Grandma's French Turkey Dressing - Easy Meat Stuffing Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why put eggs in turkey stuffing? ›

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. Seasonings: This turkey dressing recipe is seasoned with salt, pepper, rubbed sage, and garlic powder.

Give stuffing a head start by heating it up before placing inside the turkey. Like the turkey, stuffing needs to reach the 165 degree mark. If the bird is done before the stuffing, remove stuffing from the cavities and continue to cook in a baking dish.

"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.

It's all about personal preference. If you want a sturdier dressing, eggs can help do that. I don't use eggs in this recipe, though, because I like a lighter, more crumbly texture in my dressing.

If you cook the stuffing outside the turkey, first of all, it's no longer "stuffing" — it's "dressing." Both it and the turkey will cook more reliably, and you can fill the inside of the turkey (loosely) with aromatics if you're going for that Thanksgiving-y turkey-cornucopia look.

Oven-Roasted Turkey

We recommend starting the turkey in a 425 degree oven for 30-45 minutes before tenting the pan with foil and lowering the temperature to 350 degrees until a meat thermometer reads 165 degrees when inserted into the thickest part of the bird.

After turkey has roasted 45 minutes, place potatoes in top third of oven. Roast along with turkey until potatoes are tender, stirring potatoes occasionally, about 45 minutes.

Make the stuffing, melt butter in a large frying pan and gently sauté onion and garlic for five minutes until soft. Stir in the herbs for one minute then add breadcrumbs to absorb butter. Mix in zest, pine nuts and seasoning and cook over medium heat for about seven minutes until crumbs start to brown and crisp.

What do southerners call stuffing? ›

But for the Thanksgiving side dish in the South, the term dressing was adopted in place of stuffing, which was viewed as a crude term, during the Victorian era. Although dressing and stuffing are interchangeable terms, the signature ingredient of this Thanksgiving side dish in the South is cornbread.

Eggs add richness to the stuffing, and makes it cohere better. I'd use two eggs per pound of bread. I'm a no egg person - and I still stuff the bird (but also do a batch out of the bird).

The short answer to whether you can making stuffing ahead of time is yes. "Making stuffing ahead saves time, allows stove and oven space for other things, and making it ahead gives time for the flavor to fully develop," Chef David Tiner, Director at Louisiana Culinary Institute in Baton Rouge, tells Southern Living.

Nutrition Notes

Stuffing is essentially bread, salt, and butter, so it probably comes as no surprise that it isn't the healthiest food served on Thanksgiving.

Boone: After they lay their eggs, turkeys incubate their nests for 28 days on average. They have precocial young – which means that when they hatch out, they're able to move and forage on their own. They have to be able to hide in the cover of low vegetation so they can escape predators from the ground and the air.

Typically, baking the stuffing inside the bird helps keep the mixture moist. “I prefer stuffing (in the bird) to dressing (outside of the bird) because all those delicious drippings that come off the turkey gets absorbed right into the stuffing,” Bamford says.

The primary advantages to in-bird stuffing are that it's unbelievably moist and looks super-Thanksgiving-y, but to be safe (with the raw eggs in the stuffing and the raw turkey touching it), you need to cook it to 165 degrees F, which means the bird's going to have to cook to an even higher temperature, which means a ...