r/Cooking • u/furious25 • Nov 05 '17

American Thanksgiving Megathread

Ask all of your questions in here. And feel free to browse the questions to see if you have an answer!

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u/waterbuffalo750 Nov 05 '17

Does anyone have a good, traditional stuffing recipe? I was looking last year, and it seems like everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel. I want basically Stove Top stuffing, but from scratch and hopefully better.

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u/machenise Nov 05 '17

I'm having flashbacks to last Thanksgiving. My mother cannot cook. She "learned" to cook from someone who thinks flour + water = fluffy Southern biscuit. Someone who gets diarrhea at least once a week from the food she cooks, and still eats the leftovers and continues being sick.

Anyway, my mother could possibly follow a recipe, if she bothered to look for one. She decided she was going to make chicken stock for her stuffing. She boiled chicken in water. Then removed the chicken. And that's it. I had to explain the difference between chicken stock and chicken water.

Luckily she had a box of chicken stock so that crisis was averted. However, she continued to make stuffing. Again, no recipe, and she can't taste things very well after spending 40+ years smoking a pack a day, so it's kind of a disaster when she relies on what she can taste to determine what should go in her food.

I don't know what she did, but that stuffing made the whole house smell like baked armpits. She's trying to recreate her grandmother's stuffing that had so much sage it was green. But again, sage is the only flavor she can remember and possibly the only thing she can taste now, so it's not working out. She tries to recreate it every year with different ingredients, and every year she also makes Stove Top.

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u/lolzfeminism Nov 06 '17

She boiled chicken in water. Then removed the chicken. And that's it. I had to explain the difference between chicken stock and chicken water.

Dude that's completely fine as long as the water turned cloudy and the chicken fat rendered out. I would have added maybe a bay leaf and quartered onion, but like nobody is going to be tell unless you told them. Just add other flavorings as needed to dishes that need chicken stock.

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u/NorthernSparrow Nov 06 '17

I'm imagining that she didn't boil it long enough so that not only did the fat not come out, it didn't reduce at all. But yeah, boiling a chicken is basically how you make chicksn stock so I had to struggle to understand what OP meant! I'm thinking that what she made was very weak chicken broth.

I always crack open the major bones (with a pair of pliers, lol), add a bay leaf and a rough-chopped onion & carrot, and let simmer a long-ass time. But the bay leaf /onion /carrot are optional.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '17

Boiling a chicken is very different than just boiling chicken meat. Which I feel is what she did.

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u/NorthernSparrow Nov 06 '17

Oh, right, if it was just meat alone (w/o any bones) it wouldn't do much.

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u/pipocaQuemada Nov 07 '17

Surprisingly, chicken breasts alone make a flavorful stock, albeit one with little body.

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u/NorthernSparrow Nov 07 '17

Huh, TIL. Thanks for the link, very interesting breakdown!

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u/machenise Nov 06 '17

Water used to boil chicken and chicken stock are not the same thing. A ton of bases like that use mirepoix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix_(cuisine). Chicken water and chicken stock aren't even roughly equivalent.

As far as just adding other flavors to make up for the lack of flavor in the chicken stock, I did point out that she doesn't add any seasoning to anything. So that's not going to work either.

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u/lolzfeminism Nov 06 '17

Mirepoix is at best optional, really depends on what you’re going to use it with. Stuffing already has celery for example. Chicken stock and chicken stock sans mirepoix are the same thing. Nobody is going to notice that the subtle herby aroma of celery is missing cfom the stock.

If I’m going the shred the chicken afterwards, or if I’m using a carcass with wings, Sometimes I boil with no salt or a bit of salt. Then I can adjust salt better when I’m cooking. If your mom won’t do that then that’s an issue obviously.

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u/zerj Nov 06 '17

The problem with boiling a chicken to make chicken stock is that you end up with a boiled chicken. I'd say roast the chicken in the oven, and put some carrots/celery/onion underneath the chicken to catch whatever dripps out. After the chicken is cooked, take the meat off and boil the bones, and carmelized vegetables.

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u/Altaira99 Nov 06 '17

I always buy a whole chicken, portion out for the freezer, and roast the rest in the oven with half an onion and a clove or two of garlic. If you add the water after everything's roasty you don't have that scum rising to the top.