Stuffings for a Crowd - Cooks Illustrated

If you're serving stuffing, you may be tempted to fall back on supermarket stuffing. Must you really sacrifice quality for convenience?

The Problem

Supermarket stuffing offers unbelievable ease, especially if you have to make a large quantity, but it isn't nearly as good as homemade.

The Goal

We wanted to make ample stuffing to serve 16 (or more).

The Solution

Our first decision was to select the right bread. We liked cornbread because it's very sturdy, but not tough or sweet.

We also liked the density and slight sweetness of high-quality white sandwich bread. Regardless of the bread, drying

the bread before making stuffing was crucial for texture and flavor. Cornbread stuffing especially can get mushy and

lose its structure if the bread isn't sufficiently dried. We found that the two breads did differ in required amounts. The

amount of cornbread seemed skimpy compared to regular bread, but cornbread didn't shrink as much as regular

bread when it dried, and it blew up to nearly twice its size as it soaked up the liquid before cooking. Cooking the

stuffing alongside—not in—the bird made the stuffing easy. In fact, we could assemble the stuffing 24 hours ahead

of time, refrigerate it, and just let it stand for 30 minutes before baking.

list of recipes

America’s Test Kitchen is a 2,500-square-foot kitchen located just outside of Boston. It is the home of Cook’s Country and Cook’s Illustrated magazines and is the workday destination for more than three dozen test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes until we understand how and why they work and arrive at the best version. We also test kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients in search of brands that offer the best value and performance. You can watch us work by tuning in to America’s Test Kitchen (www.americastestkitchen.com) on public television.