The Jennie-O company makes about eighty-seven thousand different turkey products, a few of which grace almost every supermarket in Los Angeles. They make your turkey burgers and your turkey franks and your turkey sausage and your ground turkey and your turkey bratwurst and your turkey bacon and your oven-ready turkey breast and your turkey meatballs and your turkey pastrami and your turkey ham and your whole turkeys and…well, you should grasp the concept by now.
My favorite Jennie-O product, as I've mentioned here before, is something they call Turkey Pot Roast (or sometimes, Bone-in Turkey Pot Roast). This is a turkey thigh that's been slow-cooked via a process that makes the meat very tender. In previous posts here, I've itemized the reasons I like them…
- They taste great.
- They're easy to make and you can do it without any prep. If at 7:00, you get the urge for turkey, you grab one out of your refrigerator, pop it in the microwave and you can be dining on one of these by 7:15. These are lifesavers when I have one of my difficult-to-plan days…which lately is every day.
- They're healthy. Or at least healthier than anything else I'd be likely to eat if I didn't have one of these available.
- And they're cheap…about $3.33 a pound for cooked, almost-boneless turkey. One Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roast usually weighs in around three pounds so for ten bucks, I get an awful lot of good, cheap meals. They also reheat rather well.
- And did I mention they taste great? They do.
Note the part about heating them up in your microwave at home. When last I wrote about these, the Jennie-O folks were marketing them two ways. One was what I just described. The other was a version — basically the same but with the skin left on — that supermarkets could purchase to heat up and sell the same way they sell hot rotisserie chickens. This version I don't like as much because…well, here: I'll make another list…
- They don't give me the above-described convenience of having a supply in the fridge, thereby being able to heat one up whenever I want one. The unpredictability of my life demands that I have something like that available and Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roasts are the best thing I've found that fits into that category.
- The stores that carry the already-heated ones are some distance from me. The nearest one is about a half-hour drive and they don't always have them.
- And sometimes when they do, they've been sitting out in the display case being kept warm for hours. Not as good.
So that, as I've written here, is why I decided to always keep a few of the "home" version in my icebox — which is what I did until a few months ago when the Jennie-O folks stopped making that kind.
You may recall I was always on the hunt for them. First, I bought them at Costcos. Then one Costco after another in my town stopped carrying them, despite my repeated calls and urging. I don't know why they stopped. Maybe they had to make room for the display of thirty-gallon canisters of A-1 Sauce.
But that was okay because I found out that the Fresh & Easy chain carried them. Unfortunately, the Fresh & Easy chain keeps being acquired and changing management and at some point, they ceased to carry Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roasts. (You want to know why the Fresh & Easy company has been in so much trouble? Try calling them up and asking them to carry a product. I don't think their Customer Service department ever imagined they might have to service a customer.)
But that was okay because shortly after they stopped, the Ralphs supermarket chain began carrying them. That was the easiest of all for me and I was very happy. Now, Ralphs has stopped carrying them…and so have enough other retailers across the land that the Jennie-O company no longer packages the kind you take home and keep in your refrigerator until needed. They may bring them back at some point…and then again, they may not.
So says a senior exec at the Jennie-O company who was inordinately helpful in telling me where to purchase this product back when they made this product. Since they don't at the moment, she has now set me up with someone at one of the markets that sells the other kind, the kind they heat and sell next to their rotisserie chickens. The nice lady at Jennie-O has arranged for me to purchase them unheated from that market.
I mention all this because my past endorsements of Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roasts brought a lot of messages from folks who said they'd tried 'em and loved 'em. I wanted to alert you that if you're looking for them, you're not going to find them where you once did…now. They may come back. They may not. But they can be had in the deli section of some markets, all warmed and ready to take home. (In Los Angeles, they're often at outlets of Jon's Market and also Sprouts. Sprouts is a chain that's kind of like Whole Foods Markets only the selection is better and you can buy meat there without taking out a second mortgage on your home.)
If you find a place that sells them hot and you want to buy them cold, ask to speak to the manager of that department. You may have to buy them as I do in quantity, in vacuum pouches that contain several.
And that's all I have to say on the topic. This has been your update on Turkey Pot Roasts. Stay tuned to this website for late-breaking news on the vital topic of Turkey Pot Roasts. I'm Mark Evanier, your Turkey Pot Roast reporter. Thanks for listening.