• The Food Lover’s Companion says the two terms can be used interchangeably With that out of the way, I expect to hear no more on that semantics discussion this holiday season So, moving on, stuffing While it can be made with any number of bases, the most popular type (and my favorite) is made with bread, broth, eggs, and butter Essentially it’s best to think of stuffing as a savory bread pudding when constructing a recipe The key to great bread pudding is to use the bread as a sponge to soak up as much flavorful liquid as possible At the same time, through you don’t want it to be spongy The cooked stuffing should have a moist, tender, custardlike texture It should be firm enough to cut with a knife but soft enough to eat with a spoon, with a bit of space left over to soak up some gravy Much of this has to with how you pick and handle your bread, but before you get there, you’ve got to decide what kind of bread you are going to use Whole-grain breads may have more flavor on their own, but they are rougher in texture than white-flour breads Since in a stuffing the bread is more a vehicle for flavor than a flavor on its own, I prefer to use a white bread as it achieves a more custard-like texture It’s tempting to use a high-quality, crusty, chewy, large-holed fancy-pants artisanal bread, but the finer-hole structure of regular supermarket-style “Italian” or “French” bread (or just highquality white sandwich bread) makes for better flavor absorption and retention, and that’s what stuffing is all about After you’ve cubed your bread, the next stage is to dry it out It may surprise you, but drying and staling are not the same thing (see “Drying Versus Staling,” here) Though many recipes call for stale bread, what they’re actually looking for is dry bread Staling takes time Luckily for us, drying is fast I dry my bread by toasting it in a low (275°F) oven for about 45 minutes, tossing it a couple of times halfway through By drying the bread like this, you make enough room in the cubes from two regular-sized loaves (about 2½ pounds) to absorb a full cups of chicken or turkey broth It’s so much broth that the stuffing will almost taste as if you baked it in the bird if you do it in a separate pan (for instructions on how to safely bake the stuffing in the bird, see here) I recommend starting it with foil on top to trap in some moisture, before removing the foil and crisping up the top The flavorings I go with are classic: butter (and plenty of it), sage sausage (you can get away with just sage for a nonmeaty version), onions, celery, and garlic My sister likes to add dried cranberries and my mother likes to add chestnuts They are, of course, both wrong ... I dry my bread by toasting it in a low (2 75°F) oven for about 45 minutes, tossing it a couple of times halfway through By drying the bread like this, you make enough room in the cubes from two regular-sized loaves (about 2½... It’s so much broth that the stuffing will almost taste as if you baked it in the bird if you do it in a separate pan (for instructions on how to safely bake the stuffing in the bird, see here) I... to trap in some moisture, before removing the foil and crisping up the top The flavorings I go with are classic: butter (and plenty of it), sage sausage (you can get away with just sage for a nonmeaty