Claire Saffitz Cooks Her Ideal Thanksgiving Start to Finish | NYT Cooking

I I have to say I do I love Thanksgiving Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday for us Cooks we're not sports fans it is our Super Bowl although you probably have to bleep that out because you can't say Super Bowl right big game kind of oh really okay it's our Super Bowl hi everyone I'm Claire saffitz I am here in the nyt cooking studio and today I don't even know what to call today today is a marathon we are running a marathon today and tomorrow because we are making a complete Thanksgiving dinner from start to finish including pies obviously would never forget pies and we are really filming this video as if I were cooking Thanksgiving dinner straight through starting just the day before we're going to get started last year I had been traveling was just my parents and my husband and I and I did no prep we didn't start cooking until like noon we cooked the most delicious ious Thanksgiving dinner and my mom and I ate in our pajamas I've never enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner more and to me one thing I've learned in life is that the more effort I put into things Beyond a certain point like the less I enjoy it I really went with the greatest hits and I went with the things on the plate that I want to eat together obviously turkey there I'm not negotiating on the turkey you have to have cranberry to me you have to have mashed potatoes and I'm not going to do like another kind of potato cuz I don't think that's necessary I have to have gravy I want a green vegetable but I want it to be cooked in my family we always always always make a New York Times recipe from probably 20 years ago that is a glazed shallot it gets eaten first it's so delicious then for dessert I am sticking with the classic pie category so we're going to have a version of pecan pie but it's more like a tart a pretty classic pumpkin pie but I have one really fun and delicious sort of addition to it which is a toasted pumpkin seed topping and then lastly a caramel apple pie let's get the pough ingredients up first I'm going to put that together this is something where if you have the time and this mental space to think about this you can go ahead and make your P do a couple days before a week two 3 weeks before and put it in your freezer so this is a single crust that I'm going to make for all the three pies I'm going to need four of these so again I'm going to make a single recipe and I have three more in the fridge right now so I have a top and a half of allpurpose flour then I have 10 tbspoon of unsalted butter this is chilled this is a tablespoon of granulated sugar so this is going to go in some kosher salt and I always say this about Pao the sugar there is not there to make it sweet but it's there to encourage Browning so you get like a really beautiful Golden Crust so I'm just going to mix all of that together helps to have all of your ingredients cold so I'm going to add my butter I also have some prepared ice water right here and I basically going to toss all the butter pieces you see it's been cubed into like/ in pieces so that each piece is co coated in flour and then working quickly smash the cubes of butter with my fingers to kind of flatten them and break them up into smaller pieces and this does not have to be precise at all I'm just trying to break up the butter a little bit if you feel like the mixture is getting warm I would stick the entire Bowl in the freezer at that point but if you're starting with chilled butter you should be fine now I'm going to add my ice water I have a little extra ice water here in case I need to add more then I'm going to take my fork and just really quickly stir this around to incorporate that water I'm using a fork because if you're going to stick your hands in there they're going to first touch the water and then touch the flour and then your hands are covered in this kind of like paste I'm actually going to assemble the rest of the dough on my work surface one of the many advantages of doing it this way is that my hands are no longer really going to work the mixture this is a bowl scraper you could also use a bench scraper and as I work I'm going to kind of continue to push it back into a central pile and what this step is doing is it is further breaking down the butter it is breaking the butter into pieces of different sizes you get a mix of tender and Flaky in your pie crust when you have some really really small bits of butter and some that are left a little bit larger the third thing that this is doing is it is Distributing all of that moisture really evenly pido that's not evenly hydrated you get some spots that are kind of wet and sticky and you get some spots that crack because they're too dry so this is going to make sure that that moisture is really really thoroughly distributed one of the great things about this method is that it really prevents overworking when you overwork pyo it could just get a little bit tough so it's just a super gentle mixing method but it's also really really thorough so this looks good to me I have some really really small pieces of butter that equals tenderness and I have some larger pieces of butter which equals flakiness so now I'm going to bring this together and just kind of Pat it into a rough square and I'm kind of compacting it a little bit CU I want it to hold together by the way if when you are patting it together or when you're chopping up on the work surface if you see lots of little flowery bits you might have to sprinkle in a couple drops of water which is why I saved my ice water here so I'm going to take my rolling pin and I'm going to flatten this in kind of both directions until it's about a/2 inch thick then I'm using my scraper to help me compact everything into a nice tight package and I'm also going to use my scraper now to cut the dough in half in both directions crosswise and lengthwise so I'm going to make four quadrants of equal size and you can see that the dough it's not really holding together it's still a little bit dry and Shaggy looking so now what I'm going to do is stack the layers the stacking is going to take the pieces of butter and quadruple the number of them and when that gets flattened out and rolled out that is going to make this incredibly flaky crust I'm going to roll over it with my pin just to flatten it a little bit and now I'm going to wrap it in plastic so this is done this just needs to chill so as this sits in the fridge the whole thing is going to hydrate and the final kind of little tip that I'll give for whenever you're making P do again because this is sort of a a less hydrated pough I like to take the plastic and then I like to wrap it fairly tightly and then I use the rolling pin to actually force that dough to fill in any air pockets in the plastic this is the most effective Step at eliminating cracking when you go to roll out the dough doesn't that look good okay this is going to go into the fridge needs to chill for at least 2 hours and while I'm waiting for that to chill I am going to start my turkey stock to me even in like a streamlined Thanksgiving where I'm cutting some corners or just like cutting dishes Al together I'm still making turkey stock because stock goes in several of the dishes that we're going to eat on the table like stuffing it goes into gravy obviously it also goes into one of the other dishes that I'm going to show you which is that shallot recipe I have a couple pounds of chicken wings you can use chicken or turkey wings but I also have my whole turkey which is still thighing out almost all turkeys I've ever seen come with this little like thermometer doad I've never used it they don't work your turkey will be hideously overcooked so that goes into the garbage don't be alarmed that there's stuff inside your turkey the first thing that's in there is the turkey neck this is a really really fantastic thing to add to stock so we're going to keep this it's going to go in my Dutch oven the other thing that comes and it's usually tucked beneath the neck skin which is right here this flap is your giblets so that's going to come out of here that's what's in this little bag the liver and sort of other other edible parts sorry this is out of face like not the most appetizing but the reason these things are included in here is because there's like good flavors to be had from these parts so we're going to hold on to these These are going to go in the stock so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the wing tips now you know when you have bones you have collagen and collagen is like the secret to a really good stock so anything that we're not going to want to eat like on Thanksgiving we're going to want to add to the stock some people use the wing tips to tuck the wings like back and underneath the bird you can do that I'd rather the wing tips go into the stock one of if not the biggest mistake people make on Thanksgiving is they roast a bird that is way too big like a 20 lb turkey is way too big if you're roasting at whole so I'm going with the smaller bird this is a 12lb turkey but if you're having a really big crowd and you're worried about not having enough servings of turkey roast two so I have my aromatics kind of the usual stuff nothing fancy a couple carrots so that's going to go in I have a head of garlic I have an onion I like leaving the skin on because it gives a stock this beautiful golden color a couple stocks of celery you know manageable lengths parsley stems a couple sprigs of fresh thyme some bay leaf some whole pepper corns that's going to go in and then I have a couple of tablespoons of neutral oil like a vegetable oil just going to kind of toss this stuff together I don't really need a lot of the fat in there I just want to get the turkey parts and the aromatics lightly coated and now this is going to go into that hot oven and I'm going to roast it maybe kind of toss things once or twice just to expose you know new parts to the heat until I see some like nice Browning on the [Music] bottom I have pink lady apples here 3 lb Pink Ladies are a good baking apple that you can find pretty much anywhere so I'm going to start by peeling them this is my technique I kind of go around the stem end then around the base and then I peel from top to bottom all the way [Music] around so now I'm going to cut my apples into half2 in wedges I like to precook it to kind of reduce the juices and also because apples can be really firm and they don't always cook through I like a soft tender Apple in my apple [Music] pie this is a caramel apple pie it is kind of like a pie version of tart tatan but like a little less technical so I have a small saucepan here I have 3/4 of a cup of granulated sugar so I am making a wet caramel which is where you dissolve the sugar first in water and make a syrup and cook that to a caramel so I'm going to add 1/4 cup of water I have a heat proof spatula here and I'm going to stir this really gently I don't want to Stir It vigorously cuz I basically don't want to get undissolved sugar crystals like stuck around the sides of the pot as it comes to a boil the sugar will dissolve and I'll get this kind of clear syrup and it's at that point that you want to stop stirring but while it's coming up to a boil you can go ahead and stir so I have my apples ready to go I have my butter here I have my salt here and that's because when you're cooking caramel like once your heat is on and you've started there's really no good pausing point so you don't want to like walk away and have to go like chop up some butter and I'm starting to get a little bit of bubbling around the side so I'm kind of just at that point where I'm going to stop stirring and now I'm going to kind of switch modes where instead of stirring I'm just going to swirl the pot and swirling is a way of kind of equalizing that temperature all the way around so you don't get any hot spots and as it's cooking I'm going to take my pastry brush and that little bit of water and I'm just going to brush down the sides and that is going to dissolve any sugar crystals that are stuck on there and have not dissolved yet what happens is those little undissolved crystals can set off a chain reaction and the whole thing can crystallize cooking caramel is kind of like Browning butter it's one of those processes where nothing happens until something happens and like so it's going to kind of boil at this stage the syrup stage for a while all that water is evaporating and it's only after the water evaporates that that sugar is going going to begin to cook and reach that caramel stage so in the beginning the bubbles look like boiling water bubbles cuz that's what it is but as that water kind of disappears the bubbles will start to get bigger and they'll start to move a little bit slower and that's how you know you're at that stage where the water's gone and you're just cooking the sugar and you're about to get to that caramel stage it's actually kind of boring to cook caramel people think it's like a little scary but like I think I think what people respond to is you're just kind of sitting there for a little while waiting for it to happen and that can be a little bit anxiety inducing but it'll it will caramelize I promise so once you're at that nice deep dark amber color I am going to add my butter and those cold pieces of butter are going to stop the cooking of the caramel so be a little bit careful here because it's going to sputter there's water in that butter that's now evaporating but this is going to drop the temperature of the caramel so it's not going to cook any further and burn which we don't want then I'm going to add my salt not enough to make it salty but enough to really kind of enhance the flavor of the caramel and you want to stir until that butter is emulsified into the mixture meaning it has like blended with the caramel so this is looking really really good it's super smooth the butter has incorporated and now I'm going to drizzle this over my apples the caramel which in this stage will harden as it roasts is going to mingle with the juices from the apples and dissolve again you can see why I don't really care too much if the apples turn brown the whole filling is brown the time is working out well because these are ready to go in and I think my aromatics are ready to come out so I'm totally fine with this oven losing heat when I open it because I want that temperature to drop this already smells so good I'm going to bring this over here basically what I want to happen is the apples are going to release their juices they're going to soften and they're going to kind of mingle with that caramel so you have this like liquid caramel sauce around them back to the stock which we're going to get bubbling away in the stove top and and at that point super hands off it's just going to go for a couple hours while you do your other prep so I have my other stock ingredients here I'm going to add my white wine I don't even have this over the heat because this is really really hot still from the oven I like adding wine to stock because it adds a little bit of acidity also some kind of nice complexity in with that and I'm just going to kind of stir it around with my tongs because I want to dissolve anything that's stuck on the bottom of the pot then I'm going to add my chicken wings again you can do this with turkey wings so I'm going to add 3 quart of water this is just one quart so I'll refill a couple times and I'm going to get the heat under it now depending on the size of your Dutch oven you might not be able to fit all of that third quart which is fine just keep the remainder of it next to the stove top and you'll top it off some people don't salt their stock at all I like to Salt it a little bit because when I'm tasting it as it's cooking if I don't have have any salt in there it's really hard for me to kind of gauge how much flavor is really in this stock that I'm making one thing I like to have when I'm cooking stock is like a little bowl of water next to me and a ladle so this is my setup and this is what I'm going to use to skim the more thoroughly you skim any foam and fat that rises to the surface the clearer your stock is going to be and so I'm going to bring this up to a boil but immediately drop the heat to maintain a really gentle simmer you can see how there's some foam beginning to collect on the surface so when you're skimming you only really want to take what's on the surface so you kind of really have to hold your hand steady and you're just kind of Dipping the ladle in there at enough of an angle to get just the very top layer off and then rinsing it off in the bowl so that's all kind of staying there I promise that after this step it's pretty hands off you can just come back every 15 minutes or so and skim it I love making stock I love the smell of it it's an amazing thing you can make with basically like kitchen [Music] scraps they have released their juices so you see that that caramel which solidified as they hit the top of those apples has now turned into this like beautiful golden sauce mingling with all those apple juices so when I grab a pairing knife they yield they're soft there's like still even just a little bit of resistance I don't want them to be so soft that they're then going to basically like break down into applesauce in the pie so these can just kind of cool off and then I'm actually just going to stick them in the fridge and they can be uncovered with my oven now on 350 I'm going to toast my pecans and I'm going to toast my pumpkin seeds which go on top of my pumpkin pie just going to throw them in together in a 350 oven this is definitely something you could do a couple days before if you wanted to these are going to toast until they're like golden brown nutty smelling these are going to toast until they're golden brown and have like puffed up 5 to 7 Minutes 8 to 10 minutes somewhere around there at 350 while my nuts are toasting I'm going to turn to my turkey so I have my turkey it's been really thoroughly patted dry so it's thawed there's no like ice anywhere in the cavity I'm just using salt and pepper for seasoning it this version was just salt and pepper is still the best turkey I've ever made I'm going to make two little slits in the skin that's connecting the thigh to the breast and that's just actually to expose a little bit of the thigh meat on the inside so that the salt can get in there basically I'm going to give a generous coating of salt across every single surface of the turkey I like to kind of hold my hand a little bit above where I'm seasoning so that the salt crystals spread out try not to use table salt cuz the whole thing will be really really salty so where I made that incision I have some of that thigh meat exposed I'm going to try to really concentrate on that area on both sides I'm seasoning with one hand whenever you season you want that hand to be dry so that the salt isn't sticking to your fingers so with the other hand I'm going to kind of move around the bird make sure you get the wings now I'm going to turn it over and do the back these are where the oysters are in that little area by the way your turkey going to come with this kind of flap of like neck skin I leave that on I don't trim that in any way there's nothing wrong with the little extra skin right there okay so I'm going to lift up that flap and get some salt down where I'm hitting the bird with the salt is kind of like the top of the breasts and now I'm going to go inside the cavity I just want to kind of hit every single surface inside and out and now same thing but with pepper this bird is now seasoned this is ready to go if you have any pooling juices you can go ahead and dry them off this is going to sit uncovered in your fridge the skin is really going to dry out which is what you want that's how you're going to get like a nice sort of crispy skin all that salt is going to kind of penetrate into the meat season it really really well and then what's great about it is tomorrow you're going to take this out let it come to room temperature and just stick the whole thing in the oven no aromatics no stock on the bottom your turkey prep is [Music] done I'm going to start with my pumpkin which in a lot of ways is kind of the most complicated just because I'm going to parbake the crust if you think about the logic of like you're putting a liquidy filling onto an already hydrated pastry there's no way that's going to get crisp just by baking it all together you really have to bake it on its own before the filling goes in if you have any chance of like baked pastry on the bottom I did increase my oven temp to 425 because that is what this pie is going to go into initially to start that par baking process if you can hear but the pumpkin seeds are popping a little bit it's like a little snap crackle and pop of the pumpkin seeds so before I even get to my filling I actually want to just get my pie into the oven to start par baking so I'm going to grabb one of my crust crusts from the fridge a rolling pin a little bench flow and I'm going to walk you through what I think is the most seamless and effective way to par bake a pie crust for any kind of custard filling I'm going to give my bench bench equals work surface a little bit of flour give it a little flour on top and whenever I'm rolling out almost any kind of pastry I like to take my rolling pin and beat the dough with a little bit of force not so much to crack it but enough to really kind of start to flatten it and and work it into a large larger surface area I find that this step helps to soften the butter pieces enough that you can roll it out but it doesn't allow it to warm up this step also allows you to kind of change the orientation if it was a square you're trying to work it into a round you can start to do that at this stage so once you work it into until it's about a/ inch thick that's when you can kind of switch to just rolling it out if you start to roll it out and it cracks continue beating it or just maybe let it temper on your work surface for like a minute so I'm going to start to roll this out into a round and I want to get it until it's about an eighth of an inch thick which will get me to about a 13in diameter you can see that it's not cracking at all it's rolling out really really evenly and as I roll out you can see that there are these sort of streaks of butter running across the surface and that's what you want to see that's going to become that really flaky texture I'm also frequently turning the dough I think if you roll it only on one side you kind of don't know what's happening like on you know underneath so it's better to kind of keep it moving okay so this is looking good when I touch it it's the dough still feels cold that's really important if it's getting really sticky and it's not feeling cold to the touch it's too warm so you want to put it on a sheet tray and just pop it back in the fridge I'm going to transfer it to my pie plate I'm using a 9in pip plate so one thing you can do to transfer it is roll the dough onto your rolling pin then unroll it on onto your pie plate like so so whenever you're fitting dough into a pie plate you want to let it naturally fall into the plate and kind of pull itself down you don't want to like stretch the dough so I don't want to like anchor it here and here and stretch the dough into the side I want to let it kind of droop down into that space so once you have it in there I'm going to really really firmly press it down all around it's that contact between the dough and the PIP plate that is going to encourage it to Brown if you have air in there air is just not a great conductor of heat and so it's just not going to take on as much color now I'm going to trim around the edge I'm going to show you how to crimp a crust so because this has a really wide lip I don't have a ton of overhang so I'm just going to trim around the pie plate leaving about a/ inch overhang and I want to make sure it's even I like to use scissors for this I think it's definitely the best tool for the job now what you're going to do is you're going to take that overhang of dough and you are going to flip it underneath itself to make a kind of like little raised Edge all the way around so see that kind of tucking motion I did with that edge here it's just going to tuck underneath itself like that all the way around sometimes you'll see Bakers flip it the other way I like it this way CU it kind of hides that seam and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and kind of press that lip outward making sure it's kind of firmly up against the pie plate all the way around now I'm going to show you a crimp I'm going to take my thumb on one hand and my thumb and forefinger on the other and I'm going to put one thumb in and then push outward with my other two fingers going around so I push in from the outside with my thumb and then outward with my other two fingers and it's going to make this kind of wavy Edge these two fingers which are pushing outward these are really important because pressing down a little bit as well as out is going to help to Anchor that crust to the pie plate and that's really important when you're par baking the crust because it's going to help to prevent shrinking so you can see that I'm flowering my hands because sometimes you get a little bit of sticking and rotating the PIP plate as you go but I'm also doing is increasing the surface area of that crust because I have a single thickness everywhere except for the top where it's a double thickness and I want to create more surface area so that the crust Cooks evenly and I don't get any like undercooked p along the edge so now I have my crimp it looks really pretty I want to pop this into the freezer actually I want to get this really really cold so that when it goes into the oven I'm going to get nice definition along the crimp and it's just going to produce a better textured crust it doesn't need very long maybe like 5 10 minutes in the freezer until it's really really solid so the idea behind par baking is that we want to set the crust and have it be most if not even all the way cooked before the filling goes in so we need to basically come up with a technique to encourage the crust to hold its shape because if I were just to put the crust into the oven without anything in it the whole thing will kind of slump down so I have two pieces of foil here I have pie weights which are an actual thing like little weighted ceramic pieces but here I'm just using dried beans you can use dried rice obviously this is a more economical route and I like to use a lot of them to really fill up the whole plate so here's my crust it looks so pretty it's like super firm so I'm going to take my fork and just prick the bottom in a couple places this is to help steam Escape because steam that's trapped under the crust it can create this kind of puffing effect I have two pieces of pretty heavy duty foil you can just use regular foil I am going to fit these pieces into the bottom of my pie plate kind of perpendicularly another reason why you want the pie crust to be cold is because when you put this foil in you don't want to like the EDG is kind of soft you don't want to disturb your the crimp on your pie crust so I filled it all the [Music] way okay so the inspiration for this pecan dessert pecan pie but just the top because that's the only part that I like it just kind of occurred to me one day well why not make a pecan version of Fran Jaan which is a sort of French almond cream it's ground almonds and eggs and sugar mixed all together and it's so delicious so why not do a pecan version the first thing I'm going to do is brown my butter the brown butter adds so much flavor to the filling so the process of Browning butter is not unlike the process of making caramel which we did earlier basically what you're doing is you are cooking butter which has a certain water content in it you're bringing it to a boil and you are cooking it until all of that water content boils off and what happens is past a certain temperature all of the milk solids in the butter which are those little white foamy flexs that you see when you melt butter those start to caramelize and turn golden brown and it just makes like caramel flavored butter so you want to constantly stir it and the stirring also prevents those milk solids from sticking to the pot and then burning the higher quality butter you use the better flavor you'll get and the higher the content of milk salad so you'll get more of those little caramelly Flex that I'll show you I want to get this into a bowl because it's really really hot and so I don't want to add it to my filling quite so hot so you can see all those golden brown specks in the bottom of the saucepan make sure all of that gets scraped out so to cool down my brown butter quickly I'm going to add an ice cube and you might think like aren't you watering it down but all I'm really doing is adding back the butter the water that I just cooked out of it so this is just a good way to cool everything down quickly and then while that's cooling down I'm going to go ahead and start to assemble my filling so of my 1 lb of pecans I'm going to add 1 and 1/2 cups or about 5 oz to my my filling so just kind of measuring from here and now to this I'm going to add some demarara sugar I really love baking with demorar sugar because it just has a little bit more character than granulated sugar then some salt so I'm going to pulse this this is going to be loud there we go I had to hit power okay so my nuts are finally ground to this I'm going to add two eggs now these eggs are cold straight from the fridge and that's because they're going to help to cool everything down before I add the brown butter which is warm so I want this mixture to be on the colder side if I can God these are really like membrane eggs okay two teaspoons of [Music] vanilla [Music] so that's it my pecan filling is done I'm going to just scrape that into the same Bowl we should be just about ready to check on our crust and remove the pie weights so recap of where we are over 50% of the way through day one turkey is seasoned stock is cooking pie dough is done I have two of the three pies actually three all three pies working we're going to move now into the baking phase for each of them the end of the day will be getting all the pies baked in between waiting on each pie I'm going to do cranberry which is a really fun like kind of my favorite recipe of the whole batch once that's done I can do a little prep for tomorrow like prep my brussels sprouts maybe do a little stuffing prep see what we have time [Music] for so after nearly 25 minutes I peaked under and the edge is starting to get a little golden see all that steam coming see how dramatically that edge puffed so I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and gently remove my pie weights now you want to be cautious here because the number one thing you want to avoid is having that foil break and then you have especially if you're using rice which has happened to me before then you have to like pick each individual Bean or pie weight out of your crust look at how nicely set the edge of my crust is the bottom still looks pretty wet so we're going to put this back in it's going to go in at a lower temp at a higher temp you're going to get a dramatic and fast kind of evaporation of that moisture which is going to cause your crust to shrink then you get cracks The Filling is going to kind of seep in high temp with pie weights low temp without and what I want to see is I want to see golden brown across the bottom of my pie crust importantly I waited until this stage of par baking to start my filling because it's very important that I think whenever you're making a custard pie that you actually put a warm filling into a hot crust it's going to bake a lot faster your filling just has like less of a temperature jump that it has to make inside the oven the hot crust is important too because if your crust is right out of the oven and you pour your filling into it any filling that comes in contact with the crust is going to set and it like plugs itself of any leaks I keep referring to this Pie as a custard pie it's pumpkin but it's also Dairy and eggs I like a pie with a lot of eggs in it because it gives you that more wobbly texture rather than the texture of just like sweetened puree so I'm going to combine my butter some heavy cream again for that custardy texture plus flavor and a thir of a cup of maple syrup and I'm going to bring this to a boil then in a my larger Bowl I'm going to start with my eggs the recipe uses a whole can of pumpkin it makes a generous amount of filling how much filling you actually pour into your pie depends almost entirely on your pie plate I had versions at home where I had a little leftover filling and then I used a FR pie plate and I had one where I used all of it and it wasn't even that full so this is coming up to temperature you can see that it's steaming so it's almost at a boil I am going to take now my eggs and this is dark brown sugar which gives a really nice molasses flavor to the pie as well and so this is kind of the beginning of that custard base I have my eggs and my sugar I have my Dairy which is warming up and this is how you make a custard you stream your kind of warm Dairy into your eggs and sugar and that's called tempering so I'm whisking this together really really well I want a lot of that sugar to dissolve and I want all the eggs to be really well broken up and now I'm going to stream this hot mixture into my egg mixture so you want to whisk constantly and stream slowly because you don't want to cook the eggs with the heat from that cream butter and maple syrup it smells so good I love the maple I have my spices here I love the combination of warm spices that go into pumpkin pie here I'm using cinnamon all spice and a little bit of clove clove is so overpowering sometimes I just think that all pumpkin pie tastes like as clove there's a lot of it plus salt so I like this balance so I'm going to get those in to help distribute them I'm going to add two teaspoons of vanilla extract call that two teaspoons then I'm going to add my whole can of pumpkin so when you're looking for pumpkin make sure you're buying pumpkin puree not like pumpkin pie filling so I'm just going to whisk all that together until it's super smooth you can see it makes this really like luxurious mixture so this is my custard when I touch the side of the bowl it's warm that's what you want okay so now the topping which is this toasted pumpkin seed mixture so to the pumpkin seeds and the separate Bowl I'm going to actually add a tablespoon of my filling and the inspiration behind this actually was also kind of the top of the pecan pie I'm see there's like a there's a theme Here I really like the top of the pie so by adding some of this fill filling I'm taking advantage of the eggs that are in the filling and their binding property Sugar Plus eggs plus butter in here is like going to make everything kind of stick together so to this I'm also adding 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and it's going to create this sort of candied effect on the top of the pie stir all that together really well to blend it make sure everything's evenly coated one of the great things about pumpkin seeds is that when they toast they puff up and that means that they're filled with air and that means they're like little rafts that will sit on top of the filling oh it's looking good it did Puff a little bit but that will go down there was some shrinking but it's still nice and like flush with the top of the plate so what I want to do while it's still hot is add my filling all right so I was able to use all the filling and now I have my pumpkin seed mixture and I'm going to actually concentrate it just around the perimeter so kind of leaving the center open so you see what a rich color The Filling is [Music] okay so now I have all of those pumpkin seeds on the surface and then I just take the back of the spoon and like not really pressing the seeds into the filling but just kind of smoothing them out so that they are settled onto the surface so now back into the oven 325 in my house meaning like the collective House of my family it is not Thanksgiving unless we have this cranberry sauce my mom has been making this cranberry sauce for decades and it is from a community cookbook which I love Community cookbooks so much my mom has several good ones it is called jambalaya and it's like the Junior League of New Orleans cookbook and it has I have no idea why she decided to try this cranberry recipe but it's so perfect in every way I have not changed a thing so the only real prep I need to do is to chop up a whole orange so this is going to go into my large saucepan I'm going to add 12 oz of cranberries then I'm adding golden raisins maybe a slightly unexpected ingredient but cider vinegar it has a lot of sugar if you're going to make this please please do not change the amount of sugar you will just be making something inferior frankly now this recipe has cinnamon and a little bit of clove pinch of salt and then some grated lemon rind medium low heat and you can kind of give it like a little bit of a stir toward the beginning to help to dissolve the sugar you know all the juices are going to kind of come out of the cranberries and the orange until it comes up to a vigorous simmer and all the Cranberries are going to kind of pop and lose some of their shape these were frozen cranberries Frozen is fine but just go ahead and thaw them ahead of time if they release any juice which they usually don't but you can add that juice in don't discard that I'm just going to let this hang out slowly come up to a simmer it's pretty hands off at this point and I'm going to do a quick clean up and then immediately I'm going to roll into assembling my pecan pie I basically want that to be ready to go into the oven as soon as my pumpkin comes out I just want to have everything ready to go so I can like not have any idle oven [Music] time so we have all the components ready to go to assemble our pecan I keep calling it a pie it's really kind of a tart I'm using to assemble this a 13x9 pan preferably metal this is a really good one cuz it has these nice sharp Corners you can use glass that's totally fine but you can also use a quarter sheet tray which is this size so these are all options so the first step is to roll out my crust basically I'm going to roll this out into a big rectangle so I'm going to do that same beating motion and then 90° angle so I want to roll this out until I have about 14 in in length and 10 in in width [Applause] so now I'm going to get it inside my pan you can kind of tell by how much overhang you have how higher sides will be so that looks pretty good so I'm going to use that same technique of rolling it onto my rolling pin and then rolling it back into the pan and you want to do your best to center it if you can so the idea is that you're going to basically make sort of 1 inish tall sides all the way around so now that I have it in here I'm just kind of patting it down to the bottom of the pan and then kind of up the sides if you have an area where you're not actually like up the sides what you can do is trim off a little bit of pastry from one of the taller sides and then use that to kind of patch an area now I'm going to scrape my filling into my crust then you can use the spatula or the back of a spoon I like an opposite spatula best you're just going to spread that into an even layer all the way to the sides and [Music] Corners okay so once you have that worked in there I'm going to make my pecan topping I have one large egg white in this bowl that's room temp add to that some demarara sugar so the same sugar that was in The Filling I'm going to whisp all of this together really really well and I'm going to whisk it until a lot of the sugar has dissolved cuz the egg white is mostly water and I have like a super foamy kind of opaque white mixture with no liquid egg white remaining so once you get to this kind of foamy stage I'm going to add my toasted pecans so this is very much like the process when you're making like a little candy nut mix with this egg white and sugar then you want to stir all of that together and kind of fold until the nuts are completely coated so this gives them that kind of like candied effect on the surface of the chart so now I have this mixture and you just want to sort of scatter the pecans across the entire surface if you were like really going for like a Martha Stewart magazine cover look you could arrange these like in rows but I'm just going to kind of scatter them and then once they're scattered I am going to just arrange them just to get them into a single even layer okay the last step is just to sprinkle a little extra demorar sugar across the surface I just love love that it makes it shiny and gives it like a little Sparkle I would say that's maybe about a tablespoon and then a little bit of salt so this is going to go in the fridge and just hang out until we're ready to bake it it's actually good for it to chill a little bit let that pastry get really cold and then we'll get that in the oven as soon as the pumpkin comes out the Cranberries just to point out have collapsed so they've all burst they've kind of lost some of their volume and now it's more of a homogeneous mixture the whole thing came up to a nice vigorous simmer it looks so good it smells incredible so this is done I can kind of set that off to the side so what I want to actually do is add a little bit of ice one thing to be mindful of when you're making stock is that food safety is an issue because stock is a really kind of fertile breeding ground for bacteria so it just means that you don't want it to sit at room temperature for very long and then that's going to help me to be able to strain it pretty quickly and get it into containers and then into the fridge so I've mostly just tried to strain the liquid through but I'm going to go ahead and kind of get the solid straining as well because it's like we spent a lot of time really extracting all these flavors and all the collagen and everything from the wings and the aromatics and I just don't want to waste any of it I am basically going to get everything that I've strained into quart containers save your Deli quartz is the point of this and I think it's time to pull the pumpkin pie so you can see it's puffed very beautifully there's just the Teeny tiniest bit of wobble in the center but that's going to set really nicely as it cools so here's my pecan this is going to go straight in I turned the oven up to 375 one thing you want to pay attention to is that because I have that sugar coating the bcans they can start to get a little bit dark so it's a good idea to check it at around the 30 minute Mark and if it looks like the surface is getting a little bit too dark we can tend it with boil and now here's the cranberry sauce which is still pretty hot so it's it's rather liquid but when this cools all that pectin is going to really like set everything oh God this is how should I do this no poures around oh God V make sure you're getting all the spills happy with the stock yield I'm probably right at 7 Cups if not a little bit more so all this is going to go into the fridge and then the next thing I really want to turn to is assembling the apple pie so here are my apples I just had them in the fridge uncovered while I was doing all my other prep now I'm going to finish off the filling which really just means that I'm going to add my thickener so I have a tablespoon of vinegar and a tablespoon of corn starch so I'm just going to drizzle this over so I just want to stir all this together you can see that there's those juices in the bottom of the pan everything that's in here we're going to add into the pie now that can hang out here while I roll out my first pie crust so exact same process as before I'm going to roll this to about an e/ of an inch thickness about 13 in round transferring this to the pie plate same deal you can use any pie plate for this there's plenty of dough I'm not doing a crimp on this so I don't need like a lot of overhang so you could use a 10-in pip plate if that's all you have you could use a standard 9 in you could use a deep dish it's really up to you and now I'm actually going to add my filling and I'm going to start by transferring the apples they are soft but they are still like remarkably intact like they're not falling apart at all but they're soft enough that I can really kind of compact them and press them into the PIP plate again which is going to really go a long way to minimizing air space between the top crust and the filling then of course you want all of these juices in there these are going to concentrate and thicken plus it has all of that caramel flavor in there I'm going to put this back in the fridge while I roll out the second crust just because I don't want this to warm up too much while I'm waiting on that second piece of dough so now I have this rolled out this is my top crust so to assemble the first thing I want to do is dip my brush in a little bit of beaten egg and brush it just around the perimeter of the pie plate just an even layer this is like glue this is going to help the pastry adhere to the bottom layer and then just drape the top crust over again you don't want to really stretch it let it kind of slump gently over the apples and I want to press really really firmly all the way around actually have quite a bit of excess so I'm going to cut around the pie plate and the knife my pairing knife is just flush with the lip of the pie plate and now I'm going to use my fork and even though I'm not making a crimp I still want to thin out this layer of dough CU it's actually two thicknesses the top and the bottom all the way around the edge so I have a little bit of bench flour to prevent sticking and I'm just going to press it into the all the way around so this is accomplishing the same thing as that crimp that I showed you for the pumpkin pie which is increasing surface area making it a little bit thinner so that it bakes at the same rate as everything else the egg is going to give the surface of the pastry just a beautiful shine it's going to also encourage Browning so it's going to bake to this like really gorgeous warm golden brown so the last thing before baking is to cut slits but before I do that I'm going to pop the whole thing into the freezer because we've you know had it out we've been working with it for a little bit I want the pastry to get really cold and I'm going to wait until it's cold to cut the slits cuz I'll get nice Sharp Cuts pecan is ready to come out of the oven I just checked it it smells so good oven temperature goes up to get it ready for apple pie now that that pastry is nice and cold I'm going to get like beautiful clean cuts and how you want to cut the slits is up to you I like to cut pretty long marks because I want that opportunity for evaporation amazing I kind of feel like anything else I get done today is gravy no no pun intended actually truly no pun intended this stuffing that I'm going to show you is a really kind of No Frills Thanksgiving stuffing it's the perfect example of that thing I was talking about at the beginning which is like the more you kind of do to it the more ingredients you add I don't think it really gets better I have here here one loaf of white pulman bread so the first thing I'm going to do is cut off the crusts and to do that I'm just going to kind of work in like Stacks crusts off because I I kind of like making my own crust with the stuffing like I want my own Browning on the bottom and sides and top so I just like starting with a kind of uniformly textured bread so this I would save you can let it just kind of dry out you could stick it in the freezer but this is good like breadcrumb fodder so I've done stuffing in the past where like I've used the you know fancy alaf of sourdough and I've torn the bread slices and I left them out overnight kind of another thing where I'm like was that worth it I don't know just get your bread you know the day before cuz you're not getting get on Thanksgiving and let it sit out and kind of stale on its own and then you're just going to toast the bread slices so I'm doing this today before because I can I have the time but you could just do this day off this I'm going to set aside but basically in a few minutes when I turn down the oven temperature for the apple pie to 350 I'm going to also put this in the oven the bread is going to dry out it's going to kind of turn into like light croutons it's going to get a little bit of color on it I'm definitely going to give it a toss halfway through because the less moisture that's in the bread going into the stuffing the more I can replace with stock and eggs and aromatics another big I think time suck when it comes to like prep is chopping all of your veg for stuffing so I'm going to prep my veg I want to start by rinsing my leaks which can be really really dirty usually you have dirt trapped in leaks where like the leafy dark green part meets the kind of light green stock so I'm going to trim off the root ends and then split them lengthwise to wash out some of that dirt so make sure you separate the leaves okay and then an onion of course very important in stuffing uniformity of the chop is not important like it's all going to get cooked down it really doesn't matter therefore this is a great job to delegate to anyone who is willing and has the time other things to delegate on Thanksgiving appetizer tell someone to bring some cheese and crackers or the aforementioned crud which I think is a great idea wine or cocktails have someone else do that if you have a dishwasher make sure it's empty by the time you sit down for dinner okay so I have all of my aromatics chopped I want to taste my chicken stock m o so good okay my bread has been toasting about 25 minutes I'm going to let it go another five or so and now I'm just going to start cooking and assembling everything so I have a large Skillet I'm going to set it over medium high heat let me talk to you about the kind of secret ingredient in this stuffing I'm adding a half a cup of heavy cream it might seem a little bit unusual and it is it just really gives it a kind of richness in the background that you wouldn't get from butter alone and it's just like a little something that I think makes it particularly delicious when everything else is kind of straightforward so I'm going to start by melting 6 tspoons of butter and I'm going to add my sausage I have sweet sweet Italian sausage I have a pound of sweet Italian sausage obviously out of the casing so I want to cook this and you know get it all nice and broken up I want it in little bite-sized nuggets I want to get a little bit of color on it is it is it me every time I'm here there's some kind of crazy weather event happening someone trying to tell us something I just want to cook the sausage until it's cooked all the way through and if you can get color on it while that's happening then all the better so I'm going to pull the bread out cuz that's probably done which is looking great by the way okay so this sausage is done it's cooked through going to kill the heat just for a second I'm going to put my bread into this large bowl so now I want to transfer my cooked sausage to my bowl with the bread but I want to leave the fat in the skillet so I'm not just going to dump the whole thing in I'm using a slotted spoon everything's going to make its way into the bowl at some point anyway but I want to leave the fat in there for cooking my aromatics the core flavors for me for stuffing are celery and Sage so I'm sticking pretty close to that flavor profile so we're going to cook this pretty thoroughly until all the Veges softened and even starting to Brown a little bit around the edges meaning that it has given off a lot of its water scrape up some of those brown bits on the bottom of the skillet so this will take a good 10 15 minutes for all this to cook down while I'm waiting on that I can prep my baking dish I have a 13 my9 pan you can use any shallow three C baking dish the important thing is just that you have plenty of surface area so you have something shallow you want to develop what to me is the most delicious aspect of stuffing which is the textural contrast that difference between the crispy bottom and sides and top and that kind of soft custardy Center so that's prepped I'm going to season the this a little salt and pepper okay so this is coming along nicely I can start to mix my eggs and my cream and my stock I'm using two large eggs for this quantity of stuffing and I'm going to whisk this just to break it up then I'm going to add my heavy cream what to me what it does is it makes the stuffing lean ever so slightly in the direction of like a savory bread pudding and now to this I'm going to add 2 cups of stock the recipe calls for three total the amount of liquid that you're adding to your stuffing really depends on your bread how dry it was so I'm going to hold back that last cup which I can then add as needed so the veg is looking done the onion is translucent and like a lot of the leak and onion bits are starting to get brown around the edges so I'm going to scrape all of this into my bowl with the bread so I'm going to start to sort of toss this through I'm not adding dried fruit which I I actually like in stuffing but I just feel like this is the stuffing that's meant to be eaten with everything else on the plate it's meant to be eaten with a bite of turkey and gravy it's meant to be eaten with the cranberry so it's like it doesn't need that fruit because it's going to come from Elsewhere on the plate and so now that I've added that mixture I want to fold everything gently I want to get all that moisture distributed plus I want to distribute the sausage and all of those cooked aromatics the key to determining if your stuffing has enough moisture in it is to kind of pick up a piece of bread and it should feel like a wet but like rung out sponge like hydrated all the way through but not soaked another sign is that the bread is going to feel hydrated but you shouldn't have a lot of or even a little bit of pooling liquid in the bottom it just means that if you have a lot of liquid then and you've added like there's just a little too much stock in there it's just going to take a little bit longer for the stuffing to Brown this is looking really good there's no liquid standing in the bottom of the bowl okay so this is ready now to go into my baking dish it's a great thing to assemble first thing because I think that if it gets an opportunity to sit a little bit just at room temp before baking it can just kind of everything can hang out the flavors can kind of melt the hydration can even itself out I have that final tablespoon of butter and I'm just going to pinch it off into little pieces and Dot them across the surface so this is also going to help with the Browning of that very top layer I'm going to cover this tightly with foil and that app pie is done so I'm going to pull it out of the oven and oven is off for the day we're done oh it's looking so golden brown so something happened to this pie that I've never seen before which is that it has like almost risen up out of the pie plate which is kind of wild but it looks great so flaky having made those nice Sharp Cuts with the Parry knife after the pie chilled you really see the separation of the layers we're done for today this is day day one okay I got eight solid hours of sleep last night I have my coffee the first thing you want to do on the morning of Thanksgiving if you're following this strategy is you want to pull your turkey out of the fridge that's what I'm going to do room temp turkey I guarantee is going to be one of the most important steps in getting like a juicy not dry overcooked bird and the oven is preheated so I'm going to get started I think I'm going to do I don't know what should I do I'm perap some shallots maybe I don't know it's like so early in the morning I have so much time it's like feel like I should just take a break already even though I like make the whole meal I feel like it's kind of low-key because I think the desserts are kind of like the really labor intensive part those are all done I have at least half of the menu already prepped I think the things that you want to Outsource today is like if you haven't already set the table have someone do that early in the morning have someone be on drink Duty like filling pictures of water maybe opening bottles of wine if that's what you're serving your focus has to be on the menu all the other things try to Outsource to me brussels sprouts they're kind of a favorite vegetable but they're definitely my preferred green vegetable of choice at Thanksgiving I think it's you really want to have a green vegetable I really want it to be cooked but to me it's kind of one of the only seasonal green vegetables that's like around at Thanksgiving time in late November and I am making an extremely simple roasted Russel Sprout kind of stole this from my husband because this is how he cooks them and then I was like yeah that's definitely a good way to do it so I start by just trimming off just a little bit of that dried core end and then I'm going to work over a bowl and what you want to do is basically separate those dark outer leaves from the kind of light green core and that's because those looser outer leaves cook in a different way than the tighter more dense leaves in the core and we're all going to cook them together but they're just going to get cooked for different lengths of time and at different temperature sometimes you get one that's really big then you want to cut the core the little tight core in [Music] half okay so Brussel spots are prepped I have this beautiful bowl of like all of these leaves and I'm going to put the chorus back in this other Bowl so I'm going to set these over here I guess I can I'm going cook the stuffing let's get the stuffing in the oven it's all set up from last night and I'm basically going to cook it until I want to say the internal temperatures at a certain point but I'm not going to take the temperature because the second phase of cooking is that the foil gets removed and then it gets baked at a high temp to really Brown the top and to encourage Browning on the bottom and sides so the next thing I'm going to assemble is my make aead gravy again if you have your stock done you could do this the day before or even the day before that so I have all my components except my stock which is in the fridge so I want to grab that so I can show you what it looks like when it's cold so you can see it's nice and dark and it has that light gelatin wobble that's what you want I'm going to actually skim a little bit of that fat from the surface because when you're making gravy it starts with a rue so it starts with a mixture of fat and flour and all that gets cooked together and the flour kind of binds the fat and if you add fat onto top of that sometimes what you get are like little fat droplets in your gravy which you don't really want so this is not going to get Bound by the flour so I'm going to actually just scrape off this little thin surface of fat it's also much easier to do this when your stock is cold and then I'm going to get my pan over medium heat or so I have 6 tablespoons of butter turkeys are pretty lean meat I don't I'm like is anyone getting that much drippings from their turkey I guess you're going to get a lot of drippings if you're adding fat like if you're smearing butter all over your bird and everything but like well I'm just going to start with butter straight away here so I'm going to add 6 tblsp of butter so my butter is melted and foaming I'm going to add my flour and I'm going to whisk constantly as I sprinkle the flour into my fat just want to prevent any lumps so this is a rue this is a mixture of flour and fat that gets cooked out I favor a gravy that is on the thinner side I think a lot of gravy can be really gloopy and that's what you want to avoid so here we're kind of getting to that point where the texture has kind of thinned out a little bit which is a sign that you've cooked out your flour and I'm getting a little bit of that honeycomb texture which is really just kind of refers to the way that it bubbles in the skillet and it's starting to turn a little bit golden but keep going cuz you want to get some color on it so some R you want to be really pale like for bashal it's like you're not really trying to put color on it but for this instance because I want the flavor that kind of toasty flavor I'm really cooking it out and in New Orleans cooking like some Rus are really get really really dark all right I think this color is looking good so now I'm going to add my white wine make sure you're using a dry white wine this is going to instantly thicken everything once I add this liquid so you want to whisk constantly cuz you don't want to form any stubborn lumps and now I'm going to add my stock which is not really going to pour in you can definitely warm this up beforehand you can see that that stock is melting so you want to whisk this really well to eliminate lumps so once you get this completely smooth with all of your stock added we're we're going to let this just kind of come up to a simmer we want the full thickening power of the flour to take effect and I'm also going to add to this my fresh herbs this is going to give the gravy a lot of flavor okay so I'm going to add some salt you don't want to add too much salt at this phase because it's going to reduce a little bit and you can always season it more so what I want to do is bring this to a simmer and then I'm going to turn down the heat quite a bit and this is going to cook away until it's slightly reduced it's nice and thick I mean I I think the consistency that I go for is kind of like heavy cream consistency where it's like super pourable but it's going to coat the back of a spoon I'm making make aead gravy so I'm not using the dripping so you're not really tying this to your turkey cooking which I think is really nice cuz I actually think gravy is one of those things that disappears because people's turkeys are really dry and you need the gravy so if you're like want more gravy leftovers you can just make it it's not tied to also making a turkey that being said when your turkey comes out of the oven if you have pan juices which we might have have a couple tablespoons of pan juices those can get added in while you're reheating it's only going to help what I want to do next I'm going to make a little bit of a time schedule okay so it's noon let's say I'm going to put the turkey in at 1:30 I'll do the mashed potatoes so the turkey will be out by 4: I'm going to do the Brussels then so that takes care of that I'll do the shallots and the mashed potatoes next and then everything else is done or working and we'll have lunch don't forget to schedule time for you to sit down and like have something to eat at least a snack so my dad is the one who makes this it's like his dish and I'll have to ask what made him want to try it this dish I'm about to make is a true saffitz family favorite so this is a recipe by Molly O'Neal that was in the New York Times print like food section probably 20 25 years ago it's such a delicious recipe and it's so simple it's for glazed shallots so I have all my peeled shallots they're whole if you have really large shallots you can break them up into like their little loes or you can cut them in half you want them just to be about the same size so I'm going to get these into a skillet and you want them to fit in a single layer so it's really the right amount for just about a large Skillet a couple of tablespoons of butter sugar a little bit of kosher salt then white wine now I have a cup of chicken stock so I didn't account for this when I was making the stock because the most important places where you want the homemade stock are the gravy and the stuffing so this is where you could use store bought I'm going to bring it to a boil over high and you can see that the shots are probably about 50% submerged so this is now at a boil the butter is melted I'm going to turn it down to a simmer and this Cooks uncovered it's just a really easy dish so let's take a look at the stuffing oh my gosh it looks so good it's getting really nice and crispy all around the edges I think it I think it probably in another minute or so so I'll pull it out so this is kind of getting to that syrupy stage so now I'm going to increase that heat and they're just about glaze but I'm actually going to get a little bit of color this is what the recipe tells you to do is you're going to get a little bit of Browning because there's sugar in that glaze mixture it'll start to caramelize the shallot so you get such delicious flavor so now I'm actually going to turn off the heat and I'm going to add that final tablespoon of butter I'm going to season it with some black pepper so when that fork went in it's like super tender but it's not falling apart oh my God so now a lid goes on this these will hang out over there I'm doing great I'm going to cross shallots off my list so we're right on track lunchtime then turkey once the turkey goes in that's kind of when for me the clock starts the train is on the track so good thing we have a plan we're right on schedule we just had lunch it was a nice little break now I'm going to put the turkey in the oven so the first thing I'm going to do is just actually flip it over because I'm going to roast it breast side down in the beginning this is going to go in I'm going to roast it for about an hour and then I'm going to flip it over roasting a breast side down you don't have to do this but basically I'm making sure that a lot of those juices that are inside the bird don't all collect like along the back of the bird which is not really a part that you end up carving and serving so it just kind of helps to keep all the juices distributed and also it helps to cook the breast I think the conventional wisdom holds that the dark meat Cooks longer but the white meat is so much bigger and thicker than the dark meat that actually that's the part that takes the longest and again after an hour I'm going to flip it and now my mashed [Music] potatoes I have 2 lbs of Yukon Gold and 2 lbs of ret you get the kind of buttery creaminess of the Yukons and the fluffiness from the russets so it's actually really satisfying you can see the color contrast here I'm going to get these going if you wanted to peel your potatoes in advance you can just hold them in a big bowl or just in the pot you're going to cook them in just like this in water that's going to prevent Browning so we're going to Salt this water you want to Salt it really generously and bring this up to a boil and in the meantime I'm going to infuse my milk mixture with mashed potatoes I'm adding butter and milk I like the mix of milk and butter I might actually top it off with a little bit of water so I developed this recipe not only with a kind of make aead schedule in mind but also keeping in mind the idea that for a lot of people the only time they're ever going to make a recipe that calls for a ricer or a food meal is Thanksgiving and I just don't think it makes sense to have like a piece of specialty equipment in your kitchen for one time a year so this method actually uses a hand mixer it actually makes like a super delicious tender creamy mashed potato so I'm going to put my milk into this saucepan here so I have 12 tbspoon of butter here a stick and a half so I'm going to add my one stick of butter the four tablespoons that I'm reserving are actually I'm going to put those on top of the finished meshed potatoes inside the saucepan and they prevent a skin from forming and like keep everything from drying out so I'm going to get that kind of infusing this part's a little bit hands off if the milk mixer starts to boil you want to turn that down just to low I'm keeping my potatoes on high because I want them to come up to a boil okay I have some down time cuz I'm just waiting on this so I'm going to go ahead and select my platters label them get them set out and I get to choose from the prop wall which is like my this is my greatest dream I need a really large platter for turkey so maybe this is good for turkey I like to do cranberry in two separate bowls both of these are great so that you have one at one end of the table brussel sprouts should go in something shallow and wide wait this is kind of like a gravy boat look at how cute this is let's use that all right I'm crossing cranberry off the list of my Thanksgiving checklist because those are now on the table all right so I just turned the potatoes off they're done when I put a fork into a piece it totally o there you go it slides right in with no resistance and the pieces kind of break apart that's how you know they're done go ahead and drain them really really well and then I'm going to come and add them back to the spot see all that steam coming off the potatoes inside the pot that pot is still really hot so you can see that the potatoes are kind of drying out you just don't want any water in there any water that's present obviously we're adding milk but we're also adding fat and richness any water on the potato can kind of encourage that gumminess I kind of preash them before I go in with the mixer because you do need to break up those big pieces so this is kind of replacing that ricer step and then the mixer will further break everything down now I'm going to add my infused milk mixture I'm just going to pluck out the time sprigs but leave the garlic in there so this whole mixer is going to go in and I'm going to scrape any little bits from around the sides in goes the garlic and that also kind of mashes up I seasoned the water for the potatoes but I haven't really seasoned anything else in the mixture so I'm going to add some salt and some pepper and now I'm going to go in with my hand mixer so I'm going to start on low speed just to incorporate everything I want all that liquid and the potato to mix together and I can increase the speed more to like a medium and that's it that's really all the mixing that this needs so the key to just not getting a gummy mixture is just not to mix beyond that kind of like everything's Incorporated and looking really nice and fluffy so I'm going to actually just like Smooth the surface of the mashed potatoes work everything into an even layer all the way around the sides and then what you're going to do is you're going to add that reserved 1/4 cup of milk poured over the surface and my 4 tblsp of butter that's going to prevent a skin from forming on the top of the potatoes it's going to prevent them from drying out this can now go to the back burner mashed potatoes are done now that I'm feeling really good about like each individual dish and the assembly I should go into to a reheat schedule so let's say so we're going to have a 5:00 p.m. sit down so at 400 p.m. that's when things get serious that's like game face time what needs reheating the gravy the stuffing the mashed potatoes and the shallots okay so I'm going to whip some cream so I'm using a nice wide bowl with a handmixer just sometimes you like get a lot of splatter when you're whipping cream so make sure your cream is really cold if it's hot in your kitchen because Robin's been on all day you might want to chill the bowl to this I'm going to add just a couple of tablespoons of powdered sugar because it contains a little corn starch and it just very very subtly sweetens it but the little bit of cornstarch in there is also going to help to stabilize it a little bit so I have a big metal Bowl going to start on low not to be a broken record we can throw in a pinch of salt just to the tiniest pinch so as the cream starts to thicken it's already splattering you can increase the speed of your handam mixer if you have a St mixer and it's easy just to kind of like throw it in there and turn it on with a whisk and I'm going to go for a pretty soft whipped cream here so this is this is kind of just under softly whipped it's still liquid but it's thickening I'm going to add my powdered sugar so once it starts to kind of hold those marks of the Whisk that's how you know you're pretty close to softly [Music] whipped okay so I can always whip it a little bit more before serving so I'm going to stick this in the [Music] fridge the turkey has been in for another hour breast that up so as everyone who's walked over to this area of the kitchen has remarked it smells so turkeyy like intensely an intense turkey flavor clear juices so I'm feeling like it's probably close to done this area of the breast this is where it's going to be the thickest part so I take I go in at a couple different angles and take the temp wow this cooked a lot faster than I thought it would we're already at 160 there we're done to pull it I'm going to get this resting over here so so now we're going to move on to getting our Brussels sprats into the oven I'm going to toss them with 2 tspoons of olive oil and now I just toss all these until they're coated so I'm going to roast these first and where those leaves are really really tight on the inside they just need longer to cook than the outer leaves basically these are going to go into the oven and roast and while they're roasting I'm going to toss just the outer leaves with a little more oil and then they get thrown on the baking sheet give them a little Shake okay and then when these are done they'll come out and then stuffing will go in to reheat and at that point the oven finally is done these ovens they got quite a workout during Thanksgiving so we have that pecan pie so to turn it out I can I can like move it around in the pan because the crust pulled away from the sides as it baked so I'm going to turn the entire thing out just onto a rack it's pretty sturdy so we can definitely handle it look at that beautiful golden pastry all the way around so now I'm just going to reinert it onto this cutting board so here is the pecan tart ready to serve this can go back over with my other desserts now most people don't have a huge cutting board with like a channel for catching all the juices so what you can do is set a cutting board inside a rim baking sheet cuz one thing that's really annoying is like when everyone's about to sit down is you have like turkey juices right running off your counter down your cabinets so going to get this onto my cutting board one thing I like to do before I actually start separating the parts is to remove the wishbone you want to remove the wishbone because it's going to allow you then to carve the breasts off of the carcass in one big piece so I'm going to go up into the next skin and you can feel for it that's the wishbone so I'm going to use I have a pairing knife I'm just going to kind of cut along the sides of the wishbone this part is very intimate okay so I'm going to I'm going to pull out the wishbone and sometimes it breaks which is fine so I just broke one side there it is going go ahead and pull out the other side oh I got it out hole there's the wishbone so you can save it and dry it and then you can break the wishbone with someone okay I'm going to carve off the legs so I already made those slits which helps to kind of see where the legs connect to the body so I'm just cutting down through that skin and then and then the easiest way to separate them is to break that joint so I'm going to kind of pull and snap on one side to pop out that bone and then I can cut down so there's a leg and now I'm going to separate the breasts but actually first I might take off my the flats of the Wings which I definitely serve the wings are delicious that's dark meat plus lots of skin okay now I'm going to go ahead and take off the breast so I'm going to slice through down along either side of the breast bone and without a wishbone there's no obstruction so I can get my knife all the way through then kind of using one hand to help pull the meat away from the carcass I'm just going to kind of slice down and remove the breast so this meat looks good even though it went higher than I wanted it to when I pulled it it's fully cooked but it is Juicy so I think I'm going to separate off the Drummet and then slice the breast okay so now I have all the parts separated one thing I like to do do I like to pick the meat off of the back especially the oysters one of like the a crime of Thanksgiving would be to leave the oysters on the bird the oysters are these little nuggets that are nestled into the backbone if you really want to like congratulate yourself on a successful see that like cavity right there you should enjoy the oyster yourself it is just like a delicious nugget of dark meat do people do this table side do people literally or they I don't understand how people do this table side to me carving is like you don't want people to see this part all right so I'm not done carving I'm going to slice up the white meat so now I'm going to separate the drumstick from the thigh this looks so [Music] good if you wanted to you could chop like top this with some ch chopped chives or something I don't think you really need to you could put a little pad of butter on top that could be nice I don't have like too many pooling juices the gravy is looking really [Music] good I'm so excited it looks so good when I look at the plate I don't think that there's anything missing I really want to eat every single component I'm going to have a little bit of this dark meat which looks so good absolutely delicious really well seasoned juicy tender and now a piece of white meat M delicious so I'm going to make my favorite bite of Thanksgiving a little bit of turkey a little bit of Shallot I like to scoop my Fork through the mashed potatoes and a little cranberry my number one favorite Thanksgiving bite that Nails it it's so good I went first on the stuffing and so I took the corner piece one of the corner pieces which is obviously the prime piece because you get bits of stuffing like this which is like crispy and caramelized all the way around what I said before about how there's not a lot of acid on the plate and Thanksgiving there's also not a lot of crunch on the plate so for that textural contrast it's really important that you have those crispy bits of stuffing brussel sprouts so good again you get a little crispy texture little hint of brightness from the lemon this is not a throwaway side at all this really brings me back to Thanksgiving last year where we eaten our pajamas it was like so chill wasn't like freaking out about timing or anything and it was the best plate of Thanksgiving food I've ever had and this I think is even a little bit better I'm so excited to cut the pies you're going to see when I cut them there was nothing lost by making the pies the day before and letting them just sit out overnight the pastry is still super crisp so I'm starting with Apple you can see that the pie is Juicy but if you can look into the pie plate there is like really no liquid pooling in there that caramel is not so much adding sweetness it's adding like just all that great kind of toasty caramel flavor the apples really maintained their shape okay now I'm going to try pumpkin I'm going to start here just at that point taste it on its own you get some of that maple flavor flavor which I think Blends really well with the Warm Spice and now for pecan which I kind of saved for last cuz I kind of think it's my favorite what I love about this is you could just pick it up and eat it as we saw before beautiful caramelized bottom it got so much flavor from the toaster pecans inside the filling you have the kind of caramelly depth from the brown butter and the demarara sugar this makes me not even like remember what pecan pie tastes like this is the only version of pecan pie that I kind of want to eat going forward it's delicious M so good this is part of our try this at home series a little bit different than our other episodes which tend to focus on baking projects but Thanksgiving is a huge project so I hope you get a chance to enjoy time with family and friends on Thanksgiving practice whatever Traditions are close to you but hopefully work in some of the wisdom and recipes that we showed you here today so thank you so much for watching and Happy [Music] [Laughter] Thanksgiving [Music] oh

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 1,621,267

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes

Id: 0rHT0QPvLTc

Length: 80min 36sec (4836 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023