The Unique Dessert You've Never Eaten That Features Chicken

While cheese is a popular course to end meals in many European cuisines, the use of meat in desserts is quite a bit more rare.

But as with many unusual dishes, you just have to know where to look. Searching for a dessert that features meat? Look to Turkey, a country known for its meat preparations (kebabs galore) as well as its desserts (baklava!), and apparently for both of them combined.

Turkey is the birthplace of tavuk gogsu, a sort of chicken pudding (via Twisted Food). The name means "chicken breast" in Turkish, which is the most popular cut of chicken used in the dish. It's got all the ingredients that you might expect in a dessert: cinnamon, rice flour, and sweetened milk. The wild card is, of course, is chicken, which is pulled like barbecue for pork, and then pounded.

The mixture is cooked for a long period of time and then either made into a rectangular shape or a roll, and finally, it's topped with cinnamon.

The dish, which dates back to the Ottoman Empire (via Atlas Obscura), is said to taste something like a cross between a chicken nugget and a rice pudding. The chicken taste isn't overpowering, and the uninitiated might not even realize that they're eating a meaty dessert. The only giveaway is said to be the texture, rather than the taste. The dish can be found in cafes and pudding shops in Turkey, especially in Istanbul.

The story behind the dish is that a Turkish sultan woke up in the middle of the night and demanded a sweet midnight snack. The only ingredient in the kitchen was chicken, and the staff made do with what they had.

Food historians note the similarities between the European dessert blancmange and tavuk gogsu. During the medieval period, blancmange, a creamy pudding, contained chicken as well and was eaten by royalty. By the 1600s, chicken was no longer added to the dish, and for the last few centuries, it's as unadventurous as any other item you might find on the dessert menu.