How Long to Cook A Turkey

The Van Hoof family has been helping people serve tasty Thanksgiving dinners for 56 years now, by breeding and growing broad-breasted white turkeys.

Bob’s Turkey Farm, at 181 Old Common Road, was started in 1954 by Robert Van Hoof, and is definitely a family affair that includes his children: daughter Susan Miner runs the retail operation and does the bookkeeping while son Richard Van Hoof runs the breeding and raising of the turkeys. Another daughter, MaryBeth Blanchflower, runs the kitchen.

While the type of turkeys they offer have remained the same, the business has grown and evolved.

“Families aren’t as big they used to be,” said Susan Miner, who runs the retail portion of the business, and is a daughter of founder Robert Van Hoof. “Families are smaller and more than ever this year we’ve had people sizing down. A lot of people said it’s just going to be the four of us this year.”

While Thanksgiving is their biggest selling period, Christmas and Easter are also high selling times, Miner said.

With a year-round business they’ve have developed a wide variety of products, from their turkey pies to turkey lasagna to turkey sausage.

 “Our soup has a tons of meat in it, it’s not like canned chicken noodle soup where you have to go looking for the meat,” said Robert Van Hoof, who still works at the farm. The soup as well as the breaded cutlets and turkey sausage were also customer requests that were added to the menu.

Over the last 15 years, customers have also shown a lot more interest in pre-made items that they can put in the oven, like the lasagna or the pies.

“I also think over that time that people have wanted a lot more healthy types of food,” Miner said, which leads them to use turkey because it has less fat. “People also have less time to cook.”

The business has grown in other ways as well. In 1954, Van Hoof started with 125 turkeys, and these days there are 15,000 turkeys between the Lancaster farm and the Ashburnham farm. The majority of the turkeys are raised in Lancaster, and about 3,000 breeders are kept in Ashburnham so there will always be healthy stock.

Turkeys can get several types of respiratory diseases, and if that happens it spreads and there is no real cure.

When asked what leads to a good turkey, Van Hoof didn’t hesitate for a second. “A good, clean baby turkey,” he said. “Cleanliness is important to keeping them healthy.”

How Long to Cook A Turkey