The Butterball Turkey Hotline's Most Extreme Calls

Why is the Thanksgiving turkey such a mysterious creature? We eat it with the greatest of ease, but cooking it is another matter. Turkeys frequently come out overcooked, undercooked, and, occasionally, covered in edible pink glitter and body paint. (Thanks to William Gay Sledd on YouTube!)

That's not the worst of it, though. Every year, Butterball hosts a hotline that fields about 100,000 calls each Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some of those calls have been publicly disclosed because they're just so funny. There have been documented calls from first-time turkey bakers who worried that the bird would rise like a loaf of bread when cooked. There have been frantic calls from harried hosts that cleaned their birds with metal scouring pads, and now needed help getting the metal bits out of the turkey. And there has even been a call from an aspiring cook who wondered how best to carve their bird with a chainsaw, and whether motor oil could be used to make a good baste.

But the following three anecdotes have to be the very best of the worst. They have been confirmed as real calls by the Butterball Turkey-Talk Line and Snopes.Com. As you read them, remind yourself that, no matter what you do, your turkey will probably come out better than the ones listed here!

"Dude, Where's My Turkey?"

It's not easy to misplace a turkey. But it happened to a caller from Colorado, who had shoved her turkey into a snow bank to store overnight, as she had no room in her fridge. She called the Turkey Talk-Line to ask if it would be okay to eat the turkey after it had been stored thus. However, she soon found that a heavy blanket of snow had fallen. The white, featureless landscape made it impossible for her to find where she had buried the turkey. We never learned if she recovered the bird. If not, well, at least the local wildlife had a nice buffet once the snow melted.

"What's That Smell?"