a delicious, crispy turkey skin at the end. As the turkey cooks, the drippings go into the ingredients/rice below, infusing them with flavor.  

4. Pay attention to cook time and pot covering to get ideal results. 

You start the cooking stage with a lid on your dutch oven. This keeps the meat from getting dried out and the skin from burning to a crisp. It also lets the other ingredients come together, which requires plenty of liquid. 

After 45 minutes of cooking it covered, you take the lid off and cook for about another hour. This gets the turkey skin perfectly crisped and leaves you with something resembling more of a rice pilaf texture than a rice soup texture.  

On that note, the type of rice you use can make a big difference in the final outcome of this recipe since some rice cooks much faster than others. For this recipe, we used Lundberg Gourmet wild rice blend, a mix of whole grain rices that take 45 minutes to cook as-is. 

If you don’t have this exact type of rice, use another whole grain rice that takes a comparable amount of time to cook.  

Recipe: One-pot roasted turkey with kumquats and wild rice

We hope you love this one-pot savory kumquat recipe as much as we do. Thanks to our connections on Instagram for triggering us to use our kumquats in the kitchen. 

KIGI,

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• Our potted citrus garden tour (video)  
• Step-by-step: how to grow your own organic citrus at home in any climate zone
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• Recipe: Guava & Meyer lemon ice cream 
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