These Thanksgiving Stuffing Recipes Will Make the Feast Legendary (2024)

FAQs

What's the difference between stuffing and dressing for Thanksgiving? ›

"Stuffing is cooked in the cavity of the turkey, so the juices soak into the ingredients, making it more flavorful. Dressing gets cooked on its own and needs extra liquid to make it flavorful." So stuffing is cooked inside the bird. Dressing is cooked outside the bird, usually in a casserole dish.

However, as Thanksgiving meals became more common over the years, stuffing began to take a much more prominent place at the holiday table. Early Thanksgiving menus from the 19^th century list stuffed turkeys and hams as main courses, indicating that by the 1800s, stuffing had come to the forefront of most holiday meals.

Broth: Chicken broth keeps the stuffing moist without making it soggy. Eggs: Two lightly beaten eggs help hold the dressing together and add moisture. Water: You can add a few tablespoons of water, if you'd like, to achieve your desired consistency.

Here's an important Thanksgiving food safety tip that will surprise many: USDA doesn't recommend stuffing a whole turkey. The practice increases the risk of cross-contamination and takes the turkey longer to cook. Cook stuffing separately instead.

Some people insist that it should be called dressing when it hasn't actually been stuffed inside a bird. But many people insist on one term or the other regardless of how it's prepared or what's in it. The term dressing is most commonly used in the South, but it's popular in pockets throughout the US.

Purportedly ancient Roman, or else Medieval, cooks developed engastration recipes, stuffing animals with other animals. An anonymous Andalusian cookbook from the 13th century includes a recipe for a ram stuffed with small birds.

But according to the two only remaining historical records of the first Thanksgiving menu, that meal consisted of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, cod, bass, and flint, and a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.

The late Ruth Siems, a 1953 home economics graduate, is credited with the invention of Stove Top stuffing. The product hit shelves in 1971 as a dish appropriate for Thanksgiving but also for everyday meals. The secret behind the dish is the dimensions of the bread crumbs, which General Foods patented in 1975.

The mayonnaise adds a creaminess and rich taste to the scrambled eggs that you won't find any other way. And it means you can skip using milk, which can make scrambled eggs too runny and inconsistent.

The mayo helps to stabilize the mixture and incorporate more egg into the eggs, making them fluffy. Plus, the extra fat can also make them silkier, and more rich.

Why is turkey stuffing so good? ›

When made from scratch and seasoned right, it is rich, moist and savory, shot through with different textures and flavors that give cooks plenty of room to play. That basic amalgamation of starch, fat and aromatics is indisputably delicious.

I love using sourdough bread, but really any neutral bread will work fine. White sandwich bread from the grocery store is the most common choice, and it works perfectly here!

However, if you're cooking stuffing inside a turkey, things become more complicated. Since it's soaking up all the turkey juices, that stuffing also needs to reach that safe 165-degree zone. Otherwise, Sasson tells SELF, it's more likely to harbor dangerous bacteria.

Despite the benefits of stuffing a turkey, it's not a safe practice, says Baker. That's because the turkey and stuffing might cook at different rates, often leaving the stuffing uncooked and unsafe to eat by the time the turkey is ready.

To understand the difference between the two, all you have to do is look at the cooking method. Stuffing is stuffed (literally) inside the cavity of the turkey, while dressing is roasted in a separate casserole dish.

The term dressing, per the History Channel, originated around the 1850s, when the Victorians deemed stuffing too crude for the dish to be named. This happened around the same time that the term “dark meat” began to refer to chicken legs and thighs.

Both stuffing and filling have the same results, as the bird cooks, juices impart a deep, rich flavor to the bread mixture inside. On the other hand, dressing is the same bread mixture, but it's cooked in a separate vessel outside of the bird.

In Pennsylvania, some people even call it filling. What people may not understand is that there is a difference between all three. Dressing is a Southern term for stuffing however it is not used to stuff a turkey. Unlike stuffing, dressing is made with cornbread and baked in a casserole dish.