Thanksgiving Day Bacon + Biscuit Dressing

I’m afraid the pictures for this dressing do the recipe no justice. But you’ll have to trust me on the fact that any dressing recipe made out of biscuits and bacon is going to rock your world. This one rocked mine. My grandma sent me a recipe that she clipped from Penzey’s magazine. I could not find a link to the recipe on-line but it’s similar to other one’s you’ll find on the internet.

I had to improvise a bit on this recipe which resulted in a very large batch so if you learn from my mistakes and follow the recipe below, you should get a similar dish that tastes just as awesome but doesn’t require 20 people to finish it off.

First off, I had to make biscuits specifically for the recipe. They were yeast-biscuits which I’ve never made before. They didn’t turn out that pretty, but I was fine with that because I intended to use them in the dressing recipe anyway. I made the biscuits a few days ahead of time and froze them, thawing them the night before.

The day of I got going early with this recipe by baking the biscuits. While the turkey was in the oven, I began prepping the rest of the ingredients. This is where things went awry. I had purchased three large yellow onions for two Thanksgiving Day recipes. However, I didn’t realize that this recipe did NOT call for LARGE onions. So I’m sauteing all my vegetables (onions, celery and mushrooms) and I’m noticing that the pan is quite voluminous. I glance over at the biscuits sitting not that far away and think … huh … it appears that there are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more vegetables than biscuits going on here. Now I’m not a stuffing/dressing expert, but I would think that you want your “bread” to be the start of the stuffing/dressing show.

What to do, what to do. In the freezer I had stored the remaining biscuits that I had not already baked/browned. So I took the leftover biscuits from the freezer, but them into cubes and threw them in a pan to bake right along with the turkey. So I doubled the biscuit recipe to make up for the fact that I probably had four-times the amount of onions called for. I still only used 4 cups of chicken stock and, because of that, thought perchance the dressing would be dry. It wasn’t at all! It was moist but not mushy, which is good because you never want your dressing to be mushy. The bevy of fresh herbs in the recipe, gave it good flavor. I made myself a huge plate of turkey, potatoes, and dressing and sadly (or not so sadly, depending on how you look at it) could not finish the entire plate.

Because this recipe yielded so much darn dressing, I was able to create my favorite Thanksgiving Day Leftovers Bowl to take in my lunch next week (and then some).

ingredients.

Twelve 4-inch biscuits, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes (this recipe is similar to one I used)
1 ½ lb bacon
2 medium yellow onions, diced
5 celery stalks, diced
16 oz. white button mushrooms, brushed clean and sliced
½ c. chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
4 T. chopped fresh sage
4 T. chopped fresh tarragon
4 T. chopped fresh thyme
4 T. chopped fresh rosemary
1 to 2 tsp. salt, to taste
freshly cracked pepper
4 to 5 c. chicken stock

directions.

Position a rack in the lower third of an oven and preheat to 350°F.
Spread the biscuits out on a baking sheet. Toast in the oven until lightly browned, 25 to 30 minutes. Set aside. Increase the oven temperature to 375°F.
In a deep sauté pan over medium-high heat, cook the bacon until crisp, 7 to 9 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain.
Pour off all but 3 tablespoons of the fat from the pan. Set the pan over medium heat and add the onions. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are soft and lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Add the celery, mushrooms, and herbs and cook until the celery is soft, about 5 minutes. Transfer the onion mixture to a large bowl. Add the bacon to the bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add the biscuits and stock and stir to combine.
Transfer the dressing to a baking dish and cover with aluminum foil. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and bake until the dressing is lightly browned, about 20 minutes more.

In order to have everything timed perfectly, I completed the instructions up to the part where you add in the stock. I mixed the biscuits with the rest of the mixture and then set everything aside until the turkey was out of the oven. Then I quickly mixed the stock into the rest of the ingredients and threw the dressing into the oven. In the fifty minutes it took to bake this dish, I let the turkey “rest,” I made the gravy and I baked the biscuits. With only one oven to use this year I had to choose the exact right recipes–I couldn’t have too many oven-dependent dishes–and I ended up choosing correctly!