The Best Stuffing You’ll Ever Make

I'm Frank Proto, professional chef

and culinary instructor,

and today I'm gonna show you the best way to make stuffing.

I'm gonna show you how to make stuffing

that's gonna keep them coming back for seconds,

or thirds, and possibly fourths.

This is Stuffing 101.

I truly believe that stuffing is one

of the most important dishes on your Thanksgiving table.

First of all, it soaks up a lot of gravy

and it's really delicious,

second of all, we get to use up

any leftover bread we might have,

and third of all, you can make it in so many different ways.

One of the major pitfalls with stuffing is

that it's either too wet or too dry,

and what I'm gonna show you is how

to find that middle ground

where your stuffing has the perfect texture.

[gentle music]

There's a lot of different breads you can use.

I'm gonna use a baguette;

you can use sourdough, rye bread, white bread.

It's pretty much whatever you prefer,

but the reason I choose the baguette is

that it's sturdy, it holds together,

and it doesn't disintegrate

when I start to add all the other ingredients to it.

I like to use day-old baguettes.

It's already started the process of drying out.

All right, let's cube up this bread.

I'm just gonna take a half a loaf right now.

I leave the crust on.

I like the flavor of the crust, I like the way it looks.

And we're gonna cut it in half and half again,

and then into nice cubes.

These cubes go onto a tray to start that drying process.

Now that I have the bread cut,

I want it to dry out for a few days and get really firm.

If you don't have the time

to let it dry out for a couple of days.

What I like to do is take this, put it in a low oven,

200, 250 degrees, until it gets most of the moisture out.

In front of me, I have a tray of bread

that's already been dried,

and if you look at it, you squeeze on it,

it doesn't go anywhere, right, it's firm.

If you drop it, it doesn't shatter, but it's really loud.

It's not soft at all.

We have nice dried chunks of bread.

[gentle music]

One thing I love about this dish is

that it's one of those things you can do ahead.

It actually tastes better after a day or two.

So I got some oil in the pan,

and I'm gonna fry off my sausage.

I'm using breakfast sausage outta the casing.

I feel like the flavor in breakfast sausage mirrors a lot

of the flavors we use in Thanksgiving already,

sage, thyme, so that's what I'm going with.

A lot of breakfast sausage has a high proportion of fat,

and I want that in my stuffing.

It flavors the whole stuffing.

Let's go in the pan,

and I know it looks like a lot of sausage,

but I'm feeding a lot of people, it's Thanksgiving,

so I'm gonna get this in the pan, start cooking it,

and start breaking it up into little chunks.

What we're trying to do here is render off some of that fat

and brown our sausage so we get that caramelization

and those caramelized flavors.

So break it up as you go.

One of the great things about stuffing is

you can use a lot of different flavors.

If you don't like breakfast sausage, find some chorizo.

If you don't like chorizo, you can use Italian sausage.

It's really adaptable to what you want in your stuffing.

You'll notice that I'm not putting any salt

and pepper on this.

Most sausages come seasoned already,

and I'll season the whole dish later on,

rather than trying to season the sausage.

There's salt, there's flavor in here already.

I don't think we need to add any more to that.

The sausage is nice and brown,

it's cooked most of the way through,

and we're gonna use that slotted spoon

to take out the sausage,

leaving as much of the fat behind as I can.

If I tilt the pan back

and run my sausage up to the back of the pan,

you can see that I'm getting a lot

of the fat draining off as I take it out.

And now I can start cooking my vegetables for the stuffing.

All right, so we just let the fat from the sauces get hot,

and we can add our onions in.

All the vegetables for my stuffing

are rough chopped or large chopped.

I wanna still see them in the finished dish,

so I go a little bigger on the vegetables.

Whenever I cook onions,

I always add just a little bit of salt.

It's gonna draw out the moisture

and let our onions start breaking down.

I'm also gonna add just a little bit of pepper now too.

I like to season throughout the process.

So you can see my onions are starting to get brown.

We can add our celery now.

A lot of times with stuffing, you'll see celery.

Celery is just that flavor profile

that goes really well with this.

So once our celery starts to cook down,

I can add my bay leaf, I have some chopped thyme,

some sage, and some rosemary.

Just stir those in.

Chopped garlic goes in at the end,

because it tends to burn really quick,

and if I put it in earlier,

I have burnt garlic, not toasted garlic.

All right, my veggies look good,

they're starting to get fragrant,

and now it's time for the butter.

It looks like a lot of butter,

and yes, it is a lot of butter,

but that butter is gonna soak into that bread

with the stock and the sausage,

and it's gonna make this stuffing so delicious and moist.

Thanksgiving and the holidays is no time

to skimp on the butter.

So you can see that I have some brown bits on the bottom.

That's my fond,

and that's where all the concentrated flavor is.

Once we add the stock to this, that's gonna melt

and give us some nice caramelized flavors.

All right, we're done, I can shut my heat off.

And what I'm gonna do with this now is add it to my sausage.

Get all the butter in there, scrape it into your...

Mix it all together.

I'm gonna take the bay leaf out, get rid of the bay leaf.

I have all of my cooked ingredients in the bowl,

the sausage, the herbs, the veggies, the butter,

now all we really have to do is get this mixed in

with our bread and some stock, and then bake it in the oven.

[gentle music]

It's time to put everything together.

So the bread goes in first.

It's gonna start soaking up all the liquid right away,

and that's what we want.

Make sure you have a big enough bowl for this,

because if you don't, it's going everywhere.

You take your sausage and aromatics and butter,

and you put it over the top,

and what this is gonna do is start soaking

into the bread immediately, and that's what we want.

I'm gonna add some stock.

I'm not gonna add it all at once,

I'm gonna add it and see where we're at.

So I'm gonna go about half.

I'm using chicken stock.

It is kind of a neutral stock.

It's gonna add some background flavor,

but it's not gonna take over.

We're gonna start mixing,

and what I'm looking for here is

that my bread starts to get a little soaked

with all of the flavorings and the stock.

I think it's a good time to also add some salt and pepper.

Our bread is kind of bland compared to the sausage,

so we do wanna season this really well.

Keep on mixing and stirring.

I'm gonna let this soak for about five minutes,

just so that we start seeing our bread is softening.

We don't wanna put this in the oven

when our bread is still hard.

You can see that it's already starting to soften up,

and that's what we want,

but we want it to be a little softer than this.

And it's time to put it into our baking dish.

I'm not gonna butter my baking dish.

We have a lot of butter in the stuffing already,

so let's just dump it in.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I'm just gonna kinda let it settle in here.

Stuffing is usually put inside the bird

when the bird's roasting.

Dressing is something that we make outside of the bird

in a dish like this.

I don't like stuffing my bird with stuffing,

for the main reason that

it makes the bird take longer to cook.

For me, in my mind, it's interchangeable.

I'm not gonna split hairs with this.

It's a stuffing, it's a dressing.

I'm not gonna argue about it.

I'm gonna put it in the oven for about a half hour.

What I'm mainly looking for is

that the top gets nice and crispy

and we don't have any moisture left in here,

all the moisture's sucked into the bread.

So let's get into the oven and then we get to eat.

[gentle music]

It's been about a half hour, my stuffing is outta the oven,

and if you look at it, the top is a little dried out,

there's a lot of crunchy bits, there's some soft bits,

it's got a lot of textural difference going on,

and that's what makes me so happy about stuffing.

There's a lot going on in a few little bites.

We finally get to Thanksgiving dinner,

I got my Turkey, my green beans, my mashed potatoes,

my cranberry sauce, my gravy.

We saved the best for last.

We got the stuffing.

Right there.

It's kind of like the place of honor,

that's the head of the table right here.

Look at this beautiful plate in front of me.

It's got everything on it,

and it's got a really nice mound of stuffing.

So without further ado, let's give it a taste.

Of course, I want to dip it in a little bit of gravy,

and luckily my mashed potatoes are holding the gravy for me.

You can really taste all the herbs

and aromatic vegetables you have in there.

The sausage gives it a nice kick.

If you take the time and the effort

to make your own stuffing,

I guarantee everyone's gonna go back for seconds.