Epicurious Stuffing with Cornbread & Sausage
It sure does look tasty, doesn’t it.
I feel like most people have had something like this, but this was my first time.
Time: 4 hours
Difficulty: 1/5
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Last year, I found a pretty delicious vegan stuffing recipe (that I made non-vegan). I could have made the same one this year, but I like to try new things. I’ll analyze that recipe later on, but this year I wanted something that I felt would be a little more traditional and simple. A stuffing with sausage is something that I’ve heard of before, but I can’t recall having it. This recipe looked fairly straightforward, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
Surprisingly few ingredients
As far as stuffing recipes go, I think that this one is pretty tame when it comes to ingredients. I think you should pay special attention to the breads you go with. I would recommend a good quality bread (I used French Sourdough) and your favorite corn bread. I used chicken stock instead of broth, but I doubt that it makes much of a difference. All the other stuff is pretty standard.
Tools:
Bowls
13”x9” Baking Dish
Cooking Review:
Prep: 40 minutes
The prep for this recipe included chopping the celery, onion, and herbs as well as cutting up the breads into the appropriate sizes and amounts. It’s fairly important to have similarly sized chunks of bread so that they dehydrate and soak up the liquids evenly.
Drying Breads: 1 hour+cooling
Once all of the bread was cut up, I baked it for about an hour to get rid of any extra moisture in them. I started mine at 275 degrees before increasing the temperature to 300 because I was sharing the oven with something else.
Browning Sausage and cooking vegetables: 15 minutes + cooling
While the bread cooled, I browned the sausage before adding them to a bowl with the dried bread. I then added the vegetables to the pan along with the butter until slightly browned, scraping up any stuck on bits from the sausage. This was then added to the bowl with the sausage.
Mixing everything: 5 minutes
After letting the vegetables and sausage cool for about half an hour, I mixed the egg, broth, herbs, salt, and pepper and added it to the bread mixture. I mixed until the bread looked evenly coated and saturated. I then transferred everything into a buttered baking dish.
Baking: 1 hours 50 minutes
I let my stuffing sit in the refrigerator over night before baking it the next day, so I had to let it sit out to come to room temperature before baking. If you’re making it the same day, you can put it right into the oven. I baked the stuffing for an hour and 5 minutes covered with aluminum foil to get the center to 160 degrees before removing the foil and baking for an additional 45 minutes to brown it. At this point the stuffing is done.
Analysis:
I really enjoyed the flavor of this stuffing. It is very savory and well seasoned; there’s nothing I would add as far as the flavors go. The textures are also very good. A lot of stuffings can be overly mushy, but this one has a great mix of crisp, firm, and soft components. I also think that the two different breads along with the sausage add a nice textural contrast. This is a stuffing that I can see a lot of people really liking. It’s moist, flavorful, and satisfying. What more could you ask for. Now, some people like a little sweetness in their stuffing. This doesn’t have that, but I don’t think it really needs it (maybe it would be too much). This recipe earns a 10/10. Despite how long it takes to make, it’s super easy and mostly hands off. It’s well worth the wait.
