Today we're going to stuff you with stuffing!
I tend to hoard bread ends
and you can cut them into cubes of course
and make your own stuffing blend.
My mom always bought
just good ol' Pepperidge Farm traditional cubes.
And for every one sack,
or about four to five cups of cubes
we would do two apples,
a few ribs of celery with the leafy tops
and a couple of onions and one stick of butter, whole stick.
That's what I've got here kind of sweating out together.
To that we season with salt and pepper,
the good old Bell's Poultry Seasoning,
but I like to bump it up with fresh parsley,
sage, rosemary and thyme and a few fat bay leaves.
Then we take a tray full of homemade cubes
or a sack of just traditional plain stuffing cubes,
throw that in.
And then we use a quart, sometimes a little over a quart
of homemade or store bought turkey stock
or chicken stock.
Now when it comes to Thanksgiving in general
the number one item, other than paper goods,
to make sure that you're stocked up on
is stock in a box.
Stock up on stock, it does so many things.
If you under cook your turkey you can carve your turkey
pass it through a bath of warm stock
and it's perfectly cooked and juicy.
Conversely if you over cook your turkey and it's dry
magic juice will make it not so dry.
And you just serve it carved as opposed to whole.
Also, if you overcook the vegetables
you add stock in a box and a little cream
or Greek yogurt or crème fraîche
and it's a delightful soup that you planned to make.
(audience applauding)
It can fix a lot of problems.
So we let this absorb to get more of a surface area
for the dressing to get super crunchy and extra crispy.
So when you put it into a greased muffin tin
you dot the top with butter,
the whole thing's crispy and delicious.
You can also do it even easier what I've got here.
You could take all of your stuffing
and press it into a buttered large baking sheet
as if you were making a jelly roll cake, right.
So we're going to take this plain one
and transfer it to the buttered sheet
and you can do this way ahead.
And then dot the top with lots more little butter cubes
and when this goes into the oven
it's just crazy, crispy delicious all over.
(audience applauding)
Now I'm gonna show you three different mix ins
so you can alter the exact same base.
So to the apple, celery and onion,
the exact thing we just made over there,
to that we're going to add,
ooh a cup and a half of toasted walnut.
Along with the walnuts we're gonna add
some real maple syrup.
So now it's apple, walnut, maple stuffing, yum.
And a pound of spicy breakfast sausage
from my favorite smokehouse,
Oscar's in Warrensburg New York.
So now it's spicy sausage, walnut, maple apple stuffing.
(audience applauding)
Yah!
Lots of crispy bacon goes into our base
and this one is a cranberry, orange stuffing with bacon.
So I take dried cranberries,
reconstitute them with a little water or stock
until they plump up.
Add the bacon and the cranberries
to our apple, celery and onion base,
a little orange zest
and the cranberry and apple and orange
just smell so beautiful.
Up next, Italian style.
So same stuffing base, apples, celery, onion,
but I added fennel and let the fennel cook out
with the apple and the celery and the onion.
And then we're going to add Italian sausage with fennel.
So lots and lots of sweet Italian sausage
and then we're going to add brown butter and crispy sage.
I know!
(audience laughing)
Mixity, mixity,
you get the drill.
Even though there's brown butter in there
I might throw a little bit more butter on top
cause I don't know.
(audience laughing)
Here's the traditional apple, celery, onion,
the stuffing muffins.
Then we have the cranberry, orange with bacon.
We have the walnut with the breakfast sausage
and the maple, and we have the brown butter,
sage, Italian sausage.
(audience applauding)