Coming in hot with an unpopular opinion: I don’t love Thanksgiving. Finally, after decades of pretending to love dry turkey meat, or, as I divulged in Monday’s roast chicken post, avoiding raw turkey meat, I’m coming out to admit it. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting together with my family, but Thanksgiving lacks the magic of Christmas, takes cooking stress to the upper limits of what is healthy, I am convinced that 75% of Americans do not even like turkey, and why is anyone eating cranberry jelly with their meat? The single saving grace of the holiday is the stuffing.
Ready for another unpopular opinion? I said “stuffing” but I meant the concoction that does not ever touch the inside of a bird. Some people insist this is called “dressing” but I firmly disagree. Stuffing is pieces of bread mixed together with diced vegetables and some kind of meat, usually sausage, and then baked in a liquid, preferably good chicken broth, until it’s like a savory bread pudding. In order to be delicious, like with sweet bread pudding, it needs to be custardy at the bottom and have lots of good crispy bits poking out of the top. You can’t achieve that inside a bird.
Our standard Thanksgiving stuffing, made by my mom, is a very solid recipe that probably isn’t really a recipe but just something she intuits by now. But I was curious to get to know some other stuffings, because why aren’t we eating stuffing besides on Thanksgiving (and maybe Christmas?) Why is this hearty, simple and delicious food confined to being served at maximum twice a year? It really doesn’t seem fair, so I wanted to give this stuffing a shot because 1) I was craving stuffing in October and 2) if it was good, I wanted to throw my hat into the ring for stuffing-making this Thanksgiving, chez moi.
The verdict is in- this stuffing is, indeed, good. Better than good, even. Ciabatta and breakfast sausages and bell peppers, it turns out, make excellent stuffing ingredients when paired with carrots and celery- the usual suspects. It may be unorthodox, but it was hard to deny how delicious it was when I had eaten nearly 20% of the dish with my hands before I could even get it on the plate. Here’s to year-round stuffing- with or without the bird!
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 10 oz. bulk sweet or hot breakfast sausage, casing removed
- 1 carrot, cut into 1/4" dice
- 1 small yellow onion, cut into 1/4" dice
- 1 stalk celery, cut into 1/4" dice
- 2 cups turkey or chicken stock
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 2 tbsp. roughly chopped parsley, plus more for garnish
- 2 tbsp. roughly chopped rosemary
- 2 tbsp. roughly chopped sage
- 1 (12-oz.) loaf ciabatta bread, cut into 1" pieces
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Heat oven to 375°F. Melt 1 tbsp. butter in a 12" skillet over medium-high. Cook sausage, stirring and breaking up meat into medium pieces, until browned, 8–10 minutes. Transfer sausage to a large bowl; set aside. Add remaining butter to skillet; cook carrot, onion, and celery until soft, 5–7 minutes, and transfer to bowl with sausage. Add stock, oil, parsley, rosemary, sage, bread, salt, and pepper to bowl; toss to combine. Spread evenly in a 9" x 13" baking dish. Bake until golden brown and bread is slightly crisp on top, 30–35 minutes. Garnish with more parsley, if you like.
Notes
From Saveur October 2014
