My mom's go-to Puerto Rican stuffing is a Thanksgiving essential with or without a turkey
Maria Noyen
- I've never had Thanksgiving stuffing quite like the recipe my mom always makes.
- There is no bread involved, but there is a ton of meat, and it's packed with flavor.
Thanksgiving is around the corner, and for the first time in a long time, I'm not spending it at home.
That's because I recently moved from London to New York City. The move has had its ups and downs, but the biggest challenge has been adjusting to not having most of my family close by. If you're close to your family, you'll know that spending a holiday without them isn't easy. However, I'm lucky that my mom is flying out to spend Thanksgiving with me in NYC this year.
Since it'll just be us, we've decided to opt for a lunch out at a restaurant rather than cooking a Thanksgiving meal. As excited as I am about there not being any cleanup for us to do, there's nothing quite like Thanksgiving at home. Both of my parents are incredible cooks, but I will say that one of my all-time favorite Thanksgiving dishes is my mom's Puerto Rican stuffing.
So, instead of missing the opportunity to eat it this year, I decided to make it myself for the first time. Here's how I did it.
My mom's stuffing recipe comes from "Cocina Criolla," a cookbook on traditional Puerto Rican cuisine.
Carmen Aboy Valldejuli was a well-respected Puerto Rican chef, once named the "foremost authority on Puerto Rican cooking" by former New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne, according to Pelican Publishing company.
It's no surprise that my mom, who left Puerto Rico in her 20s after marrying my dad, has long kept a copy of Valldejuli's "Cocina Criolla" cookbook at home and put it to good use.
I could tell it was well-used just from the photos she sent me of the book and the Thanksgiving stuffing recipe — the corners of the pages are folded over and yellowing, and, of course, slightly splattered with remnants of ingredients used to dish up delicious Puerto Rican specialties.
Since my Spanish is rusty, my mom translated the ingredients and instructions for me.
To make the stuffing recipe, you'll need these ingredients, which Valldejuli splits up into four categories to make following the method super simple:
Category A ingredients:
1.5 pounds of ground beef or pork (or a mixture of both)
⅓ cup of onion, chopped
½ cup of raisins
1 teaspoon of capers
8 large olives stuffed with peppers
1 tablespoon of salt
Category B ingredients:
18 dried prunes without seeds
1 can of bell peppers in vinegar
Category C ingredients:
2 tablespoons of olive oil
Category D ingredients:
4 boiled eggs, chopped
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 pound of apple sauce
Before getting started, I prepped a few of the ingredients for the recipe.
This included dicing a large onion and hard-boiling four eggs for 10 minutes.
When it came time to measure out the onion, I realized that dicing half of it was way more than necessary. For this reason, I'd advise buying a small onion or keeping any leftover diced onion in a reusable bag so you can use it for any other dishes you make that week.
The next step was simple: I added all the category A ingredients into a big bowl and gave it a good mix.
As the recipe states, you can either use pork or beef, or a mix of both, which is what I opted for.
Another thing to note is that I couldn't find olives stuffed with peppers at my local grocery store. Instead, I opted for a jar of pitted olives that had bits of pepper floating around in it too.
To try to stick as close to the original recipe as possible, I picked out 16 slices of olives and a good amount of red peppers. I estimated that would be pretty close to the 8 large stuffed olives the recipe calls for. And spoiler alert — it worked out just fine.
With category A out of the way, I set my sights on the category B ingredients.
Tackling category B starts by chopping up 18 dried pitted prunes into small chunks. Once that was done, I used a knife to scrape them into the big bowl with the category A ingredients and gave it a mix.
I nearly made a huge mistake on the next step by picking up spicy pickled peppers.
Without thinking, I accidentally bought a jar of "hot pickled peppers" instead of sweet bell peppers during my initial trip to the grocery store.
I gave them a try before adding them and realized they were way too spicy, so I called my mom to double-check. Of course, she confirmed I'd bought the wrong pickled peppers.
So instead of being lazy and probably making inedibly spicy stuffing (for me, at least), I headed back out to the grocery store with my mom on FaceTime to make sure I picked out the right kind of peppers.
My advice would be to just avoid the hassle and get the right ingredients the first time around.
Once all the category B ingredients were added, I gave the mix another stir and marveled at how colorful it was.
In my experience, the more colorful the ingredients, the more flavor the dish will have.
From the red peppers to the green olives, and the deep-purple hue of the prunes, I could tell this was going to be delicious even before the actual cooking began.
Before I got started on cooking, I took a minute to chop up the boiled eggs.
This doesn't have to be exact at all. I roughly chopped up the eggs — some pieces were bigger than others, but it didn't really make a difference. I also prefer a bit of variety in size. It just means that some bites will have more egg than others, and that is perfectly OK.
Finally, it was time to cook, so I added some olive oil to a large pot.
Olive oil is the only ingredient mentioned in category C. All I needed to do was measure out 2 tablespoons of it in a large pot on the stove.
Once the oil was hot, I added the mixture and cooked it until it changed color.
According to the recipe, it's important to give the meaty mix a continuous stir until it changes from bright pink to a brownish gray. This took less than five minutes to happen.
When it did, I popped a lid on the pot and lowered the heat to let it simmer for an additional 10 minutes, as the instructions outline.
Then, I added in the final category of ingredients, including the chopped boiled egg.
After adding the boiled eggs, applesauce, and sugar, I gave the mixture another stir before leaving the pot to heat on the stove for another five minutes.
The final product was a steaming bowl of Puerto Rican Thanksgiving stuffing that smelled like home to me.
In the last few minutes of the cooking process, I decided to get started on the cleanup. And while I washing dishes, the smell coming from the pot transported me back to my family's kitchen on Thanksgiving day. It smelled like home — something I'd been really missing since moving to NYC.
Besides the smell, the texture of the stuffing was just like my mom's usually is. Unlike when I've tried stuffings that use bread, it's super moist and rich-looking. If I had to compare it to something, I'd say the ground meat does make it look a little bit like a bolognese.
No turkey? No problem. I could eat this stuffing on its own any day of the week.
If you are lucky to be making a proper turkey feast this Thanksgiving, the recipe says to let the mix cool down completely before stuffing the turkey and closing the end of the bird together either by sewing it or tying it together with string.
Since there was no turkey at home for me this time, once the stuffing was done, I didn't hesitate to grab a bowl and dish myself up a heap of the mixture.
Thankfully, it tasted exactly the way I wanted it to: sweet and savory all at once. For me, the combination of those two is what holiday meals are all about, so this stuffing completely nails it.
The flavors were balanced in each bite — I got a hint of sweetness from the raisins, prunes, and peppers, whereas the saltiness came in the form of the pork, beef, olives, and eggs. In terms of texture, the stuffing was just as juicy and moist as it looked without being soup-like.
After finishing my first bowl, I could safely conclude that my mom's go-to stuffing was hearty enough to be a meal on its own.
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