Hello, my dearest dears, and welcome back to another festive installment of Will It Sous Vide?, the weekly column where I make whatever you want me to with my immersion circulator.




During our last topic picking session, we settled on Thanksgiving sides because, let’s face it, most people care way more about the sides than they do the turkey. No specific side won out, so I decided to try three of my favorites: cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce.




The Smash Hit: Cornbread Dressing

My (opinionated, southern) family has two, very serious rules about the bread-based side that is served alongside turkey:



The bread must be of the corn variety. You better not call it “stuffing.”

Good dressing starts with good cornbread, so I made a batch of my grandmother’s very simple, very easy, very tasty cornbread. You can use any cornbread you damn well please (including store-bought), but I’ll go ahead and include the recipe, just in case you want to try it. (I know it’s not technically a “sous vide” recipe, but there was no way I was going to make dressing with any other cornbread.)


Claire’s Grandmother’s Not-Sous-Vide Cornbread

Ingredients:

About four tablespoons of bacon grease

1 1/3 cup self-rising yellow cornmeal

1 egg

1 3/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat your oven to 450℉. Add bacon grease to a cake pan or skillet (my grandmother always uses a cake pan, and she does not give a single damn) and pop it in the oven. Combine remaining ingredients in a bowl. Once you hear the bacon grease start to sizzle (about 5-10 minutes) remove your pan and pour the batter in. Return to the oven and bake until golden brown on top (about 35-45 minutes). Let cool and turn out. Crumble if you are going to be using it in dressing.


Traditional dressing calls for cornbread, eggs, stock, butter, and herbs. I first tried a version with stock—I’m actually not sure why; just to see what would happen, I guess?—and it was an unsurprisingly soupy mess. I then decided to eliminate the broth altogether, and used my BFF Better Than Bullion to give it that stock-y quality. This is the recipe I settled on, and it is very freaking good.


Claire’s Fantastic Sous-Vide Cornbread Dressing

Ingredients:

4 cups of crumbled cornbread (which, incidentally, is exactly how much the above recipe makes)

1 onion, chopped (You may notice a lack of celery, this is because celery is extremely bad tasting.)

5-7 fresh sage leaves, depending on the size

1-2 fresh sprigs of marjoram

1-2 fresh sprigs of thyme

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of bacon grease or lard (or butter if you must)

2 teaspoons of Roasted Chicken Better Than Bullion

Remove herbs from stems and chop finely. Add herbs, chopped onion, and cornbread to a 1-gallon freezer bag and shake to distribute flavorful goodness.


Beat eggs in a bowl and add your fat of choice and Better Than Bullion. Mix to create a visually unappealing slurry.




This looks vile, but it is very important.

Pour the questionable-looking liquid over your sexy crumb mixture, push the air out using the water submersion technique, and place in a water bath set to 165℉ for two and a half hours.


Dump it out in a cast iron pan and pop it into the broiler to brown on top. I don’t recommend torching it, as that results in a burned, rather than browned stuffing, and burnt stuffing isn’t a whole lot of fun.




So, does cornbread dressing sous vide?

The Answer: Fuck yeah, it does. I’ve eaten a lot of dressing in my life—all of it pretty good—but this was the best I’ve ever had. The fat and herbs infuse right into the cornbread without making it soggy, so every bite is packed with flavor, and the eggs give everything a nice, moist, almost cake-like texture. You may notice that the onions aren’t extremely cooked, but that’s how I like them in dressing. The just-softened, barely-transparent alliums provide a bit of bite to cut through the richness of the dressing, and I appreciate it. If you need your onions browned, just brown them before adding to the dressing mixture. If I wasn’t already sous vide-ing pumpkin pie for my family this Thanksgiving, I would insist on making this. I give it 5 out of 5 turkey legs.


Next side.

The One With a Caveat: Mashed Potatoes


As a few of you have pointed out, my kitchen appliance game is strange. I own an immersion circulator, but not a microwave; an ice cream attachment for my KitchenAid, but no coffee pot. I am also lacking in the way of potato ricer, because I’ve always mashed my potatoes with a wooden spoon—maybe my stand mixer, equipped with paddle attachment—and never had a problem with lumps. This was not the case with sous-vide mashed potatoes. (More thoughts on why in a moment.) As far as recipes go, I used this one from Anova’s site as a template, making a few changes.

Very Garlicky, Slightly Lumpy, Sous-Vide Mashed Potatoes:

Ingredients:

2 pounds of Russet potatoes, sliced into 1/8-inch slices

5 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed

8 ounces (2 sticks) of butter

1 cup buttermilk

1 big sprig of rosemary (This is optional. I made two batches and preferred the batch without it.)


Add everything to a 1-gallon freezer bag and submerge in a water bath set to 194℉ for two hours. (The Anova recipe calls for an hour and a half, but my potatoes were not done in that amount of time.)


Once they’re done cooking. drain off melted butter and buttermilk and reserve. If you have a potato ricer, pass the potatoes through it now. I do not have a potato rice, so I tried to beat them into submission using my spoon and then my stand mixer. This did not work, and I was never able to get all the lumps out.




Because these babies had been cooked in fat, they were a little slippery, and portions of them deftly avoided both my spoon and paddle attachment, slipping away unmashed. They were, however, some of the tastiest mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. Like the stuffing before it, cooking them in fat infused them with a whole lot of flavor, the flavor in this case being garlic, and that garlic was present in every single bite.


Returning to question we always return to: Will mashed potatoes sous vide?



The Answer: Yeah, sure, and they taste really freaking good, but you need a food mill or potato ricer to get the texture right, as there is no way to eliminate the lumps without them. If you have access to one of those devices, I urge you to make these. I give ‘em 3.75 out of 5 bottles of Beaujolais nouveau.


Moving on.

The Pointless, Though Tasty, Option: Cranberry Sauce


I had seen a few recipes for sous-vide cranberry sauce, and could not for the life of me figure out what the advantage would be. As we all know, liquid can’t evaporate when sealed in a bag, so there’s no way for the sauce to reduce. There’s also nothing easier than boiling cranberries with water and sugar so, again, not totally sure why anyone would do this. (But that’s half the point of this column.)


I didn’t really use a recipe for this, I just threw twelve ounces of fresh cranberries and a cup of white sugar in a 1-gallon freezer bag and submerged in a 185℉ water bath, until the berries began to break down (about two hours). (I left the water out, for obvious reasons.) I took the bag out, smushed it around with my hands to make sure everyone was well acquainted, transferred the sauce to some vintage Pyrex, and let it chill overnight in the fridge.




Once more, with feeling: Does cranberry sauce sous vide?

The answer: Technically, yes. You do get a sweet and sour sauce that is made of cranberries, but it takes a real long time, and you don’t extract enough pectin to get any gelling, and I am very much about a gelled cranberry sauce. The sauce was also a bit tarter than one prepared the traditional way, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on your palate. So, it’s not bad, but it’s not as good as stove-top cranberry sauce, and it takes longer. I give it 1 out of 5 slices of pie. (Brutal.)