Southern Cornbread Dressing// My friends hire me to make this dressing for them.

the welcome to Whipple well holler I'm Miss Laurie and this is Mr Brown we live in the hills of Arkansas we love the Lord [Music] keepers are the old way but accept some of the known we love to cook and we love to eat we love to Garden it's in our blood it's how we stay sustainable and fill our pantry we do a lot of canning and preserving we live with sustainable life we love our family we work hard and every once in a while we like to dance so y'all join us so to get our dressing started what I've done was uh this morning when I got up before I went to work I got my slow cooker out and what I've done is what y'all seen me do before on my other uh dressing video is I've got you can use two chickens or you can use two hens a hen has got a lot more fat on it it's bigger than just a regular chicken what I've got here these are two three and a half pound chickens is what these are and so I just put them in my slow cooker and I just left them whole and I poured about three I probably put about three-fourths of the way up from my chicken of with water so it'll make quite a bit of broth and then I just seasoned my chicken and my broth with thyme probably about a teaspoon of thyme let's see I put probably about a teaspoon of poultry seasoning I put a good teaspoon of parsley in here um probably a half a teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of pepper so that's what I've got in here and it's made some beautiful broth in here um and my chickens are done I put them on low for about eight and a half hours and uh you don't have to cook them that long but mine were still frozen so but they're done now I'm home from work we're fixing to make some dressing up so I just wanted to to get that far ahead you don't have to to worry about coming in or spending the you know in the morning of boiling your chickens or your hens or whatever to make your dressing so this is just how I've always done it it just makes it so much simpler for me and all I have to do now is just debone my chicken and uh we'll get started on making our cornbread now for our cornbread dressing okay we're gonna get our cornbread mixed up now y'all see me make cornbread before in some of my videos and I make it completely from scratch with corn cornmeal fresh ground cornmeal and flour and Etc but sometimes one of my favorite things to do is come in and make a pan of cornbread this is my favorite this is Martha White self-rising buttermilk cornbread mix and the reason it's called Uh cornmeal mix is because in this bag there's already your cornmeal your flour your baking soda buttermilk and salt so you got all your leavening agents already in here and you don't you can just throw you some cornbread together and really and truly this is some really good tasting cornbread it's one of our favorites so this is my go-to right here Martha White uh buttermilk cornmeal mix it's not like your Jiffy Mix muffin mix or nothing like that it's nothing like this that this is your cornbread mix right here so that's what we're going to be doing today to help me out a little bit and uh you're just going to use about two cups of your mix and you can double this so when I put the recipe down there just remember that you can double this but this right here this recipe will feed at least 16 people so just remember that I'm gonna put just a little bit more for good measure what you see right here too is all of my stuff I've got together to make my dressing but so we got our two cups of cornmeal mix I'm gonna put my egg and I've got a fourth a cup of oil use whatever oil that you generally use and then I've got one and a half cups of milk but I don't put that half a cup until I get it mixed up good to see if I how much I'm really how much I really need let me get my little spatula here and we're just going to mix this up sometimes you need the whole cup and a half and sometimes you don't and I can tell that I'm going to need more already I know somebody seen me use this before in a video and they're like well Miss Laura I thought you made everything from scratch well you know this is pretty much from scratch you're just not having to add all your leavening agents it's just got it in there for you and like I said I do make it completely from scratch when I've got the time to really to really mess with it and this this cornbread makes the best dressing you really don't want to use any sugar in this of course and I there's no way I would use Jiffy muffin cornbread mix to my dressing out of that would just be that's too sweet it just wouldn't be good to me but that's my opinion my taste buds so that texture is just about right so we got our two cups of cornmeal mix we got one egg fourth a cup of oil and a scant of one and a half cups of milk and you can use buttermilk if you wanted to but this has already got buttermilk in it so I'm just using regular milk and I've got my Skillet back here my iron skillet I've got my oven heated and uh I've got it heated now my oven here is different now I've got it heated to 400 a lot of people cook their cornbread at 425 450 something like that but my oven I've got to keep it down just a notch or two so it's heating up I'm going to put my Skillet in here and I've got about um a good tablespoon of oil in there and I'm going to heat my my Skillet and that's what makes a really good crunchy Brown cornbread so we're gonna get that in the oven get it cooked I'm gonna get my two chickens deboned I'm going to strain my broth so there's no little bitty bits and pieces of anything in there and then we'll get together all of our ingredients and you're going to see how fast it is to throw dressing together dressing is not let it intimidate you it's not hard to make once you get your main things made like your cornbread and you get your your chicken or your hand cooked it's easy breezy the rest of it and it don't take more than 30 minutes to cook it usually just depends on how thick you got it in your pan so let's get this in the oven and we'll be back and put our dressing together meanwhile wow my cornbread's cooking I've got a stick of butter right here that I had in the microwave you need one stick of butter half a cup in your pan and I already had it in the microwave that's why it's melted already and then I've got two stalks of celery and a half of a medium onion now you can put more celery and you can put more onion this is to your preference I myself don't like to put tons and tons of it in there and if I was making this for my grandkids I couldn't put none of it in there because they wouldn't eat it then that's why they like nannies dressing chicken dressing because it doesn't have onions and celery in it but it does have onion powder and celery seed in it to give it that flavor but if they sing that in their dressing they wouldn't eat it but this is not for the grandkids so we're good and I'm just going to saute this and you do want the half the half a cup of butter because that butter is going to go right into your dressing and it's gonna that Butter's just gonna give it that extra little good taste I know it looks like a lot of butter but like I said it's all going to go right into your until you're dressing so I'm gonna let this salt tie to the onions get a little translucent and the celery gets a little tender and then we'll take it off the heat okay now we're going to put all of our dressing together we've got our cornbread we got it made and I already started crumbling it up you need to let it cool just a little bit or it will burn your fingers that's for sure just crumble it up and little pieces or as fine as you want I like mine pretty fine but if there's some bigger pieces in it that's okay and I've got my big pan right here you want a pan big enough that you can get all this stuff in because it's just going to start growing and growing growing now since I'm making this for somebody for their Thanksgiving and she says she's going to eat one now and then she's going to put one in the freezer so I'm going to be putting them in aluminum pool uh baking pans and uh I'll be wrapping them up good so she can put one in the freezer uh for her Thanksgiving or you can put this in a in a really pretty bacon dish I like to put mine in a roasting pan that's got a lid on it now this still was kind of warm but it's it's breaking up pretty good and now I'm going to put it over here in my it's empty I'm gonna put it in my my big pan here and that skill is still just a little bit warm this Skillet was a 12. it's a 12 inch skillet and it baked some of the best cornbread okay we got that done I'm just going to set this aside now that we've got our cornmeal in here our current cornbread what I've got here is you can use any kind of leftover bread you got usually I've got biscuits that I've got a bag in my or usually I've got a freezer bag in my freezer and if I got a leftover piece of biscuit or something like that I always saw in that bag well I made dressing not too long ago and I used all my biscuits up so what I'm using here is I had some hot dog buns and this is just a couple hot dog buns all it is and I just broke it in pieces I've always got either hamburger buns or hot dog buns or something in my freezer because me and Danny you know we can't eat a whole thing of hot dog buns at one time so what I do if I don't make them homemade or if I buy them from the store I wrap them individually and I stick them in a in a bag and then I stick them in the freezer that way I can just take out one or two you know whatever me Mr Brown name so that was just two hot dog buns you can use just regular bread hamburger buns biscuits anything like that that you got and I've got two pieces of toast here and this was left over from day four yesterday and I'm just gonna crumble it up now what you can do is you can toast you say four slices of toast and crumble that up and not use your biscuits or hot dog buns that's just up to you just whatever you've got use it if this crumbled up um I've also got a whole sleeve of saltine crackers here now a lot of people say they've never put saltine crackers in their southern dressing but this is what makes this one of the things that makes this dressing so good so it's a whole sleeve you want to make sure they're crumbled up pretty good too just take your hand in there and just kind of work it up crumble it up real good and I'm going to preheat my oven to 350. I probably put mine in here and I'll put it on 325 in my oven your oven if it's a convection oven you know the temp is good on it you need it at about 350. and it is going to depend on how thick your dressing that you put in your how long it's going to take to cook you just need to keep an eye on it when it's getting good and firm and golden brown on top and you know it's sitting up good then you need to take it out so it could be different times different oven everything varies okay so we got our dressing our cornbread in there we've got our leftover bread toast biscuits whatever and we got a whole sleeve of crackers now what we're going to do is we're going to take this was half a stick of butter and it was two stalks of celery chopped up and a half of a medium onion that I diced up and we're going to put butter and all in here put it right in this dressing and like I told you earlier you can put more onion and more celery in it that's that's for your taste whatever you think you might like because we are going to be adding just a little bit of onion powder to it too so before we put our chicken in here we're going to put our our seasonings in here and I'm going to put now this is going to be up to your taste too because I know what I like to taste in my dress my Southern dressing and I don't like it overwhelmed with sage and poultry seasoning I like just enough in there to taste it but not overwhelming I know a lot of people that love a lot of sage in their southern dressing to the point that their dressing is almost green color and I I just don't prefer it that way but if you do you can put all the sage in there that you want this is poultry seasoning and I like putting this in my dressing and I'm just going to eyeball it and I'm going to say that's a good couple teaspoons and I can also smell it I've learned with my dressing not only you know by taste whatever I can smell and tell if I've got enough Sage or poultry thing sitting in there I can still smell the onions and the celery and the cornbread but it's not overwhelming with my poultry seasoning so what I'll do is put another half a teaspoon so we're going to call that two and a half teaspoons of poultry seasoning and the recipe will be down in the information box down below my videos okay now we're going to do the ground sage I don't know if I've opened this yet or not yes now this is where I'm going to be careful at but you put as much sage in here as you want and I'm actually going to put this I'm going to try to measure my hand now I can tell you too that I taste my dressing I know people think how can you do that I do my grandma always did and I do too before I to make sure I've got enough seasoning in it I'm going to say that's about a teaspoon of sage maybe not quite but then close to a teaspoon I know a lot of people put several tablespoons in their dressing okay I'm going to add another teaspoon if it comes out this is ground sage you can use your absasia if you want to so we're going to say that I put two teaspoons of ground sage in here and that should be cleaning I think I put my onion powder back now you don't have to put a lot of onion powder but I always put just a little bit even though I've got onions in there about a half a teaspoon because onion powder will absolutely overwhelm your dress and if you're not careful now because I salted my broth and what I got here is uh I ended up with about six cups of broth and then I've got some here so I ended up with probably close to eight cups of broth I've got some sea salt here not too much and I'm gonna put about a half a teaspoon of black pepper and that's that on seasonings foreign okay I've got two eggs um a lot of people put anywhere from four to five eggs in our dressing um there's really no need for that many eggs in your dressing the eggs do give it a richer um texture and stuff but I've never seen where I needed more than two eggs in it but if you're going to double it of course put double the eggs too okay before we put our chicken in I've got just a little bit of that milk left for making my cornbread and I'm gonna pour that in there and I'm going to take my six cups of broth and I'm going to start pouring it in there at least half of it now the consistency of this is going to matter because you don't want a dry dressing that's for sure so so I can tell you that the way that looks that's too dry and I don't even have my chicken in there yet so I'm gonna put another cup you want your dressing to set up of course but you want to make sure that you start out with a very moist dressing and it is starting to get moist but I still want to add a little bit more and I'll tell you in my recipe and I'll tell you afterwards how much I ended up broth I ended up using and see how moist that is okay we've got our chicken over here that I de-bound and I won't be putting all this in there but we're going to put quite a bit I'll save the rest of this for another pan of dressing so we're going to stir this in and there's some people that make their dressing without the chicken in it they just make the cornbread dressing with no chicken in it or turkey in it I always put chicken or turkey in mine okay foreign that looks good and moist it'll set up good but it won't be dry so there it is and that's the texture of it I could even I might even add some chicken to the top of it once I get it in the pan so let me get this in my pans get my pans over here let me get them sprayed and we'll go from there a disposable pan here this was about an eight by ten I got it at Dollar Store there's two in a pack and I got it sprayed really good I really don't like to make my dressing really thick but make it as thick as you want my second pan may not be as thick as this one okay now and move this one down here I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get this one as thick as I wanted to but we'll see what we can do this is such a a good thing to do because you can do this ahead of time and uh you can always freeze your dressing and uh put it the day before that you're gonna eat put your dressing still covered up in your refrigerator and let it thaw in the refrigerator then the next day you know take your plastic or whatever off of it but and then stick it in your oven about 325 and just let it heat through yeah this one's not going to be as thick but that's okay she won't care see I could have put all this in there and it would have made it really thick but she's wanting some that she can just eat right now and then the other for Thanksgiving so that's the one that'd be for Thanksgiving she can eat this right now okay I'm gonna take some butter and this is optional you don't have to do this at all and I'm just gonna dollop some butter on top of your dressing and then I'm going to take some more of my chicken or turkey or whatever you're using and just kind of put it on top and you don't have to do this either but I always do it our second pan foreign recipes for southern dressing everybody you know so many people have they're different ways of doing it and it's all good this right here everybody loves it it's just a good dressing well if you're making it for the holidays or not because I make chicken and dressing quite a bit for my kids and grandkids because I just love it anytime you can use white meat you can use dark meat if you don't have anything but maybe a bunch of chicken legs that you need to cook up use that I've done that many times chicken thighs chicken legs whatever you got okay my oven is Heating your oven you need it at 350. mine's going to be 325. and then I'll check it after 30 minutes so there is our dressing and like I said I could have filled this completely up but she said she couldn't wait for Thanksgiving to have her dressing so she wanted some for right now and then some for later so there we go and you can double this recipe too so this right here is gonna this is what feeds my family usually unless I just got a really big crowd um that's a fade about 15 people because you got everything else you got your ham and all your side dishes so this is this is plenty so I'm gonna get these in the oven get them cooking and when I get done I'll take them out and I'll show you what they look like and then we're going to make some gravy for our dressing okay there is our Southern cornbread dressing out of the oven this one right here the fullest one did take about 30 minutes and it's set up really good then this one that's just half a pan here it took about 20 minutes so they both look so good it smells so good in here so now we got this done we're going to be making us some gravy for our dressing I always got to have gravy for my dressing and I always had to have cranberry sauce too to my car giblet gravy without giblets in it all we're going to need is a stick of butter Paula Dean would be very proud of me so I got a stick of butter in my pan and I've got three heaping tablespoons of flour and we're just going to mix that up good Stir It you get the lumps out of it and what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a roux so I'm going to continue to cook this for several minutes until it gets a really good caramel color to it because that's what's going to give it such a depth of flavor now the reason I'm not putting giblets in this and giblets is what of course what grandma would always do she'd pull up her gizzards her liver the heart and the neck and then she when it was done she chopped all that up and put it in her gravy and she uh cut up a couple boiled eggs too that's where your hardcore people like me that that always love that gravy but I've got uh people that's going to be eating this dressing that don't want all that gravy so we won't be putting that in there but that's if you're wanting true blue giblet gravy that's what you would do and when I put my recipe down below I'll make sure that I'll put that down there how you make uh giblet gravy all you need is just like four gizzards a couple livers uh maybe a couple of chicken hearts in your neck and a lot of times that's what you'll get with your your hands or your turkey of course and uh that's what you would boil up to make her give what gravy out of but this is going to be just good old cornbread dressing gravy without the giblets it's going to take a couple minutes to get this to the color that I want but all you're doing is cooking that flour and making a row now this to get to this color right here took about three minutes on about medium high heat and you can see how it's getting that caramel color to it and that's where it's getting it's Rich deep flavor from I'm gonna put about a half a teaspoon of salt a quarter a teaspoon of pepper foreign and about a half a teaspoon of poultry seasoning or if you don't have poultry seasoning you put you a half a teaspoon of sage Brown sage in it you see it keeps getting that deeper deeper color I've got six cups of broth chicken stock foreign pour it in there about half of it and I'm going to keep stirring now I did strain my broth so it'll get a lot smoother texture to it and see how it's starting to thicken up keep an eye on it I had a little bit more and I need to turn my burner down and you turn it back down to a to a low medium low instead of medium high and it'll start to thicken that again let me just let it simmer and let it start thicken up I'll put some parsley flakes in here that's optional it's just up to you and what you need to do is just get your spoon and taste it taste it for salt pepper if you want to add just a little bit more poultry seasoning or Sage to it I think I'm gonna find me a spoon taste it actually it's pretty good it might need just a little bit of salt but not much that is really really good when you make that Roux like that maybe a little bit more Pepper when you make that rug like that it just gives that gravy such a good depth of flavor and you've seen how easy it was to make and you see how thickening up so you don't want it as thick as white gravy though but you don't want it too thin either so just keeps stirring it and let it simmer let it kind of thicken up a little bit more so what I ended up putting in there was about four cups I think around four cups of chicken stock and you can make this ahead of a time too make this ahead of time cool it off put it in the fridge and then all you got to do is put your maybe a little bit of cream or a little bit of milk or water in it and not much first if you want to stick in the microwave warm it up it was still too thick put your little milk or water in it to get the right consistency just warm it up and put it on the table so you can have your dressing you can have your gravy done ahead of time and that's how you make well I hope y'all enjoyed this video I know I'm going to enjoy a bite of this dressing it always turns out so moist and so good I hope my friend really enjoys this and uh I hope you all enjoy it too I think if y'all try this gravy they're gonna love it and get you a little side of cranberry sauce yum yum it's delicious so I hope y'all like this recipe I hope y'all um all have an enjoyable Thanksgiving like I've been saying in my other videos just keep it simple this year don't stress over it and cornbread dressing the southern cornbread dressing is something you can make because you probably pretty much have everything you need there in your pantry some make you a pan of it so guys y'all have a wonderful weekend and I'm going to be back with hopefully a couple more videos before Thanksgiving gets here I know next week is a big week for a lot of people that are going to be traveling going to see their family so if you are y'all be safe and enjoy being with your family so God bless everybody we'll see y'all in a couple of days

Channel: Whippoorwill Holler

Views: 425,629

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Id: 4fGck0UZZ2Y

Length: 39min 30sec (2370 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022