"What is a favorite stuffing recipe that stays as not-soggy as possible when cooked in the bird (or bun)?"

Here is my non-fancy-schmancy but always good recipe. I use whole-grain bread of some sort, usually one with seeds and such but a good hearty plain whole wheat or oat bread will do just fine. Use hands to mix!

Stuffing

• 1 loaf bread
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 cup celery, chopped
• 1 stick butter
• 2 Tbls fresh parsley
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp poultry seasoning
• 1 large egg

1. Saute onion and celery in butter until soft and yellow. Let cool slightly.

2. Break loaf of bread into cubes and place in a very large bowl. Add cooled vegetable mixture and fresh parsley into bread and mix well.

3. Add the poulty seasoning and salt together. Beat the egg. Add the seasoning to the egg and mix well. Pour onto bread mixture, mix to combine well. If needed, can add milk to moisten.

Optional add-ins to vegetable saute:

• Shredded carrot
• Mushrooms - fresh or mix of fresh and dried (soak first)

------

Method for stuffing balls:

• Shape stuffing mix into balls (size = larger than a golfball, smaller than a baseball)
• Place balls on parchment-lined baking sheet
• Bake at 350 degrees for 20-45 minutes (depends on size of balls) to internal temperature of 165 degrees.

If one were to make stuffing to be cooked in the bird, whether whole or bun, would you change anything in that recipe? Maybe don’t shape into balls, but roast loose to a little crisper and drier than otherwise?

I was thinking about adding some duck to the Thanksgiving menu, but with the turkey dishes, I think not. Maybe we’ll do duck for Christmas, if we don’t do a goose. It’s been a long long time since we had a Christmas goose, perhaps the scars have healed.

You know, it might be fun to do more turkey dishes - you know, to play with ways to use turkey that are not straight-up roast bird. I could try to come up with some turkey-based dim sum, or turkey rilettes, or a turkey-stuffed tortellinis.

"If one were to make stuffing to be cooked in the bird, whether whole or bun, would you change anything in that recipe?"

No. Just make sure it's not too moist going into the bird. I've never added milk to moisten.

My mother always put just a bit of stuffing in the bird, the rest went into a casserole dish and was seasoned with some of the turkey drippings for flavor. Thus no overly moist stuffing, which is rather loathsome to me...

Delicious dressing doesnt’t need a recipe per se but does depent on a sufficient (generous) amount of butter / cream / stock / sausage.

My business used to make at least 50 pounds of dressing. We could always coax it into yummy territory.

Stuffed breast roulades ( similar to what the Italians call ’birds’ ) would have a rather small % of dressing to meat so you would still need more baked in a dish I think.

You seem like a smoked turkey kind of guy.

Matzah makes for a firmer stuffing. :) And mandelin (little crunchy choux puffs called "soup nuts") make it yummy. That is, denser, dryer bread works well. I made a Christmas goose once. It was a lot harder to do than a duck and ducks are tastier.

Your turkey dish explosion sounds like a lot of fun.

Just today at our farmers market (which has moved indoors) my husband bought a 13 pound local turkey... frozen for now. For years, he has done a spatchcocked turkey outdoors on the weber grill and it always turns out great! Some years depending on how many people I have done a traditional roasted turkey in addition to the grilled which, alas I must admit, pales in comparison.

I think this is the one he uses , that's what he said just now :

https://www.seriouseats.com/chinese-red-sauce-glazed-turkey-thanksgiving-recipe

Oh yes--Bar B Q turkey is THE best.

My nearest grocer says they will start having fresh turkey next week. I’ll get one and experiment. Obviously I can’t risk making dishes for the first time on Thanksgiving.

I have a tabletop smoker, and can smoke indoors under my range hood. I’ve never tried smoking anything, though. It is a great big void in my cooking experience.

I sliced and pounded a chicken breast, wrapped around a basic par-baked bread stuffing to make “meat buns” that were sous vided 145F with 100% steam for two hours in Giselle the Anova Combi Oven.

Okay, the idea has promise.

One issue is the temperature: next attempt will be 140F for three hours. I’ll also brine the sliced breast. Need more moistiness!

Another is the stuffing, which was not soggy but didn’t have any tooth either. The bread cubes needed to be smaller and crisper, perhaps par-baking them halfway to crouton consistency would help, or perhap I should add nuts - I used to make chestnut stuffing which people liked.

The third issue is that the meat buns have no color, and searing or deep frying to get any color quickly overcooks the chicken. I think the eye appeal will have to be from a cranberry and gravy topping.

After I figure this out with chicken, I’ll try to do it with turkey breast.

I know this sounds silly, but the idea of a little bun of turkey with gravy on the outside and stuffing on the inside strikes me as cute - it’s like if turkeys were boneless and bite-sized, like Turkey McNuggets, and you stuffed and roasted them as usual.

Deep fried version - even getting just this much color resulted in way overcooked meat

But the au naturel bun is kind of a pasty white that is only appetizing for ice cream.

Maybe there is a way to color the bun with a glaze. Like a dark-ish honey glaze, brushed on after the sous vide and finished with five minutes at higher temperature with no steam. Giselle will happy do a multistage cook.

Or coat it with gravy and garnish with crisped skin chips and cranberry relish.

The stuffing was more like a bread filling, that’s partly because I was too lazy to get fresh parsley, but also because the bread cubes kind of merged into one mass. I can make the stuffing more colorful and tastier, but it needs to be distinct pieces with a bit of texture or tooth.

If I serve them sliced up, they look kind of roulade-ish. But I think it would be more fun for everyone to carve their own micro-turkey.

Would it be ridiculous to cook these in turkey-shaped forms?

Hmm, the dream would be to somehow wrap these with crisp roasted skin. Dcarch used to make these amazing bowls from crisp bacon. I think he roasted the bacon between two nested steel workbowls. I wonder if I can do the same with turkey skin.

Ooo Ooo I could do a Star Trek theme, and serve these as ”roast tribble”.

plllog, I’ll bet lots of people have made a Christmas goose . . . once. SWMBO and I made one way long ago, either right before or shortly after we were married. I recall the stuffing came out a slimy greasy mass and went straight to the trash, and I don’t recall any plaudits about the meat either. But a roast goose on the table that’s what everyone wanted in “A Christmas Carol” - did the Dickensians English have a way with roast goose or did that pass for a delicious holiday repast then? I mean, there were pigs, cows, and chickens to be eaten.

I can't let that go. 😉 We've had goose every Christmas for some years now. I've never found it difficult to roast and it is always absolutely delicious. The stuffing is never 'slimy' and the fat makes fantastic roast potatoes. It's very expensive and we wouldn't be eating it unless it was superb. Perhaps your geese are different? Or your ovens? Or your methods?

This year we're having turkey, but only because out Italian family is visiting and wants to try it. Otherwise everyone would request goose, as usual.

Floral, I bet your geese are much nicer. I got mine from a very fine grower, but geese are a novelty for them. It's hard to find a goose at all here, though ducks are easy enough.. I have no doubt about the successes of yours, at all. I did a simple roast with a spice rub. It was fine, though too much of the meat was in the corners of the carcasse. Great for picking the next day—I made some kind of dish with the scraps which was good—but we barely had enough slices to go around, even though it was supposed to feed half again as many. The fat was excellent, however. ;) Fun to think of turkey as being exotic! Ben Franklin wanted it to be our national bird.

John, I think they were more like Floral's. Special. ;)

We now have a Christmas cousin again, so I don't have to worry about it... ;)

Well, certainly there's far less meat on a goose than a turkey. No wings or big drumsticks. However that's because they have not been bred into ridiculous, unwieldy, unhealthy, tasteless giant freaks. But a big one is enough for eight together with plenty of stuffing, pigs in blankets and vegetables. I do not rub anything into the skin other than adding a sprinkle of crunchy salt. It needs to be dry when it goes in the oven. You prick it all over too to release the fat which is poured off regularly during cooking. I collect it for future use on roast potatoes. Also, as I understand it, it is not possible to raise geese intensively so they're free range and many are organic. For us it's a once a year expensive treat.

Hi Floral!

After your testimonial, I am getting more tempted to have another try at the Challenging Goose.

We made our goose when we were so young, and so clueless. I distinctly remember, that Thanksgiving, SWMBO on the phone with her older sister, and these words were uttered: ”which end of the turkey do I stuff?” And she looked stunningly cute saying it. She denies that now, a shade angrily, but I’m not wrong.

So it is perfectly possible we didn’t know about pricking the goose or didn’t prick it diligently enough. It was around 1992, there wasn’t the Internet to consult, and none of our friends had ever cooked goose before or anyway didn’t tell us how.

While working in an Italian restaurant, we used to stuff veal scalloppine with ricotta + cooked crumbled sweet Italian sausage. This vegetarian found that to be quite tasty. the stuffing inside a turkey bun as you call it should be amped up in both moisture and flavor because the boneless skinless meat won’t bolster the flavor as much as a whole bird does.

Floral, what you said about how-to sounded kind of familiar, but I had forgotten so much, and looked it up. The amount of great help from CF was a given. It was goose pot pie made with the scraps. This thread confirmed what I'd remembered about the amount of meat: There was just enough carved for the company, but at least three more portions picked off the carcass.

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/5571061/goose-pie-and-leftovers#n=20

This is the report on the original goose meal:

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/5569737/recipe-review-goose-to-cobbler#n=10

Here's the initial recipe discussion:

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/5561643/what-s-the-most-delicious-way-to-roast-a-goose#n=16

What I most totally forgot was any enthusiasm for doing it again! I don't even remember liking it so much, but it's the carving that sticks in my mind, not the eating. I might be persuaded if I don't have to tote around the goose and goose pot!

I love the idea of little turkeys, with everyone getting their own, but I think just a turkey "packet" of stuffing would be far more feasible, I can't even imagine how to make that into something that looks like a tiny turkey. Elery and I did bone a turkey once, and make a roulade kind of dish, stuffed it with dried fruits and nuts and some crunchy bread cubes. I don't remember the seasoning, but I know there were cranberries somewhere in there. My stepdaughter's husband says he still has dreams about that turkey!

I've only had goose once, and it was when I was a child. My brother shot a wild goose and Grandma roasted it. Back then everything was cooked into oblivion, I remember getting up at 5 am to start the turkey, because it had to cook for 9 or 10 hours. No wonder no one liked turkey! Anyway, after 10 hours in the oven the goose wasn't all that great, LOL. They are pretty expensive and I actually really like turkey, so I haven't tried one in my adult life.

Annie

Ok, I just can't figure it out -- what does SWMBO stand for?

"She Who Must Be Obeyed"

Wild goose would be entirely different in flavour from farm goose and the latter certainly doesn't need long cooking. I just it roast like any other poultry. No recipe just lots of sage, apples and onions around it and a sage and onion stuffing. Really very easy and, given the fat, very forgiving. No chance of dry meat. I do it in a normal roasting tin on a rack. No pot involved. But it is a long bird so you need a long tin and an oven it'll fit into.

After Christmas I generally make a 'Christmas dinner pie' all the leftover meat, vegetables, gravy, stuffing and sauces chopped up and baked under a pastry lid. I make the lids in advance to fit my pie dishes and freeze them. So all I need to do is fill the dish with the left overs and place the lid on top. Then bake.

I just remembered an episode of tv from 'Getting Lost' with Erin French where Clair of Sissing House in New York Hudson Valley made a chicken completely encased in bread dough, I had never seen that and I wonder if a variation on that for turkey breast would be worth experimenting with

"She Who Must Be Obeyed"

LMAO!!

I could use some advice from SWMBO myself ;))

Mxk, it's from Rumpole of the Baily.

John, I think a good strategy for the turkey “buns“ would be to color them. Saffron might be too pungent, but it's pretty. Anatto, turmeric, pomegranate... In a little eggwhite or oil. Rich milk or half and half might work if the temperature is pretty low, which it is sous vide. Turkey shaped would be cute! If you can do it in a pleasing portion with the right balance of meat to stuffing.

There are some turkey shaped molds on Etsy which could help assembly. I'd like it if it were like a cornish hen, but wouldn't like it with head, feet and feathers. Both are available. I'm not sure how they'd do under pressure, but the zip bag with straw method would be gentler...

"I have been making the dressing in a bunt cake pan! Very pretty and easy to just slice!"

What a great idea! How long do you bake it?

Floral, my grandmother cooked every meat we had for hours. Everything had to be "done" or you could "get worms". LOL So, braises and stews? AMazing! Roast birds or chops. Um....not so good, LOL.

I did learn to cook from her, but I didn't keep that tradition!

Annie

Stuffing is my favorite, never cooked in the turkey, separate baking casserole, always moist & delicious. we don’t care for sausage or any other meat in it, just the usual plus chopped water chestnuts. We usually have a turkey breast ( only because everyone in our family only likes white meat, I miss the leg, lol ) ) plus I order a quarter or half bone in Honey Baked ham .

Annie, I thought about your grandmother when speaking with DD this morning. I told her about the turkey bun effort, and she was appalled. "Dad, poultry must be cooked to 165F!" my daughter squeaked, "you'll get your friends sick!" Now, DD has a background of commercial food-service, a veteran of health department inspections, and is meticulous about cleanliness and food safety. So she is often appalled at my let-the-raw-duck-hang-for-days approach to these matters, and since she is young, she is usually right.

While young, she is actually an old soul and scorns technology, so I was actually able to defend myself this once. Pasteurization is a function of both temperature and time, so while 165F for a minute is "safe", so is 135F for an hour. Bacteria are killed by 135F, just much more slowly. So, annie, your grandmother can tastily cook her chops for hours, you just have to go back in time and give her a sous vide stick. Of course she might refuse to use it, like DD.

Anyway, DD says the pasty white color of the micro-turkey aka skinned tribble is !unacceptable!; it has to be darker and more "roasty" looking to be fit for the table. I guess she doesn't grok veal? I will try plllog's suggestions "Saffron might be too pungent, but it's pretty. Anatto, turmeric, pomegranate... In a little eggwhite or oil. Rich milk or half and half might work if the temperature is pretty low", and also pick up a can of ume to try, in addition to a honey-cranberry-maltose mixture.

So Grandma was actually before her time? She'd be happy to know that! (grin) I also owned a bar and grille and am the veteran of Health Department inspections, and took all those required safety classes. It did not cause me to cook a goose or turkey for 10 hours though and I'll still eat raw beef, in spite of the USDA.

The honey-cranberry-maltose mixture really sounds good with turkey, though, if you can make it work for the color. Didn't they sell a browning liquid of some type at the stores in the past? I wonder what was in that? Something disgusting that I can't pronounce, probably...

Annie

I can't actually "brown" the turkey buns, as the meat will overcook before you know it. I need to basically paint on color, in a form that doesn't run, with at most a few minutes at 350F if it helps. I am actually starting to wonder if marinating the breast in something with color before assembling the mini-turkeys will work. Where is food dye when you need it?

Food dye tastes chemical. I wouldn't suggest marinating in any of the spices I mentioned, but you could run them through a bath instead of painting. Or you could make your favorite dry rub and mix with a drop of oil, but carefully apply so the spices don't knock out the turkey. Or use a sprinkling bottle.

If you just left the skin on you could run over them with a blow lamp after cooking. Imo the skin is the best part of any roast poultry.

I absolutely adore Ina Garten's turkey roulade. There's enough booze and stuffing to make it pretty palatable to everybody.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-turkey-roulade-recipe-1957892

v2 underway. I realized it is easier to take the time to slice the breast more thinly, than to pound thicker slices.

The only thing I have from SWMBO’s dad, who was one of my favorite people, is a long thin slicer he used when he returned from WW2 and worked as a butcher. He was in the US Navy, fought in some of the big Pacific battles, including the Battle of Okinawa, saw kamikazes hit and ships sink, then came home and never talked about it. I miss him. But I have his slicer and it does a great job for stuff like this.

I tried harder for v2. Made garlic croutons for the stuffing, added sauteed mushrooms, toasted pine nuts, garlic, shallot, parsley, egg white, salt, pepper, butter. Brined the sliced chicken breast, made the turkey buns larger, dusted them with flour and paprika for no reason, then into Giselle at 135F for 3.5 hr at 100% steam.

The glaze I’m trying tonight is cranberry honey, soy sauce (can’t find any maltose, except what we give the pets), Dijon, garlic and onion powder, cooked down about halfway.

It is weird to be able to glaze stuff as it is sous viding, but that’s what a steam oven permits. I don’t know how this will turn out; we’ll see in a couple more hours.

The secret to a good stuffing is butter. I make sage and onion. Fry the finely chopped onions in LOTS of butter. Season, add fresh breadcrumbs and lots of sage. I cut slits in the turkey breast ( off the bird!!!) and stuff so that it's stripey when cooked sous vide. Once you've added all the accompaniments to the plate plus the gravy, I don't think the pale colour is off-putting at all. There's the green sprouts, the red cranberry sauce, the bread sauce, the pigs in blankets, the slice of roasted ham; the gravy...... that's our xmas dinner.

It is almost 1 am, so being brief: v2 was good. There is room to improve, but I could serve this and people would like it, especially with gravy.

The meat was moist and tasty. I credit 135F and brining.

The stuffing was better, tastier and more interesting, I credit the toasted pine nuts and mushroom, but still I wish the bread was firmer, I think I needed to cook the mushrooms drier and add less butter. A different nut with more tooth - chestnuts, I’m going to try - and of course the cranberry needs to get in there. I could also hold back most of the butter and just inject it at the end, if we want to get all weird.

The glaze worked, it wasn’t as dark or ”roasty” looking as I wanted but it looked better and tasted better. Next time I may use miso instead of soy sauce, and all cranberry honey instead of half that and half regular honey.

After the sous vide, I turned Giselle to 350F, glazed a second time, and gave the buns 5 minutes, but it wasn’t long enough to carmelize or brown. I’m so anxious about overcooking the meat, I may try 10 minutes but no longer.

That’s my late father in law’s slicer. I figure it must be 75 years old.

Ok, v3 will be with turkey and gravy, and v4 will be served on Thanksgiving. Too many test versions and I’ll get bored with this dish. It is time to work on the dark meat turkey stew or soup.

^^ Looks delicious!

I agree!

How about trying a chestnut stuffing - no bread. We make it by mixing sausage meat with cooked chestbuts, herbs and seasoning. That would add a lot of flavour. It usually goes under the skin of the turkey.

I would like to try a chestnut stuffing! Islay, your stuffing sounds great.

I like the sound of it, too, but I get weirded out cooking chestnuts because there's always at least one in the bag with a worm exploding out of it in the oven. :(

You don't need to cook the chestnuts in the oven for stuffing. You boil them. But you can buy vacuum packed peeled and cooked chestnuts. Much easier.

Not that I do. I don't like chestnuts or chestnut stuffing. There's something about the mealiness I don't enjoy.

Thanksgiving dinner planning is done for our faily gathering. It is being catered :-)) This is the second year we have done this with a small local catering service that works out of a nearby commercial kitchen. Previous meals they have provided, including last year's T'day dinner, have been delicious so we are looking forward to it.

Oh, I do buy the cooked chestnuts, for nibbles (they're great with sweet pickles), but they're not the same. I've only ever roasted them, bu maybe that's too much flavor for stuffing? And if the worms don't explode out when boiling, does that mean you're picking through a worm graveyard, never sure when you'll find a corpse? Eww. I'll stick with roasting!

I don't know how there can be worms in the cooked chestnuts. After all they're cooked. I also don't follow whether you are roasting precooked chestnuts? I have honestly never seen caterpillars in the cooked ones, in raw bought ones or even in ones I've gathered myself in the woods. Does this happen often iye?

No, the worms are in the in the shell off the tree chestnuts, and expand and pop partially out while roasting.. I have never had a bag of whole chestnuts where 1-3 of them didn't have a worm. I don't see how boiling would help…

Must be a specific caterpillar you have there. I've honestly never come across one.

Boiling would kill the larvae and I assume they'd fall out when the nuts were shelled. I don't think the purveyors of ready cooked peeled chestnuts would stay in business long if that high a proportion of their product contained caterpillars.

I tried various ways with foraged chestnuts. I didn't really like any of them but there were no 'worms'.

Barf. So since you were saying "caterpillar" I figured I should look it up. While the various sites do say "worm" as well, the official name is "chestnut weevil' which come in 'lesser" and "larger" varieties. The only other tree they go after is the chinquapin . Apparently, simmering the chestnuts on low kills the larvae. Most of the sites at the top of the list are about how to keep the weevils out of your chestnut tree (they used to be very prevalent in the USA before a blight/fungus got to them).

We (my people, I don't know about the rest of the country) roast them in the shells.

Well we've wandered away from Thanksgiving but I've had a look and it seems that we don't have native chestnut weevils. There are no American chestnut weevils, and although there is a European species it isn't found here other than in occasional imported plant material.

Traditionally chestnuts are eaten at Christmas here roasted on a shovel over the fire. I suppose without a fire you'd do them in the oven. But for stuffing and other recipes the usual method is boiling so they blanch and you can get the skins off.

These are the dishes I made when trying to make chestnuts palatable to me.

Chestnut semifredo

Chestnut and mushroom pie

Chestnut risotto