cornbread dressing
Ingredients:
- One batch brown butter skillet cornbread from NYT cooking
- 1 pound ground pork or sausage with casings removed. I typically use either sweet Italian or garlic herb sausage.
- 4 tbsp butter, plus extra.
- 2 medium leeks, diced
- 5 ribs celery, diced
- Minced thyme, sage, and parsley (or whatever fresh herbs you feel like)
- 2 eggs
- 3 cups turkey stock. If you don't have turkey stock, use the best quality chicken bone broth you can find.
- Salt, pepper, olive oil
Make the cornbread 4-5 days in advance. Cut cornbread up into 1 inch cubes and set out to dry. For best results, spread out the cubes of cornbread in a single layer on a wire-rimmed baking sheet, so that there's air-flow on both sides of the cornbread.
The day of serving, grease a casserole dish with butter. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a dutch oven over medium high heat. Add the pork, season with S&P, and brown all the meat. Remove and set aside. Wipe out the pan, then melt butter over medium heat. Add celery and leeks, season with salt and pepper, and sauté for 15 minutes until very soft and beginning to brown. Add the fresh herbs and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the sausage and mix everything together, then remove from heat. In a large mixing bowl, fold together the sausage mixture and cornbread croutons. Cover and refrigerate until later (timing is p flexible).
At least one hour, but less than four hours, before serving: whisk the eggs into 2 cups of stock, then pour over the dressing. Use your hands to distribute the liquid all over the dressing, being careful not to crumble the cornbread (this shouldn’t happen if the cornbread is dehydrated). Add additional stock incrementally, being sure to stop when the mixture is sufficiently soggy and the bread looks like it won’t absorb more liquid. You should be able to get all three cups in, but I leave the third cup as an incremental add-in in case things get too soggy. Transfer the dressing into the casserole dish. Scatter dollops of cold butter over the top of the dressing, then cover tightly with aluminum foil. You can leave it in the fridge like this for a few hours. On the one hand, this lets all the flavors come together. On the other hand, the cornbread gets reeeeally soft if you let it soak for more than a few hours, which is why I suggest capping the soak time at four hours. Doesn’t make a huge difference one way or the other, though.
Preheat oven to 350. One hour before serving, bake for 30 minutes, covered in foil. Then remove the foil, increase temperature to 450, and bake for another 15 minutes until the top is darkened and crusty. Let cool for ten minutes before serving.
Notes:
- The oven temperatures for this recipe are flexible. So if you're making this dish at the same time as, say, a turkey, you can bake it at whatever temperature the oven is already set to. Just make sure the dressing bakes with foil on for long enough that it binds together and is heated through. Then remove the foil so that some of the excess moisture evaporates and the top develops a slightly darker crust.
- One pound of ground pork creates a meat-forward dressing. For a less carnivorous crowd, scale back to 8-12 ounces of pork.
- Could experiment with adding chestnuts and dried cranberries.
- Doing this with no sausage but lots of nuts and dried fruit would also be good