Best Thanksgiving Stuffing

How to make homemade stuffing

Here is the step by step process so you know exactly how to make the best stuffing ever! The first step is choosing your bread. This is KIND OF A BIG DEAL.

Tear or cut your loaf of bread into pieces. I have tried both tearing by hand and cutting into cubes, and I prefer cubing. If you tear by hand, the bread tends to break down into crumbles easier once you add the broth later. I like my bread to maintain it’s shape a bit. (Hack: You can also use plain toasted bread cubes from the store that they usually sell this time of year!)

Toasty bread is not the same as stale bread

Toast your bread. Note that I did not say “dry out” your bread. Day old bread may have been how stuffing originated way back when, but we have grown older and wiser than our grandmothers. Or something like that.

Many stuffing recipes call for cutting or tearing up your bread and simply leaving it out overnight. To me, this just makes bread STALE. Stale bread is tough and leathery, and STILL does not absorb as well as toasted bread. See this Panzanella recipe from Serious Eats for a detailed discussion about this!

Instead, we are going to TOAST our bread. This makes for bread pieces that are crisp yet still TENDER and melt in your mouth. All it takes is about an hour in the oven, set to 250 F. We don’t want it to brown or get burned: just nice and light and crispy, ready to absorb all that flavorful chicken broth in our stuffing, without being leathery or overly chewy.

Butter: the secret to a great stuffing

Set aside your bread and melt a whole buncha butter in a large pan, a whole cup. I used to not be a stuffing lover, until I grew up and realized that it’s basically butter soaked in bread and crisped. What’s not to love here. Bring on the butta.

Chop up your celery and onions. I like to use about 2 cups of celery, and about 3 and 1/2 cups onion. One really large onion should be enough, or two small onions. Don’t go too crazy (“I’ll just throw it all in!”) because you don’t want to mess with the ratio of bread to veggies. Let the crispy buttery bread have it’s moment, okay people.

Saute the veggies in the butter once it’s melted. Normally when you’re sauteing onions and celery, you only need a little bit of butter or oil, but here we’ve got a cup, so it’s practically swimming in it. That’s a good thing. We need all that butter to soak into our toasty bread! Saute the veggies for about 7-10 minutes, until they are soft but not browned. Usually I am all about a bit of caramelization but not for stuffing.

While that cooks, chop up all your herbs. I LOVE these Simon and Garfunkel herbs, so I like to use about 1/3 cup parsley, 1/4 cup sage, and 1 tablespoon each rosemary and thyme. You can definitely change the amount and ratio of your herbs if you like.

Just keep in mind that there IS such a thing as too many herbs. If you go too far, your stuffing is going to taste like Pine-Sol. No thanks. So use fewer herbs if you want, but I wouldn’t use too much more than the recipe calls for. (Parsley is the only one I would say you could do more of, up to 1/2 cup.)

Add all the fresh herbs to the toasty bread in a big ol bowl.

Add the veggie mixture on top of the moistened bread and stir it all together. Get all that butter distributed!

Add in some salt and pepper.

Now here is the part that will make or break your stuffing, my friends. We are mixing up 2 eggs with 2 cups of chicken broth and stirring it into our bread mixture. BUT. The amount of liquid you need is going to depend on a variety of things:

• the amount of bread you have (more bread=more broth necessary).
• How toasty is your bread? Ultra toasty means you are maybe going to need a bit more liquid. If you left your bread to get stale overnight, it’s still holding onto some moisture and you need less broth.
• The amount of onions/celery you added (did you measure it, or just throw some in? No judgment here, but if you have lots of extra veggies, you need less broth)

You are going to have to use your best judgment and your hands. Yes, mix your stuffing with your hands. It’s the best way to feel and know if you have enough liquid.

The bread should be moist but not soaked. Squeeze it to test. There should NOT be liquid pooling at the bottom of the bowl. You might need up to a half cup of extra broth. BUT! You might not even need all the broth/egg mixture in the first place. You definitely should be using most of it, but don’t be worried if you have a couple tablespoons leftover if your stuffing is feeling quite moist.

Once you feel you have reached the perfect stuffing moistness level, it’s time to get it in a pan. First butter it up with some softened butter. You can spray too if you like, just remember, butter is going to help get you those ultra crispy edges of glory. In fact, I don’t have one, but if I did I would totally make stuffing in one of those Brownie Edge Pans! I love center brownie pieces so the pan’s intended use seems like an abomination to me, but I can totally get behind using one for stuffing. Bring on the crispy edgessss!!!

And here she is all ready for the oven! A thing of beauty!! Bake it covered at first, to keep in the moisture, then remove the foil for the last 20 minutes or so to get that gorgeous crispy topping.