When my fellow food editors and I gathered to think up our Thanksgiving menu, we agreed it needed to be simple enough to pull off with just one oven—and without a mile-long grocery list. From there, the consensus kept coming. We all wanted to keep things lighter and fresher than Grandma's menu, but not without butter, and definitely not without a little old-school elegance. And we all gravitated to using Middle Eastern spices—probably because we've all been a little obsessed with them this year.
As we started developing recipes, we also discovered plenty of Thanksgiving intel that can make any menu better—you'll find it all below. I've even put together a play-by-play game plan so you can pull of the whole menu without a hitch and enjoy hosting the holiday just as much as you enjoy devouring the feast.
Thanksgiving is always going to be a big meal, and you're going to want to save room for second helpings of stuffing and pie after that, so there's no need for a lot of appetizers. But you need something to keep your guests from getting peckish (and stay out of your way) while you finish cooking, and it is always nice to have something salty and crunchy to go with that first drink.
Salty, crunchy—but not creamy. There's plenty of cream coming later. Instead, make a batch of warm olives, spiced with Aleppo pepper, fennel seeds, and lemon zest—flavors that will all be echoed in the meal to come. Pair it with a light and creamy yogurt-cauliflower dip and use crunchy romaine and endive instead of crackers or chips—the carbs can come later.
The perennial Thanksgiving challenge: How do you get a crispy-skinned bird that's moist, tender, and flavorful without too much fuss? First, we set ourselves some strict ground rules. No brining or salting the turkey in advance, no basting or flipping of the bird during cooking. That stumped us for a bit. But then grilled cheese came to the rescue.
We'd been making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches slathered in mayo, and Katherine Sacks, our Assistant Food Editor, had the brilliant idea of testing out a mayo-slathered turkey. Would mayo lend the same better-crisping, better-tasting, better-browning magic to turkey as it does to grilled cheese? Yes. Hell yes.
We tried a lot of different versions and techniques—an herbed mayo, a raw-garlic mayo, mayo under and/or over the skin—before settling on a roasted-garlic mayo rubbed both under and over the skin of the bird. The result is fantastic: The flavor of the roasted garlic gently permeates the meat, and the skin is addictively golden and crispy. (I know, because I kept snagging pieces of it to nibble.)
Mayo-slathering your turkey is super-easy to pull off, but it is messy. If that's a concern, wear gloves. They'll save you from garlic-scented hands, and put a layer of protection between you and that big, raw bird.
For all you gravy lovers out there, I'm sorry. This year, we're making pan sauce. It's easier, faster, lighter, and more flavorful than most gravies I've met—especially when you spike it with plenty of lemon and fresh parsley like we did. Best of all, you can make it in mere minutes while your turkey rests before carving. We thickened it just a little with a bit of cornstarch, so it's naturally gluten-free. Try it and you may never go back to gravy again.
Remember when I said we didn't want to create a long grocery list for this menu? I wasn't kidding. Take, for example, apple cider. We use it three ways in our Thanksgiving menu : boiled down into a syrup to help moisten the stuffing, mixed with melted butter and Aleppo pepper to flavor a gorgeous root vegetable casserole (more on that below), and simmered into a sweet-tart cranberry-cherry compote to serve with the turkey. Cherries in cranberry sauce may seem like a funny idea, but frozen sweet cherries are so easy to find year-round, and they help balance out the tartness of the cranberries and lend a deeper, richer flavor to the sauce.
How many times have you served a mashed sweet potato casserole? I serve one every year. Which is why I decided it was time to try something new. We've become rather obsessed with hasselbacking in the Epicurious Test Kitchen recently. I've also been having a little love affair with the mandoline, and spent a long time this fall thinly slicing apples with it, so these two things were on my mind when I started filling a braising pan with stacks of mandolined sweet potatoes, parsnips, and apples. After a first round of baking, I decided to get rid of the apples and use apple cider instead, spiced up with lots of Aleppo pepper and fresh thyme and enriched with melted butter. It's something like a potato gratin made with cider instead of cream, with the nice crisp edges of a hasslebacked potato. It's sweet, spicy, crave-able, and a totally gorgeous addition to the table.
All three of our main side dishes on this menu can be prepped in advance, and then finished just before serving, and we've included make-ahead instructions in all of the recipes. The stuffing is especially good to get done the day before: it can be prepared through nearly the final step, and then just mixed with eggs and baked the day of. For a better, more interesting stuffing (well, technically "dressing" since we're baking it in a dish not inside the bird) our Acting Food Editor, Mindy, cooks shallots, celery, and apples in a mix of bacon fat and butter for a perfect balance of rich smokiness. To balance out that richness, sweet yellow raisins get soaked in apple cider vinegar and added to the mix to create little sweet-tart flavor bombs. And because even on Thanksgiving we're trying to stay #wasteless, Mindy uses celery leaves in addition to parsley leaves to add extra-fresh flavor to the dish.
Many of you will probably agree with me when I say that every Thanksgiving menu requires green beans. But those green beans don't need to be in a casserole. They don't even need to be warm. In fact, Mindy and I both think they're best when they fill the need for something crunchy and green. So Mindy blanched a bunch of green beans, tossed them with raw fennel, and coated the whole business in a spice-infused nut mix called dukkah. It's exactly the kind of crunchy, zesty dish that provides balance to everything else on a Thanksgiving plate.
Homemade rolls or biscuits may seem like too much to take on, considering everything you're juggling at Thanksgiving. But not if you make drop biscuits: there's no kneading or rising or even rolling required. Just stir the dough together, scoop it into a cake pan or casserole dish, and throw it in the oven while the turkey rests. They'll take 25 minutes to bake, and your turkey should rest for 30, so you'll have super-tender, buttery, warm biscuits to put on your table as soon as it's time to eat. You can also bake them earlier in the day and just pop them in the oven to reheat.
One pie is not going to feed 8 to10 guests (at least, not the kind of hungry guests we usually feed). But one deep-dish pie will. So Katherine went deep with our show-stopping, grand-finale pie. Inspired by her favorite buttermilk pie, she used maple syrup and heavy cream instead of the traditional buttermilk (she also gave it a generous splash of bourbon). Though you may worry that it's not done when it comes out of the oven all wobbly, never fear—it firms up as it cools into a perfectly gooey texture. A toasty and nutty pecan crust complements all that maple and bourbon, and is super easy to make by grinding pecans with all-purpose flour in the food processor. The easiest part about this pie? The crust is press-in, so no rolling or pie-dough anxiety required! For serving, Katherine tops the pie with a vanilla-infused whipped cream that gets a hint of tartness from a bit of yogurt. A little bit fancy, sure. But not the least bit fussy.
