Jeff’s King’s Hawaiian Thanksgiving Stuffing

I’m a carbs guy, especially bread. As a kid, bread was one of the staples in our household. It was cheap, and it filled you up. I ate toast in the morning with tons of butter topped with cinnamon and sugar. If I’m being honest, it was mostly sugar. PBJ sandwiches for lunch, and either Italian bread or rolls with dinner most nights. I had bread in some form at just about every meal, a habit I carried over into adulthood. Which is probably why I gained so much weight when I got out of the Army. No daily PT to burn off all those extra carbs.

When I first started dating Janet and she invited me to her parents’ house for dinner, the food was always great. Her mother was an excellent cook. Except for the time I puked after eating her stuffed red bell peppers. Janet blames that one on me. She says I worked out too soon after dinner. I blame the peppers. My only complaint about dinner at Janet’s house, aside from the stuffed peppers, was that there was no bread. I left the table feeling filled, but unfulfilled.

At some point, Janet told her parents how much I liked bread with dinner, and from then on, every time I came over for dinner her mom made sure there was bread on the table. I think she was afraid I might stop dating Janet if she didn’t feed me right. She would set out a basket or plate full of rolls or sliced Italian bread, and I was usually the only one who ate any. I always went back for seconds. To let her know I appreciated the gesture. I don’t know what her mom did with the rest of the bread since nobody else at the table partook, but I do know what I do with leftover bread. I make stuffing out of it.

Bread two ways

Thanksgiving dinner is perhaps my favorite meal of the year because I get bread two ways. Dinner rolls, and stuffing. After we got married and began hosting our own Thanksgiving dinners, it became my job to make the stuffing at Thanksgiving. Not right away, but eventually. Probably because Janet discovered I was lousy at the one thing the male head of household was supposed to be good at — carving the turkey. I hacked that sucker up like a fox tearing into a freshly killed sparrow. I know what that looks like because I see them doing it in my backyard. It ain’t pretty. But I make a killer stuffing. OK, so technically it was dressing since I didn’t cook it up inside the turkey, but it’s all stuffing to me.

Trial and error

When I started making the stuffing I went with an easy recipe: Stove Top with a few additions like diced celery and onions. Can’t go wrong with that. But as both my palate and my culinary skills developed after I took over the cooking duties, I got more creative.

I tried a traditional stuffing recipe I found on the internet, but that was only marginally better than my modified Stove Top dish. I tried oyster stuffing — once. Discovered I don’t like my stuffing tasting like something from the ocean swam into it and died. I tried cornbread stuffing, an homage to my Appalachian roots. I liked it, but the cornbread made it feel like a summer dish. It didn’t sing Thanksgiving to me.

I went through a phase when I would try anything Alton Brown featured on his show Good Eats, so I tried his Thanksgiving stuffing recipe. Too busy. Too much stuff that doesn’t belong in stuffing. His recipe was a true stuffing, cooked inside the turkey. The trouble with that approach was that cooking stuffing inside the bird, safely, means overcooking the bird, so I cooked it separately. I still called it stuffing.

Alton added stuff like cherries, turkey giblets and, worst of all, pecans. I could live with the cherries. The giblets are OK but they’re better in the gravy. Nuts on the other hand have no business in stuffing. None. I have a strict no-nuts policy for my stuffing, and there’s a story behind it. I’ll get to that. Alton’s recipe also used mushrooms, which intrigued me. I like their earthy flavor, but I found they turned mushy once I added the stock, and I didn’t like the slimy texture they added to the dish. The one thing Alton got right was the bread: cubes cut from a loaf of challah. I love that stuff. I used to bake it myself back in the day, and I would eat practically the entire loaf in one sitting. That left me feeling — uncomfortable, so I stopped making it.

After Alton, I went through my Emeril phase. I still hold on to a few Emeril Lagasse recipes. I even cook one or two up in the course of a year, but nothing for Thanksgiving. He did give me one idea that I carried over into the dressing I make today. My “secret” ingredient. I can tell you, it isn’t okra. The only place okra belongs is gumbo.

Hiding in plain sight

I moved on from Alton and Emeril to try a basic New England stuffing recipe. It was promising. One I could morph into something suitable for Thanksgiving dinner. As I worked that recipe up, I found the holy grail of stuffing bread hiding in plain sight in the bread aisle: King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls. King’s Hawaiian knows how to make sweet rolls, and I like anything with “sweet” in the name. If you cut the fresh rolls into cubes and let them dry out, they make the best stuffing. Better than Alton’s challah. And arguably, the bread cubes are the most important ingredient in stuffing. Everything else is just everything else.

I kept the New England recipe and started using bread cubes cut from King’s Hawaiian dinner rolls. Better, but not quite there. Still too simple. My palate wanted to be teased with more. More textures and more layers, but not nuts. No nuts.

Then I learned that King’s Hawaiian had its own recipe, aptly named King’s Hawaiian Sweet Bread Stuffing, so I checked it out. It’s the New England recipe at its core, with a Hawaiian twist. Since I was already using their rolls, it seemed tailor made for me.

What had to go

Before I made it, I analyzed their recipe for anything that would sabotage the finished product. Of course I did. The cashews were the first thing to go. What were they thinking? I like cashews fine. They go great in a dish like, oh say, cashew chicken. But my no-nuts policy in stuffing holds, period, full stop. I half expected macadamia nuts as a riff on the Hawaiian theme, and sure enough, another of their stuffing recipes suggests them as a garnish. No. Not even as a garnish.

Unlike the nuts, the dried apricots their recipe calls for I at least understood. Dried fruit brings sweetness and a chewy bite, and I wanted both. I just didn’t want apricot. The bread is the star of stuffing and dried apricots deliver a big chunk of something that crowds out the bread.

Their recipe also calls for poultry seasoning, which is mostly sage and thyme, and thyme was too harsh for the dish I had in mind, so I left it out. I also ditched the egg. I know from making Maryland crab cakes that egg acts as a binder, but with the changes I was planning, the extra binding would be unnecessary. And I didn’t like the idea of sautéing the veggies in olive oil. I love EVOO, but it would add a Mediterranean note to an American classic. I go with a neutral oil like canola or, more recently, avocado oil.

Building it back up

With those deletions, I started building the dish back up into something that would make my taste buds dance at Thanksgiving dinner. I wanted my stuffing to be savory at its core, but I couldn’t ignore my sweet tooth. When a recipe calls for yellow onion, I use Vidalia. Because it’s sweeter. If you don’t have a raging sweet tooth like I do, yellow onion works fine. At the same time, there’s something to be said for the bite of a red onion, so for this recipe I decided to use both.

In my search for recipes I ran across one that used peeled and diced Granny Smith apples with dried cranberries. Both are seasonally appropriate Thanksgiving ingredients and made a great replacement for the apricots in the original recipe, so in they went. I liked the sweet-tart combination they bring, the crisp fall flavor of the Granny Smiths, and the chewy texture of the cranberries. They deliver it all in a smaller, more subtle bite than the apricots without crowding out the bread. I took the idea one step further and added golden raisins for another layer of sweetness and chew, and I use more of them than cranberries to tame the cranberries’ tartness.

With the poultry seasoning gone, I needed herbs. I kept the sage, the backbone of any Thanksgiving stuffing. I use rubbed sage because it infuses the entire batch of my stuffing with savory, but I swapped the thyme that poultry seasoning uses for basil. It brings a sweeter, less in-your-face herbal touch. I also decided the dish needed some acidity to balance out all the sweetness, so I added apple cider vinegar.

It still needed protein, and that’s where my Emeril-inspired secret ingredient comes in. The King’s Hawaiian recipe calls for sausage, casings removed, but doesn’t say what kind. My inner Emeril steered me to andouille. Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays, and stuffing is second in importance only to the turkey, so I wanted my stuffing to cover the map: a New England base, sweet rolls from a company born in Hilo and headquartered in L.A., Vidalia onion from Georgia, and andouille from Louisiana, specifically NOLA, to close the circuit.

A touch of Christmas

I was close. But something was still missing. It needed a touch of Christmas.

When it comes to holidays, Thanksgiving is like Christmas’s first cousin. I wanted my stuffing to celebrate that, so I added a blend of spices to remind me, with every bite, that Christmas is just around the corner. Nutmeg and cinnamon. And with that, my recipe was perfect. The spices put the Christmas in my Thanksgiving stuffing, and they make the house smell like the holiday season, at least for a day.

How I build it

I buy two packs of 24 King’s Hawaiian rolls. One isn’t enough, two is too many, but the extra bread cubes I get out of them are my insurance policy against soggy stuffing. If I add too much liquid, I can always toss in more bread cubes to sop it up.

Pro tip: Cut the rolls into cubes as soon as you get them home from the grocery store and spread them out on baking sheets to dry. If you dry the rolls first and then try to cut them, they’ll shatter into breadcrumbs. If you’re short on time, or your house is too humid for the bread cubes to dry out, put the sheets in a 200–250°F oven to speed things along. Just keep an eye on them. You want to dry them, not cook them.

I build this stuffing in three parts: the fruit, the liquid, and the veggies. I cook the fruit up into a simple chutney. Red onion goes into the skillet first and cooks in avocado oil until it starts to caramelize. Then the garlic, 30 seconds to a minute, no longer so it doesn’t burn. Burned garlic makes a dish unpalatably bitter and you can’t salvage it once you’ve burnt the garlic; you have to toss everything out and start over.

After the garlic I cut the heat down to medium low and add the Granny Smith apples, dried cranberries, and golden raisins, and I sauté them for a few minutes until the diced apples soften. A splash of cider vinegar deglazes the pan, followed by a cup of stock. After that starts to simmer I stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, sage, salt, and pepper, and cook everything down until it forms a paste. That paste, the chutney, carries the sweet, the tart, and the Christmas into every bite of stuffing. Once the spices are fully integrated, transfer the chutney from the skillet into a small bowl and set it aside to cool.

Before I tackle the sausage and veggies, I get the liquid going, and it’s quite simple: chicken (or turkey) stock, sage, basil, and a stick of unsalted butter. Add the butter. All of it. The whole stick. And don’t even think about using margarine.

I cook everything except the liquid in one skillet, in order: the fruit, then the andouille, then the veggies, so the fond never goes to waste. I deglaze the veggies at the end with another splash of apple cider vinegar, scrape up the fond, and stir it all together. Once the veggies are softened, I transfer the contents of the skillet to another bowl. The herbed liquid simmers in a saucepan on the back burner while I cook up the veggies.

I use my biggest bowl for the bread cubes. It can’t handle all the bread cubes from 48 King’s Hawaiian Rolls, so I fill the bowl to about halfway, which uses all but a couple of cups of the bread cubes. Save the rest to adjust the consistency at the end. I dump the chutney, veggies, and sausage on top of the bread cubes and mix it by hand. A spoon at this stage turns bread cubes into breadcrumbs, and that’s not stuffing.

Once the stock goes in, the cubes soften and a spoon is safe. I add the liquid in stages, because you can always add more, and mix it up stirring slowly with a spoon. I like my stuffing juicy, but if I add too much liquid, I have my reserve of bread cubes I can add to soak it up.

Transfer the stuffing to a baking dish, cover it, and put it in the oven for an hour at 325°F. Take off the lid at the end of the hour and give it a few minutes to bake uncovered to crust the top, and it’s done. I use my 6½-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. Whatever you use, make sure it’s big enough to hold all the stuffing with room to spare for it to bubble up as you bake it in the oven, at least 5 quarts, or you’ll have a mess on your hands. The stuffing keeps a day or two in the fridge, which makes it a good make-ahead dish when the turkey is hogging the oven.

The no-nuts policy

I enjoyed eating Thanksgiving dinner at Janet’s parents’ house. Her dad was generous with the bourbon before dinner, and after for that matter, and her mother made a tasty Thanksgiving meal. Except for one thing. She committed the cardinal sin of adding nuts to her salads and to her stuffing. As my brother-in-law would say whenever he encountered nuts in her salads, “I’m not a squirrel.” After that first Thanksgiving dinner with them I almost gave up on the family, because of the nuts. But by then I had already bought Janet the ring, so it was too late. I thought I could coach her mom into making a proper stuffing, without the nuts, but alas… I failed. I never picked them out, but I did try to eat around them. Every now and then a chunk of walnut made it into my mouth, and I lived with it rather than spit it out. Janet was worth the sacrifice. And that’s where my no-nuts policy was born. I never really “almost gave up on the family.” That’s just a bit of literary hyperbole. Janet’s mom fed me too well. Especially her Black Forest Cake. That’s the real reason I married Janet…to get the recipe.

That’s my Thanksgiving stuffing in a nutshell. Without the nuts. It satisfies my carb craving, kicks off the holiday season on the right foot, and leaves my kitchen smelling like Christmas.

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and I’m ready to start cooking my stuffing. OK technically dressing. Yeesh. You’ll find it in the recipe section of our website. Right now, I have rolls to buy. More than any reasonable person needs. More than I need for my stuffing. Because it’s King’s Hawaiian Home for the Holidays season. It’s not Thanksgiving without King’s Hawaiian rolls in the stuffing and on the table.