The basic idea here was just making everything in a pan. I know a lot of people make what they call stuffing in a pan, like a casserole, and there's nothing wrong with this, but I never quite liked it. I think part of what makes stuffing really good is that it's been inside the bird while it cooked, so it's become moist and saturated with the bird's juices and fats. Making stuffing in a dish like a casserole achieves the basic goal behind bread stuffing - the flavors are combined, the bread is fused or whatever into a semi-homogeneous mass, and everything is cooked through and hot. And listen, I can throw a steak on the grill, and cook it through perfectly, and it'll be good, and I have achieved the basic goal of grilling a steak, but wouldn't you rather I had marinated or rubbed it first? It's missing something important. That's how I feel generally about pan stuffing.
But maybe, we thought, you can get the fats and juices in the stuffing, even in a casserole dish. The reason the stuffing in the bird gets it's flavor is because of drippings seeping down into the bird's cavity and saturating the stuffing - the turkey over the top is the most important point. We didn't want to cook a whole bird anyway, so we thought to get turkey pieces - a lot of supermarkets, around holidays especially, will sell packages of turkey thighs or drumsticks. Depending on where you live, and which market you go to, they may sell these year-round. By covering over a casserole dish of bread stuffing with turkey pieces, and roasting the whole thing, we hoped we could saturate the stuffing with drippings while also sealing in the moisture under the layer of meat and skin just as would a real turkey.
Since we weren't sure this would work the first time around, we also cooked some crumbled turkey sausage and mixed that into the stuffing as a means of providing nuclei of drippings inside the stuffing just to make sure, but in retrospect, we don't think that was necessary - the turkey thighs we used probably could have done the trick on their own. However, when we pre-cooked it, the turkey sausage did provide a valuable amount of pan juices that went into making the gravy, thus fulfilling the role usually played by the roasting pan juices when cooking a full bird. Thus, we were also able to produce turkey gravy.
For somebody who's made stuffing and roasted a whole bird before, this description has probably been enough for you to understand basically what we did. We're including the recipe of specifically what we did anyway, but obviously this is more about the technique than the exact flavors involved - there are a thousand different ways to make stuffing, and several different birds to buy pieces of. This would probably work with non-poultry meat as well, like a butterflied pork loin. Furthermore, we really like stuffing, so our proportions favor it to the meat component.
Turkeyless Turkey
Ingredients
- 5-6 turkey thighs
- 2-3 loaves French bread, shredded and stale
- 3 strips bacon
- 2 cups chopped onion
- 1 cup chopped celery
- 1/2 - 1 cup chopped parsley
- 1/2 lb lean caseless turkey sausage
- 1-2 cups chicken stock
- olive oil
- dried sage
- paprika
- dried thyme
- dried savory
- black pepper
- salt
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
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Chop half the bacon and render the fat out by cooking in a large pan over high heat. To this, add the crumbled turkey sausage meat and cook for a couple minutes until browned. Set aside, trying as best you can to separate the cooked meat from the juices and fat (we probably could have done a better job). The latter will go to making gravy.
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Chop the rest of the bacon and render over high heat in a large pot or Dutch oven. Add the onions, celery, and parsley, and sautee the mixture over medium-high heat. When the onions are cooked through, add 3/4 of the cooked sausage meat and mix well. Turn off heat.
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Add the stale bread a handful at a time, tossing to mix with the onion, celery and sausage. Occasionally, moisten the mixture with a splash of the chicken stock, tossing after each addition. The bread should be getting soft again, but not wet or soggy. As you do this, also season the mixture with generous amounts of sage and black pepper. Salt as necessary, but the stock has some of its own.
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Spread the stuffing mixture into a deep casserole dish or roasting pan. (Pictured here is a disposable foil pan, 11"x9"x4".)
- Clean and dry the turkey thighs. Apply some olive oil to each to adhere seasoning. Mix roughly equal parts sage, paprika, thyme, savory, pepper and salt in a small bowl, and rub the resulting spice mixture into the oiled skin of each thigh.
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Arrange the turkey thighs over the stuffing in the pan. Place the whole pan in the oven and roast for about two hours, until a thermometer inserted into the thickest thigh registers about 165 degrees F.
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While the turkey roasts, prepare a gravy from the remaining sausage meat and drippings according to your preferred method. Also use this time to make some mashed potatoes and any vegetable sides you may like.
The stuffing and turkey meat came out feeling and tasting as though we had stuffed and roasted an entire bird, so we called this a success. It was certainly significantly easier and faster than preparing and roasting an entire turkey. However, the gravy was not like the gravy we obtain after roasting an entire bird, largely because the drippings obtained from the sausage are not of the same quality as those which come from an entire bird, especially because the latter juices roast along with the bird in the pan and gives some of those good burnt bits. Furthermore, a whole turkey would come with its giblets, which are really essential for a proper gravy. I'm sure, however, that such giblets may also be purchases separately at the supermarket - we just didn't think of it at the time. In any case, this procedure, being much easier and faster and yielding almost the same results as cooking an entire turkey, will probably supplant our whole-bird roasts in the future.
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