Gizzards

Raw chicken gizzards, some halved. The dense muscle is why a gizzard is cooked long before it is fried.

A bird has no teeth, so it chews with its stomach. The gizzard is a muscular grinding chamber that holds swallowed grit — small stones, or gastroliths — and works food against it. It is lined with a tough, yellowish cuticle called koilin. The organ is almost pure muscle, which makes it dense, lean, faintly sweet and, if cooked carelessly, as tough as a tyre.

Chicken, turkey, duck and goose gizzards are all eaten. A turkey gizzard is three to four times the size of a chicken’s.

Cleaning a gizzard

Store-bought gizzards are usually cleaned already. A bird cleaned at home needs three steps:

1. Split it and rinse out the grit.
2. Peel off the koilin lining. It comes away in one sheet once it is started.
3. Trim the silverskin and fat. Shady Brook Farms’ method also cuts out the vertical tendon that runs through a turkey gizzard.

The one rule: cook it twice

The gizzard’s muscle is so dense that nearly every good recipe cooks it through first, slowly, and then fries it:

• pressure-cook chicken gizzards about 25 minutes at high pressure, or turkey gizzards about 20 minutes with a 10-minute natural release;
• or braise them 2–4 hours, in a slow cooker on high or a Dutch oven at 350 °F (Wade Truong, MeatEater);
• then cool, cut, dredge and fry hot and briefly — about 2–3 minutes at 350–375 °F.

The exception is cutting them very small. Michael Pendley’s garlic wild-turkey gizzards go straight into a pan of lard in bite-size pieces, cooking until their liquid evaporates and they brown.

Tenderizers: Shady Brook uses baking soda for 15 minutes; Pendley soaks in milk for at least 30 minutes; and many Southern cooks marinate in buttermilk or hot sauce.

The gizzard dishes

• Southern fried gizzards (US). Pre-cooked, dredged, fried and served with hot sauce, or simmered into gumbo. The collection has Southern Fried Chicken Gizzards and Pickled Turkey Gizzards.
• Gésiers confits (southwest France). Duck gizzards preserved in their own fat, then warmed and scattered over the salade périgourdine with walnuts and croutons.
• Gizdodo (southwest Nigeria). Chicken or turkey gizzard with fried plantain (dodo) in a pepper and tomato sauce — a Yoruba party dish.
• Sunagimo (Japan). Chicken gizzard yakitori, sliced and grilled over charcoal.
• Duck gizzard snacks in Sichuan and Hubei, braised and sold by weight.
• In Kenya, Uganda and Cameroon, the cooked chicken gizzard has traditionally been kept for the eldest respected man at the table.
• Potterville, Michigan is reported to hold a Gizzard Fest; the report is lightly sourced and was not confirmed for this page.

A word that trips translators. In Colombian Spanish and in poultry cooking, mollejas means gizzards; in Argentina and Uruguay it means sweetbreads. See kidneys, sweetbreads and brains.

A field note: chicken gizzards at home

Chicken gizzards are among the offal cooked in this collection’s kitchen, alongside the livers and hearts. How they were cooked was not recorded, so no method is claimed here. The turkey recipes below are drawn from other cooks, and one is original.

Turkey gizzards: four recipes

Most fried-gizzard recipes are written for chicken. Turkey gizzards take the same treatment and give a bigger, meatier bite. This collection adds four ways to cook them:

• Southern Fried Turkey Gizzards — Shady Brook Farms. Tenderized with baking soda, pressure-cooked 20 minutes in a seasoned broth, double-dipped in buttermilk and seasoned flour, and fried at 350 °F.
• Garlic Fried Wild Turkey Gizzards — Michael Pendley, Realtree. Milk-soaked, pan-fried in lard, and finished with twenty-odd halved garlic cloves charred in the pan.
• Wild Turkey Gizzards with Bacon, Onions and Mushrooms — Pendley. Floured and browned in rendered bacon fat, with sweet onions and a pound of mushrooms cooked down until the onions caramelise.
• Bourbon-Glazed Turkey Gizzards with Mushrooms and Onion — this collection’s own composition, and untested. No established bourbon-glazed gizzard recipe could be found in any source consulted. The recipe joins a proven method — pressure-cooked, then pan-browned gizzards with mushrooms and onion — to a standard bourbon pan glaze, and says so in its notes.

Wild turkey: mind the lead

The gizzards of wild birds can carry dangerous levels of lead from ammunition — the bird swallows spent shot as grit, and the gizzard grinds it. This applies directly to wild turkey, ducks and geese. No agency guidance specific to eating wild-turkey gizzards was found. The cautious practice is to split every wild-bird gizzard, look at what is inside, and discard any that hold shot or pellets.

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In this dive: What offal is · The history · Safety and the law · Liver · Heart and tongue · Kidneys, sweetbreads and brains · Tripe and intestines · Blood · Heads, feet and tails · Gizzards · Game offal · Fish offal · Every part on the list · Corrections