Good morning. Good morning! Hi. Are you stressed about Thanksgiving, yet? If you are: great! Same! If you’re not: don’t worry, I’m going to try to fix that. Let’s go.
I don’t like telling people what to do; in life, I am a terrible boss (also, perhaps, sometimes, a terrible parent?). Instead, I’d rather just share information, and science, and give you permission to break rules and eat for joy and et cetera. Trumpeting concrete rules about food just breeds anxiety, and food should never be that.
But this is Thanksgiving, and unless you are eschewing the holiday in its entirety, then, kindly: there is a lot of shit to do, and if you haven’t already started then you are super behind. (xo.)
(I’m kidding. You’re fine.) But: whatever your role in next week’s celebration, it’s time to have more than just a vague plan. Let’s divide, conquer, confirm. We started our Thanksgiving coverage at the end, with dessert - so let’s back up, now, to the beginning. Today we’re covering high-level basics that should help you wrangle your ideas - whether you be guest or host - into a tangible menu, with recipes to suit. Here’s what’s what:
Today’s newsletter is content heavy, and divided into two sections. Altogether, it should take you about 10-12 minutes to read.
The first section is a link party: lots of ideas for your menu, as well as a few techniques peppered in.
The second section is for the science nerds: a breakdown of what to - and what NOT to - prep ahead of time, and why. It’ll help you in planning your meal next week - but is also useful information for general kitchen life, like meal prepping or hosting a dinner party. It is long, though, so if it’s not your jam and you want to skip it - no sweat. I put it at the bottom for a reason.
There’s no original recipe included today, or pretty photos, but there are more in the pipeline: I’ll be seeing you tomorrow with an easy version of GBC that - finally - doesn’t suck, and again later in the week with a primer on umami, and how to maximize it for the holiday (plus two recipes for stocks - one’s vegan! - and gravy), as well as a few other miscellaneous turkey-day surprises (like a recipe from my grandma, and some ideas for leftovers). You’ll be hearing from me a lot between now & Thanksgiving - for better, for worse, ready or not. xo.
Link Party
I’m not going to give you my recipes for things like turkey or potatoes, simply because the world doesn’t need more of them. There are lots of good ones out there. Here’s a handful of favorite links to help you with technique & inspiration - recipes that you can either replicate entirely, or use to elevate your own personal favorites.
Turkey
Up first: an excellent primer on dry & wet brining. Whatever you want your turkey to taste like, start here. You can tweak as you need, but the Serious Eats backbone is on point.
That guide links out to J.Kenji’s carving method, and Smitten Kitchen’s turkey primer includes some carving tutorials, as well. (I don’t love the flavor profile of her turkey, but I’m a big fan of her onion method. Definitely worth adopting.)
A note on flavorings: do brine your turkey (I don’t have a preferred method; there are pros and cons to all), but don’t put a lot of weird shit in it. If you must deviate from simply seasoning your bird with butter, salt, and pepper, then stick your seasonings in the cavity of the bird: not in the brine, and not on or under the skin. My reasons are 2-fold: firstly, a lot of aromatics, seasoning pastes, and herbs will burn at the temps that you need to perfectly roast a turkey - but tucking them into the cavity provides them a protective barrier; and secondly, when you put your flavoring components in the cavity, they’ll steam the turkey from the inside - both imparting some flavor and moisture, while NOT strongly affecting the flavor of the drippings (which will then concentrate and make your gravy taste super, super funky).
Gravy
This method from Food52 is great, and you can disregard the fussiness about extra vegetables in the roasting pan; if you’re using a good homemade stock, it’s overkill. Specifically, I love their suggestion to use rendered turkey fat (instead of olive oil or butter) for the roux: keeps the flavor profile clean, and eliminates waste!
(Need a good stock recipe? I’ll have two coming your way in time for you to make them this weekend. xo.)
Whatever recipe you use, know your thickener: flour will not clump in hot fat, hence the use of a roux. Cornstarch, on the other hand, WILL clump when added to hot liquids, so if you’re going that route, dissolve yours in a tablespoon of cold water before adding.
This NYTimes mushroom gravy is really tasty - and vegan, if you’re after one that is. I do suggest rearranging her steps, however, to make a roux (see above).
Potatoes - Mashed, and Beyond
This is really, really good reading.
So is this.
This one is pretty mind-blowing. If you mash: read it.
And if you’re up to it, these are very much worth the work.
Sweet Potatoes
This will change your life. That is not hyperbole. Whatever you make - however you serve and eat sweet potatoes - this information can and should change the way you prepare them for your specific dish, forever.
Stuffing
More on this below, but this breaks down the difference between stale and dry bread, and why it matters.
Cranberry Sauce
I love cranberries, making me an equal opportunity proponent of ALL craberry sauces. I’m a particular fan of uncooked/fresh ones, and as they’re less common, I’ll be sending you a recipe for one later this week.
If you’re looking to mix it up, here’s some inspo for some fun variations on cooked sauces.
Veggies
I am dying to make this salad. It has occupied my thoughts since I saw it. I’ll be swapping some pomegranate arils in for the nuts, since my celebration will include a few allergies. She’s just so pretty.
It feels kind of extra to share two onion dishes, but this has been a long-time favorite - it’s so clever and unexpected. (Originally from Gourmet mag, RIP.)
I love the juxtaposition of warm and raw, here, and it’s a great base for any flavor profile you want to throw at it: you can disregard the dressing ingredients and use whatever you’d like.
This OG Butter. recipe for corn with shiitakes & thyme would fit right in at your turkey table.
Speaking of Butter. recipes - I’m purposely omitting any talk of the dreaded GBC until tomorrow. The wait will be worth it.
If you need a salad-salad at the table, this one has been my favorite for almost fifteen years. I eat it several times a month. (And as a P.S.: if you need a new resource for recipes, her archives are aces.)
Breads
I thought this idea for stuffing-flavored biscuits was clever, but haven’t tried it yet. I don’t love the inclusions (rosemary and fennel seeds do not say stuffing to me; I’d go celery and shallots) but I still think the concept is genius.
These are legendary - everyone makes them, no one regrets it.
If you want something even easier, nothing is more low-risk, low-output, high-reward as focaccia - I double the base of this recipe and usually just ignore the garlic business to dress it up on my own. You can pretzel the top, as above - that’s really fun, and a crowd pleaser (also: pretzel’ed focaccia makes a truly banging stuffing; plan ahead). You can dress it up, really, with anything; my current favorite is a combination of sage, browned butter, and a mix of chopped prunes and oil-cured olives.
If cornbread is your game, I humbly suggest: add one egg and one cup of pureed sweet potato or drained applesauce (or even a single mashed banana) to any recipe. You’ll be rewarded with a really tender cornbread that’s sweet and aromatic, but still very much “cornbread” - you’ll barely notice the fruit you put in (although the sweet potato gives it a really gorgeous mango color).
Dessert
It’s really hard not to make this section a full two-dozen links long, so I’m actually just totally tapping out. If you need dessert help, just text me?
Need even more pie help? Ya girl made the papers - I gotchu, boo. xo.
(That was so much! But. What did we forget?)
Alright: this is the science part. If you’re not here for it, just X out now - I’ll see you tomorrow.
The Plan-Ahead (or, largely, Why Retrogradation Matters)
The internet has a staggering amount of holiday-menu and how-to-host content, so I’m not going to add to it - much. Instead, I’m going to focus on dismantling the one suggestion that I think most publications get WRONG, and give you enough bits of information to help you get it RIGHT. And my gripe is this: the make-ahead list. No one gets it right. Let’s quickly explore why - and then bask in the glow of knowing we’ll never get it wrong, again.
Cooking is a transformative process: when you apply heat (and salt, and acid, and water, and and and) to food, you trigger chemical and physical changes in that food. Those changes are not only often irreversible, but (and this is the important part, for today’s purpose) they are also largely dynamic: food, especially once the cooking process has begun, is in a constant state of flux. Simply removing the pan from the stove and terminating the heat source, for example, doesn’t put an immediate end to the cooking and changing process, and we see examples of this all the time: it’s why we stop actively cooking our meat before it reaches our target temperature, because we know that it will continue to passively cook while it rests; it’s why we shock blanched vegetables in ice water, so that the heat they retain even after we remove the boiling water doesn’t over-cook them; it’s why many bakeries won’t deign to sell their day-old bread and bagels.
This dynamism isn’t always a negative; I’m not here to tell you that you can never serve anything other than freshly-prepared. It’s just that every type of food - every class of molecule, and every unique recipe and combination and process - exhibits this dynamism in a different way. And the reality is that when magazines and other media outlets publish their Thanksgiving Checklists, they’re rarely - if ever - taking that into consideration. Instead, in an effort to make your holiday-meal-life easier, they’re focusing on two things: time, and space. How long does it take to make each dish?, and, How can we most effectively juggle space in our fridge/oven/stovetop to get it all done? You take those numbers, you divide it by a certain number of days, et voilà!, you just math’ed your way into Thanksgiving.
Let’s science our way into it, instead. Because when we do that, we can focus on quality instead of mathematical efficiency - and still wind up with a really manageable schedule. Watch, I’ll prove it.
Foods To Prep Ahead - And Why
Produce (other than potatoes)
Anything being served raw - crudités, a salad or slaw, an uncooked cranberry relish - can generally be prepped 1-3 days ahead of time: wash, spin, peel, seed, core, chop, slice, or shave, then store (separately!) in bags or containers with a damp paper towel covering their surface to keep cut edges from drying out. Do not pre-season with dressings, acids, salts, or sugars: they’ll start to break down the plant cell walls, and your produce will begin to weep. Do not store prepped produce - even components of the same final dish - in the same container: many plants emit gasses that can speed up decomposition of other species.
Roasted vegetables are a great make-ahead option - one of the best, actually, and here’s why: most vegetables are full of flavorless water, and the high-temp process of roasting cooks a lot of that water away - sometimes 50% of it or more. But the process of cooling is an evaporative one, too, meaning that when you let a sheet pan of vegetables cool, it will continue to dispel water (in the form of steam) and thereby concentrate the flavors of the veg even more, without subjecting it to further additional high-heat cooking (which would quickly result in burning). In short: cooled roasted veggies have a higher concentration of flavor compounds than their freshly roasted counterparts, and are, therefore, more delicious. A bonus: they’ll keep well at room temperature, in a sealed container, for 24 hours, AND they’re delicious served at the same temp; no need to stress about fridge OR oven space the day of your shindig. Just don’t combine them with any sort of dressing or sauce until it’s time to serve, and don’t cover them until they’ve completely cooled (to avoid pooling condensation).
Cranberry sauce. Cranberries contain a lot of mucilage (like okra does), which makes them self-thickening when cooked - and the cooking liquid will continue to get even silkier and thicker as it cools, so get it out of the way as soon as you can: cooked cranberry sauces will keep in the fridge for up to five days. Raw or fresh cranberry relishes don’t hold up quite as well, but they’re still best in the 2-3 day window: enough time for the sugars to macerate and soften the fruit, but not long enough for everything to turn to mush.
Dry Ingredients & Wet Ingredients
For the dishes that do need to be made same-day, you can still give yourself a huge head-start on kitchen time (and on dishes) by measuring and mixing like ingredients ahead of time. In most cases, you can get enough work done ahead of time that, come Thursday, each of your recipes has been reduced to “dump, mix, cook.”
Whatever you need dry ingredients for - a corn pudding, some biscuits, or your gravy - you can save time by measuring and mixing all of the dry components for each recipe ahead of time, and then storing them in labeled containers or bags.
Ditto for wet ingredients: combine all of the wet ingredients for cornbread, for finishing gravy, for finishing mashed potatoes; label each container and into the fridge it goes.
Feeling extra? Make a compound butter for your turkey, your mash, or your breads: those will keep for up to 5 days in the fridge, as well. Just be sure to pull it out Thanksgiving morning to come up to room temp before serving.
Toppings (savory)
Most of the things that you’d put on top of a finished savory dish - crumbled bacon, buttered breadcrumbs, crispy onions - can be made ahead of time and, once completely cooled, stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
Pies (and like desserts: galettes, fruit tarts, slab pies/hand pies, etc.)
We’ve discussed, before, that when you cook a carbohydrate, the starch molecules absorb water and expand and burst, destroying their crystalline structure and leaching out a hot, thick, sticky gel. What happens when that gel begins to cool is called retrogradation: as the heat dissipates, the starch molecules want to recrystallize, but now there’s this gel in the way that has nowhere to go - so it acts as a mortar in between the broken starch molecules, and the result is a sturdy, brittle, solid structure. Retrogradation is generally not the most palatable: it’s why cold leftover rice is crumbly and dry, why bread stales, why cold french fries can never be fully restored to their original glory. But pie actually offers a platform for retrogradation to shine: it provides a sturdiness that’s often lacking. Most pies feature starches in two contexts: the crust, and as a thickener or stabilizer in the fruit or custard filling. Pies also contain two deterrents to retrogradation - fat, and water - in high amounts: pie crust has a very high fat content (if it’s a good one, anyway), and pie fillings are generally really high in fat, or water, or both. Since each is present in relatively high quantities, when the retrogradation does occur, there’s enough fat and water to keep the starches from going totally, utterly brittle and crumbly and dry; in a pie, everything reaches a nice medium, in a way that few other dishes manage. Fat and water each really lack structural integrity, though, which is why sogginess and sloppiness plague pie bakers. Enter the “pro” column for retrogradation: if you allow the starches in your pie to fully cool (which can take longer than you think, so give it a whole day or more), the recrystallization of the starches will result in a sturdier pie crust, and in a firmer filling. If you’re married to the romantic ideal of serving a warm pie, don’t sweat it: retrogradation is largely irreversible (see again: sad fries), so as long as your pie has been able to fully cool once, you’ll reap most of the benefits of it even if you reheat it. So, see?, science: day-old pie is pie at its best.
Foods NOT to Prep Ahead - And Why
Potatoes
Now that we’ve covered what retrogradation is, I’m betting you can guess why I have rage blackouts when I see Mashed Potatoes at the top of some big food website’s “Make Ahead List.” Yes, they’re kind of a pain in the ass, and yes, Thanksgiving can be a logistical nightmare - but serving sub-par mash is not a solution. Making mashed potatoes just to chill them results in reheated mashed potatoes that are stiff, crumbly, and oddly tough-textured. Hard pass.
If you really want a leg up on the mashed potatoes, you can ready your potatoes for cooking ahead of time. You just can’t cook them until the day-of. Whatever your preferred method for cooking the spuds, you can scrub them, oil them for baking, even submerge them in a big pot of cold water, ready to boil the next day. If your preference is to boil cut potatoes, as opposed to boiling them whole, you can even pre-chop: just toss them in a zippered bag with a few tablespoons of oil and give them a good shake, to prevent oxidation. Those will be good in the fridge for 2 days; when you’re ready, just dump them into the water and go.
Breads
Are you sensing a theme? All of the carby Barbies are relegated to same-day cooking. Retrogradation is staling; stale breads are retrograded. They mean the same thing, and while you may never have heard the word “retrogradation” before today, you’ve absolutely heard of “stale” - and you already know that you don’t like it.
Be mindful, of course, of 24-hour process breads: to bake some rolls or focaccia or yeasted biscuits, you’ll still need to get your starter going ahead of time.
Stuffing
This one’s tricky: I actually DO recommend that you completely assemble your stuffing one day ahead of time, so that the dry bread can absorb your liquid of choice overnight and ensure complete saturation. But, it should be baked on Thanksgiving, and more importantly, it should NOT be made with several-days-old staled bread: it should be made with dried bread, prepared the same day. Because, again: stale doesn’t mean dry, stale means retrograded, and retrograded means irreversibly tough and crumbly. Making stuffing with freshly dried bread, one day before you plan to bake it, will result in stuffing that has a tender (not rubbery) interior and a buttery-crisp (not crunchy-chewy) lid.
Yams & Sweet Potatoes
These are not the same thing, but in either instance, they should be made just before serving. That pesky retro-G is only half of the problem: true sweet potatoes are potatoes, and yes, they’ll retrograde once cooked - but they also often weep water once they’re chilled, as the cooked flesh starts to constrict. They won’t retrograde as severely as starchier potatoes and other foods, but they’re not at their prime once chilled, either.
Two exceptions: (1) if you’re roasting chunks of sweet potato or yam (rather than mashing or pureeing or otherwise creating some kind of casserole with them0 those will be fine rested at room temp like other roasted veg, as described above, and (2) if you’re making a sweet potato pie, the egg proteins and the fat in the filling will help stabilize the starches, so follow the rules for pie: a day ahead is best.
Proteins
Are you still with me? Bless you.
Don’t make your turkey, or your ham - or even your tofu - a day or more ahead and then reheat it.
When you heat muscle tissue, it constricts (that’s why your burgers shrink up on the grill, for example) - and that constriction squeezes intramuscular fluid (the stuff that makes meats taste and feel juicy) OUT. Cooling and then reheating just repeats that process, resulting in even drier meat.
And lastly, a note about the general catch-all category of casseroles: because they can be made of any number of things, it’s hard to tidily tuck them into one of the categories above. They feature prominently in many holiday shindigs, however, so use this rule of thumb: if it contains a prominent carbohydrate (potatoes, bread, rice, pasta), cook it same-day (though again - you can prep it ahead of time; see Stuffing); if it’s largely plant-based, you can probably make and reheat it. The texture might suffer a little bit, but that’s often made up for in flavor: many flavors bloom over time, and the two rounds of heating will concentrate your flavor profiles, as well. A worth trade-off.
We’re done. You made it.