How 9 celebrity chefs make stuffing
Erin McDowell
- Whether you're team in-the-bird or team oven, stuffing is one of the most popular Thanksgiving dishes.
- Celebrity chefs from Martha Stewart to Guy Fieri have their own recipes for stuffing.
Martha Stewart's recipe for classic stuffing is made to be cooked inside your Thanksgiving turkey.
The recipe calls for all the typical ingredients, including onions, celery, sage, and two loaves of stale white bread. However, Stewart also recommends adding optional ingredients like toasted pecans and dried cherries to take your stuffing over the top.
Ina Garten's recipe for sausage and herb stuffing also includes apples and dried cranberries for added flavor.
Garten recommends toasting your bread first before moving on to sautéing the onions, celery, apples, parsley, salt, and pepper. After sautéing the sausage in the same pan, mix all the ingredients together with chicken stock and the dried cranberries before baking it in the oven.
Emeril Lagasse's recipe for stuffing involves relatively few steps but quite a few ingredients.
The chef's Thanksgiving favorite uses mild fresh Italian sausage, diced onion, diced celery, garlic, apples, chestnuts, fresh goats cheese, and a beaten egg before it's baked or stuffed inside the turkey.
Rachael Ray makes her apple, celery, and onion stuffing every year on Thanksgiving.
The recipe is pretty traditional, except for the inclusion of McIntosh or Empire apples, and it is baked in the oven. Ray also calls for seasoned cubed stuffing, rather than homemade bread cubes like many celebrity chefs recommend using.
Guy Fieri's pepperoni stuffing is a unique take on the classic Thanksgiving side dish.
The recipe calls for sliced pepperoni, yellow onions, red bell pepper, pepperoncini peppers, and sun-dried tomatoes. To amp up this Italian-inspired recipe, Fieri also opts to use dried-out focaccia bread rather than white bread.
When Insider's Chelsea Davis made the stuffing for her Thanksgiving dinner, she said it "tasted like a loaded pizza."
"Fixer Upper" star Joanna Gaines' recipe for homemade Thanksgiving stuffing uses French bread and mushrooms.
The recipe doesn't have any meat in it, although it does use chicken broth and poultry seasoning to give it more flavor. Gaines also adds interesting ingredients like heavy cream and mushrooms to her stuffing.
The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond's recipe calls for three different types of bread, including homemade cornbread.
Drummond's dressing recipe — yes, it's technically called dressing if it's not in the bird — uses cornbread, an Italian bread like a ciabatta loaf, and French bread. The recipe doesn't use sausage, although it does include other classic ingredients like celery, parsley, and onions.
To make Bobby Flay's dressing, you'll need hot Italian sausage and cubed country bread, plus other ingredients.
The recipe also uses unsalted butter, red onion, celery, carrot, garlic, and fresh sage to add a lot of flavor. Despite Flay mostly being known for his burgers, the recipe has received mostly positive reviews, with one user calling it "a staple every year" at their Thanksgiving dinner.
Paula Deen's stuffing recipe calls for homemade cornbread and a large amount of butter.
To make Deen's Southern cornbread stuffing, you'll need a stick of butter, chopped celery, chopped onion, chicken stock, plus the ingredients needed to make the cornbread. The recipe also calls for saltine crackers, which Insider's Paige Bennett thought was a miss.
"When I took a bite, I noted the interior was far too soggy — there was definitely too much broth, and the crackers turned mushy after absorbing the liquid," she wrote.
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