Thanksgiving is a big deal for many families across America. With the bulk of the celebration centered on the shared meal, preparing the feast can bring anxiety and stress for home cooks, whether it’s their first or 50th time. If you fall into that camp, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Not everything on your Thanksgiving menu needs to be homemade.
In reality, pretty much all of the meal can be outsourced to professional cooks and bakers or replaced with store-bought products. Here are five of our favorite shortcuts to help make Thanksgiving more manageable.
Stuffing
If you really wanted to go all out for stuffing, you could go through the multiday process of baking your own bread or cornbread, drying it out, cooking whatever meat and vegetables will be added, assembling the casserole and then throwing it in the oven on the big day. Or, you can grab a bag or box of your favorite brand from the grocery store and be done with it.
In our team’s taste test of boxed stuffing mixes, Stove Top Chicken Stuffing Mix was the clear winner. “It won the rare raves of this experiment, with one taster crowning it ‘delicious’ with no less than three exclamation points,” my colleague Emily Heil wrote. In addition to the time savings — Stove Top can be ready to eat in mere minutes — as its name implies, it can be made completely on the stove, leaving precious oven space available for other dishes.
If you want to spruce up your favorite brand to make it feel more homemade, try adding sautéed vegetables, cooked sausage or giblets, nuts or dried fruit, such as cranberries or raisins.
Turkey
Turkeys are often the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal. Unfortunately, they are also notoriously difficult to prepare. There’s the issue of thawing, whether to brine, and then attempting to yield crisp, golden skin and moist, juicy meat. So let the bird be someone else’s problem. Restaurants are particularly good choices for getting the kinds of turkey you might not make at home, such as smoked or deep-fried.
Another option is the popular fast-food chain Popeyes, which sells frozen cooked turkeys that you simply need to thaw and heat in the oven. “It emerged nicely browned and crisp-skinned, with bits of the rust-red Cajun spice mixture flecking the surface,” Heil wrote in a review that went on to praise the bird’s tenderness and flavor. “As we picked at the meat, like Thanksgiving diners hovering in the kitchen for a post-meal snack, we agreed that this was a winner of a turkey dinner, given the ease of preparation.”
And if you’re not into turkey, skip it entirely and order something else, such as a ham, smoked brisket, fried chicken or a vegetarian main.
Rolls and cornbread
Baking dinner rolls from scratch is not for the faint of heart. There’s mixing, proofing, shaping and, often, flour flying all over the place. Though they can be delicious, I personally rank them lower on my list of Thanksgiving food importance. I’d be perfectly satisfied with brands such as King’s Hawaiian or Sister Shubert’s, or even something from a can.
If your family prefers cornbread over rolls, there are plenty of options for store-bought mixes to adorn your table. I recommend a less-sweet variety if you plan to use it in stuffing or dressing. But if you intend to serve the cornbread as-is, you can amp up the corn flavor of whatever mix you love most by adding kernels to the batter, like in Buttermilk and Scallion Jiffy Cornbread (pictured above).
For any type of bread you have on your table, serve it with a compound butter, which is just butter mixed with whatever flavor-boosting ingredients you want, for extra deliciousness and flair. (Garlic and herbs is always a good option.)
Pie crust
If you struggle with making pie crust — don’t. Even with the butteriest, flakiest crust that you can imagine, the dessert would still be nothing without a good filling. To save yourself the time and trouble, use a premade crust for an apple pie or a custard-based pie such as pumpkin or sweet potato pie (which is what my dad does every year for his family-famous pies). A premade graham cracker crust works great for cheesecake (see the No-Bake Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake above) or a cranberry tart.
Desserts
Of course you could make things even easier on yourself by purchasing Thanksgiving pies — or other desserts — from a bakery. You get to support a local business and enjoy delicious desserts. It’s a win-win situation. Pro tip: Put your orders in ASAP to ensure you don’t miss out on your favorites. For the non-pie people of the world, you could also keep things simple by picking up a boxed cake mix or a pack of good chocolate chip cookies.
Cranberry sauce
Last, and maybe least (depending whom you ask), is the tart, ruby red condiment that usually makes an appearance only once a year. Admittedly, most cranberry sauce and relish recipes are extremely simple to make — some don’t even require cooking! But if you just can’t think of adding one more item to your to-do list, in the words of cookbook author and Food Network star Ina Garten, store-bought is fine.
The post Stuffing mix, premade pie crust and more Thanksgiving shortcuts we love
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