Bread Stuffing: Tell me your favorite recipes!

[ziggylu]

I've made cornbread stuffing for years and years. From the first time I made it my mother and the rest of my family loved it. When I talk about trying something different there's a near riot so I've just kept makeing the same cornbread stuffing through the years.

This year my nephew, the only grandchild, made a comment about bread stuffing...well I should have thought of this years ago! Grandma loves to spoil nephew and when I said I didn't want to make two stuffings so maybe this year we could just try bread stuffing for the nephew she said OK...

So...now the stuffing world is my proverbial oyster and I can't decide what I want to put in my stuffing. What are your favorites? I'm goign to use basic white, buttermilk, or potato bread since that's what the kid likes but from there anything goes.

[TrishUntrapped]

I make a basic sausage bread stuffing.

Brown two packages of crumbled Jones, Jimmy Dean, or some other bulk sausage in a large fry pan along with several stalks of sliced celery, and optional chopped onion.

In a large bowl, tear with your hands the bread (I use two loaves of Nissan's stuffing bread which is white and unsliced, you can use what you like.)

After the sausage has cooked thoroughly, cool it for several minutes and then add it, along with the cooked veggies, and all the drippings into the bread.

I then add some Bell's poultry seasoning (a tablespoon or two), salt, pepper, a stick of melted butter, and then three beaten eggs, and mix lightly with my hands. Then use enough chicken broth to get the stuffing to a nice soft and not too dry consistency.

You don't want to pack this down. You can stuff some in the turkey or bake in a buttered casserole dish, but again, don't pack it in, pour it lightly. Bake till cooked through.

This is a very basic recipe. Some people like Italian sausage, garlic, mushrooms, apples, raisins, dried apricots, oysters, chestnuts.... you name it.

[ladybugplus]

This what my dear sweet MIL-Delores taught me to make dressing for turkey...I used to stuff the turkey but now I just put in the oven toward while turkey is in the oven on the side.
I have just heard its not wise to eat stuffing from a bird because of that poultry bacteria thinngy plus it just easier for me to bake it separately and I add the gravy to it too...yummy

BTW I use Mastercook to store my recipes so it will be in MC format

* Exported from MasterCook *

Delores's Turkey Dressing

Recipe By :
Serving Size : 8 Preparation Time :0:00
Categories : Side Dish Stuffing

Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
2 loaves of bread -- that have been laid out all night on table
3 large onions -- chopped
1 bag celery -- chopped
2 sticks margerine
1 can Swanson Chicken Broth
5 Chicken Bouillion cubes
poultry seasoning to taste
salt & pepper to taste

1. A day before you make this dressing make sure with newspaper on the table then lie slices of bread side by side each other. After the one side gets hard then turn all slices over till the other side gets hard. Next just cut with knife the bread into cubes. Put in large tupperware bowl.
Also, have John chop up the celery & onions. Put into gallon baggies and keep in refrigerator till ready to saute in skillet with margeine.

2. In large skillet melt butter then sautee onions and celry.

3. Boil water while onions/celery sautee on stove. Take cup of hot water and put bouillion cubes in to dissolve. After they dissolve mix in the swanson broth.
Now put the broths on the bread cubes and be very careful not to put too much in one spot because that will make the bread gooey. Salt & pepper to taste and also poultry seasoning.

4. Mix the sauteed vegetables into bread mix again being careful not to put too much liquid in one spot that will make bread gooey. Refrigerate until ready to put entire dinner in oven.

Optional : Gramma Vaughn sometimes added slivered almonds to the dressing which was very good too. Gramma Vaughn made the best dressing I have ever had. I so love her cooking. Very thankfulk she shared her secret with me.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Per Serving (excluding unknown items): 16 Calories; trace Fat (3.6% calories from fat); 1g Protein; 4g Carbohydrate; 1g Dietary Fiber; 0mg Cholesterol; 6mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1/2 Vegetable.

Nutr. Assoc. : 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

[Morganna]

I seem to be posting this everywhere, but linking to long threads seems a bit rude... :)

This is a very long response but it contains a whole lot of details about method, in addition to the recipe itself. I wrote this in 2002, shortly after my mother died, and I was trying to record her recipes for well... posterity I guess. So I'll share it here now. :) This stuffing is very different from what I know a lot of folks are used to, and it comes out sort of a bread pudding texture, but it's what I grew up on, and I love it. ;) Also, you can add italian or sage sausage to this easily (at the same step you'd add the veggies, just cook the veggies with the sausage), to make it a nice spicy sausage stuffing. I make two batches, one with sausage, one without, now.

Like so many other mothers, mine didn't really follow a recipe for her signature dishes. She taught me how things should sound, feel, or smell to get the right end product. This stuffing was a fixture at our thanksgivings. Mom made two stuffings: oyster, and sage and onion. I hated oyster, so I never learned to make it, but we all loved the sage and
onion. From the time I was 12 on we lived too far from my aunts and uncles to celebrate with them, so we had a small family thanksgiving that was just us (Mom, Dad, brother, and me).

We always stuffed the large cavity with sage and onion, the small one with oyster. Until this last year, I did that, too. But this year (2002) Alton Brown convinced me that my turkey would be much better if I baked the stuffing outside the turkey (and now I'm a believer). It worked fine and I simply made up some of the moisture in the stuffing with turkey broth made from turkey base (bought from www.redibase.com). It was just as flavourful.

There are shortcuts you can take with this recipe that won't significantly impact the end product, and I'll note those. Also, you can scale this recipe down so it doesn't make nearly so much with little problem.

Mom's Sage and Onion Dressing

To stuff a 15 to 19 pound bird
Two or three loaves of plain white bread (shortcut ingredient: two bags of plain white bread cubes, unseasoned or preseasoned with sage

)

2 large white onions (white onions is important for the strength of the flavour, if you only have yellow, use more onion), one finely minced, one coarsely chopped

4 large stalks celery (these can be either thinly sliced or finely minced, depending on how your family feels about biting into celery bits, but don't leave it out completely, it is part of what completes the flavour, I tend to mince mine because my husband doesn't like celery, my mother liked having the celery bits recognizable)

A handful of celery leaves finely minced

1 pound butter (doesn't matter if it is salted or unsalted, though if you use unsalted you'll want to add a little more salt as you mix)

1 cup turkey broth (I use redibase turkey base for this, it's fantastic. Though, if you're going to be baking this inside the bird, just leave out this ingredient, you'll just increase the amount of milk you use to make up the moisture)

12 eggs, well beaten (you can reduce the fat in this recipe significantly by using egg substitute. It really doesn't hurt the end product)

Roughly half a gallon of milk (depends on the dryness of the bread) I use skim because that's what I have around the house. Again, this reduces the fat content without harming the recipe. If the only fat in this dish is from the butter, then it's actually not that bad, overall. :)

Herbs for seasoning poultry (usually): Sage, Thyme, Parsley (these can be fresh, but I prefer dried because I'm better able to predict the outcome of the stuffing based on the smell of the herbs when I'm mixing it)

Pepper
Salt

At least two days before:
Lay out the bread in single layers on racks or cookie sheets and allow to dry out completely. Be sure to turn the slices over regularly to ensure they are totally dried out, if you're not using racks. This is a lot of bread to have laying around, though. This is where the pre-made cubes come in. No bread laying around, no prep done days in advance, no chance the cat's going to wander across exposed slices of bread. :) If you use the pre-made cubes, just skip this step. I've never noticed a significant change in the flavour and they are much easier to work with. :)

The day before, or the morning of the feast:
Take off any rings or bracelets or watches that you're wearing and wash your hands thoroughly (make sure your nails are clean too) and roll up your sleeves (if you have 'em).

Tear up/crush the bread slices into roughly 1/2 inch bits (or dump the bread cubes) into a huge bowl with plenty of room for getting your hands in there and mixing up the stuffing. Getting crumbs in the bowl are a part of this process, so don't worry about any tiny bits you may end up with.

Add the herbs, salt, and pepper to the bread and toss to coat the bread with the herbs fairly evenly. Use more sage than you do thyme or parsley. You should be able to smell the sage, but not the thyme or parsley, and it shouldn't be overwhelming. You should be able to smell the sage when you lean over so that your nose is about three inches from the bread and sniff. I usually add enough pepper so I can just barely smell it, too (being sure to turn away when I sneeze :). The taste of the herbs intensifies when you bake the stuffing, so you don't want to overdo them. The good thing about this method of seasoning is that if you use your nose as the measure, then the end product will taste right to you, because it was your nose that determined the right amount in the first place. :) But it's also where you can get in a little trouble. If you have a cold, or your sense of smell isn't as keen as the other people you're feeding, you can put too much sage in the stuffing, and it will overwhelm all the other flavours. If you're feeding several people, you can also have them sniff at the bowl and sorta reach a middle ground on the seasoning, so that it's not overwhelming anyone (if it really matters, that is).

Set the bowl aside for now.

In a frying/sauteeing pan, melt the butter. Add the coarsely chopped onion to the butter and saute briefly to start softening. Add the celery, finely minced onion, and minced celery tops. Saute until all vegetables are soft, and well mixed.

Pour the vegetables and butter over the bread, then mix well, distributing the veggies throughout the stuffing and evenly coating the bread with the butter. Pour the eggs over the bread and mix well, again, evenly coating the bread as much as possible. It's important that you do these two steps fairly quickly once you've poured in the ingredients so you don't get "eggy" patches or "buttery" ones. Even distribution is important because the bread is going to soak up these liquids quickly. If you are using
turkey broth, then this is the point you'd add it, again, mixing quickly to evenly distribute. Just a note here, when you add these ingredients, you're going to be getting strong wafts of smells from the stuffing, that's why you seasoned it before this step, so you could gauge the amounts more accurately without warm moisture changing the smell. :)

Now you're ready to start adding milk. Add three cups of milk and use your hands to incorporate it into the bread. This step is where you will run into the difference between using sliced bread and pre-made bread cubes. The sliced bread absorbs the milk more readily, usually takes a little less milk, and mixes up faster. Though the bread cubes are a little more work on this step, they're still faster to work with overall. Work the milk into the bread with your hands and be sure to mix up the bits that tend to drop to the bottom. You can use a spoon for this, but the texture of the stuffing is important, and you can't feel it through the spoon.

Keep mixing in milk, about one cup or a bit less at a time, until the stuffing is sticking together and all the bread has been softened by the liquids. If you're using pre-made cubes, be sure that you don't have any largish "hard" bits of bread. It should all be very soft, moist (almost wet but not quite, there should not be any puddles of milk and it should not drip if you pick some up in your hand and hold it over the bowl with your
fingers spread), and sorta sticky. It should hold together and sound moist when you pull your hand through it (feeling for lumps of unmoistened bread).

At this point you can either stuff your bird with the dressing and pop it in the oven, put the stuffing in a baking dish (well, it's enough to fill several baking dishes) sprayed with non-stick spray and bake it, or store it, covered, in the fridge for use later. Do not let it sit out on the counter for very long.

I usually put some in a 13X9 baking dish, and some in a 2 quart casserole and bake them at 350 degrees. The 13x9 dishes tend to bake faster because they're shallower, and the stuffing dries out a little more (not in a bad way, but you have to watch it because it can turn into a rock if you let it overcook). The stuffing in the casserole takes longer to bake because it's deeper, but the stuffing is a little more moist in the middle, again, not in a bad way. :)

The stuffing from the 13X9 dish tends to be better for use in left over dishes like "Sludge" (torn up chunks of leftover turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and torn up stuffing all heated up together into a stew-like mass). The stuffing from the casserole is better with the main feast. In any case, bake the stuffing until it's got a nice golden crust on top
(roughly an hour but start checking at 45 mins, assuming these are the only things in the oven, if there's more in the oven baking, it could take longer). That's usually plenty long enough for the center to be cooked through. It will be very solid and not at all crumbly. You can always check it by spooning out a little from the center to see if it's solid and cooked through. You could also probably use a probe thermometer, I think
the right temp is between 170 and 180, but I've never done that, so that might be a little high. That's how high the center of the stuffing needs to be if you're cooking it in the bird, IIRC