Ina Garten’s Sausage and Herb Stuffing
The Barefoot Contessa's take on a holiday staple.
The Barefoot Contessa is a cook you can trust. Her recipes are reliably delicious, but also generally a little rustic and plenty approachable, which is just how we like our food at 12 Tomatoes. So who better to turn to for a reliable stuffing recipe? We set out to see if Ina Garten’s Sausage and Herb Stuffing could be our new go-to.
We made this stuffing as a part of our Celebrity Stuffing Recipe Showdown. The showdown is a fun project where we take four celebrity recipes — some celebrity chefs, some not so much — cook them, and then taste and compare them to see how they stack up. This match-up included Ina Garten, Gwyneth Paltrow, Emeril Lagasse, and Marilyn Monroe. We ended up with four very different stuffings!
What’s in Ina Garten’s Sausage and Herb Stuffing?
She tells you some of the main things right there in the title — sausage and herbs! But more specifically, she calls for:
- White or sourdough bread
- Butter
- Yellow onion
- Celery
- Granny smith apples
- Parsley
- Sweet OR spicy Italian sausage
- Chicken stock
- Dried cranberries
How Do You Make Ina Garten’s Sausage and Herb Stuffing?
Ina has you start by cubing your bread and baking it to dry it out a bit. Then, you cook down the celery, onions, apples, and parsley in butter. Those go into a big bowl with the bread while you brown up the sausage in the same (now empty) pan. Again, that goes in the big bowl of bread, this time along with some chicken stock and dried cranberries, and then you get it in a baking dish and bake. Pretty simple process, all in all!
How Does It Taste?
The flavor is simply lovely. There’s a balance of savory, sweet, and tangy thanks to the apples, sausage, and cranberries and some brightness from the parsley. The bread to other ingredient ratio was great. That being said, for being branded as an “herb” stuffing, we felt like this could have used more herbs. A mix of fresh herbs instead of just parsley would have been nice.
While the flavor was great, the main drawback for us was that the stuffing didn’t really hold together. It wasn’t quite dry, per se, but it definitely could have used some more stock and/or an egg to bind it all together. Because of that, it didn’t taste like a cohesive dish. And while, again, the flavor was great, it was very flavorful, so we could see it working as a more independent dish rather than something you’d serve as a side to be incorporated into a full holiday meal.
We made this as part of our Celebrity Recipe Showdown.
To see how it stacked up, read on here:
Celebrity Stuffing Recipe Showdown
You can see the other celebrity Stuffing recipes here:
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Classic Bread Stuffing
Marilyn Monroe’s Thanksgiving Stuffing
Emeril Lagasse’s Simple But Fabulous Stuffing
Ina Garten’s Sausage and Herb Stuffing
Ingredients
- 16 cups white or sourdough bread, cut into 1-inch cubes (1 1/2 lb loaf)
- 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
- 2 cups yellow onion, diced medium (2 onions)
- 1 cup celery, diced medium (2 stalks)
- 2 granny smith apples, cored and diced large
- 2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, chopped
- 1 tablespoon Kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 3/4 lb sweet or spicy Italian sausage, casings removed
- 1 cup chicken stock
- 1 cup dried cranberries
Preparation
- Preheat oven to 300°F.
- Arrange bread cubes in a single layer on a sheet pan and bake for 7 minutes. Remove from oven and place in a large bowl.
- Raise temperature to 350°F.
- Meanwhile, in a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add onions, celery, apples, parsley, and salt and pepper. Cook, stirring often, until vegetables have softened, about 10 minutes. Add mixture to bread cube bowl.
- In the same pan, brown the sausage over medium heat until cooked through, breaking it up with a fork as it cooks, about 10 minutes. Add to bread cube bowl.
- Add chicken broth and cranberries to bread mixture, mix well, and then pour into a 9x13-inch baking dish. Bake until top is browned and mixture is hot in the center, about 30 minutes. Serve warm.
Recipe from Food Network.