Apple Cornbread Dressing

Stuffing and dressing are the same thing. Dried bread cubes with a variety of other goodies cooked with chicken broth. The difference is whether or not said mixture gets stuffed inside the turkey or if the mixture gets cooked separately. If you don’t stuff, it isn’t called stuffing anymore, it’s called dressing. Let me say again. Stuffing = Stuffed. Dressing = Not stuffed. Got it?

To stuff or not to stuff? That is the question. Let me make it simple: if you stuff, the stuffing is better, but the turkey is worse. Turkeys are cooked from the outside in. This means, with extra goodies in the center, it must be cooked longer, which in so doing makes the turkey dryer. If you read my Turkey recipe, you’ll know how I feel about dry turkey. Add to the equation that the turkey cavity isn’t actually that large and you’ll usually have more stuffing mixture than can fit. You’ll therefore end up cooking half of your mixture separately anyways, and creating a frankensteinian merger between stuffing and dressing. Truly an affront to god. I choose, therefore, to just make a dressing, and stuff the turkey cavity with onion and lemon halves to use in the gravy.

With that settled, we just need a recipe. Like most Thanksgiving foods, there are at least 13 quadrillion different recipes for dressing. The only core ingredient is dried bread cubes. You typically add sautéed onion and celery to this, with various herbs. You can add fruits, nuts, sausage, bacon, cheese, whatever. If you think of something to add, chances are it has been tried. In the American south, however, they dared toil with the aforementioned core ingredient of stuffing: the bread cubes. Instead of dried white bread, they use cornbread. Why? Because it’s sweeter. While he recipe below has its own cornbread recipe, feel free to just buy a mix.

There is something important about this dish that cannot really be translated into the written recipe: chunk sizes. Both for the apple and for the dried cornbread. Firstly, the apples should not be diced too small nor too big. I personally think it is ideal to use an apple corer, and then slice the apple wedges into 1 - 2 cm chunks. The cornbread is trickier. You bake on large homogenous mixture of cornbread and don’t exactly have a lot of control over how it crumbles. This is why I bake it in a cast iron skillet. If you place the skillet in the oven before pouring the cornbread mixture into it, it will make the edges of the cornbread significantly crispier. The result is larger pieces crumbling rather than a dusty cake-like mixture. Larger chunks around an inch across are the best.

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Apple Cornbread Dressing

Author: Todd Martin

Ingredients

Cornbread

• Eggs | 3
• Butter | 10 Tbsp.
• Milk | 1 2/3 Cups
• Flour | 2 cups
• Corn Meal | 1 1/3 Cups
• Sugar | 3/4 Cups
• Baking Powder | 4 1/2 tsp.
• Salt | 1/2 tsp.

Dressing

• Chicken Broth | 4 - 6 cups
• Apples | 1 or 2
• Onion | 2 cups
• Celery | 1 cup
• Butter | 4 Tbsp.
• Fresh Rosemary
• Fresh Thyme
• Fresh Sage
• Salt
• Pepper

Instructions

Cornbread

1. Whisk 3 eggs, add melted butter and milk.
2. Combine the flour, corn meal, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a homogenous mixture.
3. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients into a cornbread batter.
4. Bake an empty cast iron skillet at 400° F for about 10 minutes. Add the cornbread batter into the hot skillet, then bake for 30 minutes, still at 400° F.
5. Crumble the cornbread onto a baking sheet to dry. Either allow it to dry for several days, or bake at 200° F until dry.

Dressing

1. Dice onion and celery.
2. In a skillet, melt butter, add the diced onion and celery and sauté. Add the fresh rosemary, thyme, and sage.
3. In a large bowl, add the sautéed mixture to the dried cornbread, as well as a diced apple or two, and the chicken broth. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. Pour the mixture into a casserole baking dish, bake uncovered at 400° F for 50 minutes.

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