Name: Our Favorite Stuffing With Cornbread and Sausage
Cook time: 50 minutes
Total time: 2 hours 20 minutes
Yield: 8–10 servings
Ingredients: ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus more for pan; ½ pound good-quality day-old crusty country-style or peasant bread, torn into ¾" pieces (about 5 cups); ½ pound day-old cornbread, broken into ¾" pieces (about 5 cups); 1 pound breakfast sausage links, casings removed, or ground breakfast sausage mix, broken up into ½" pieces; 2½ cups chopped onions (about 1 medium plus 1 large onion); 3 medium celery stalks, sliced; 2 large eggs; 2½ cups low-sodium chicken broth; ½ cup chopped parsley; 2 tablespoons chopped sage; 1 tablespoon chopped thyme; 2 teaspoons chopped rosemary; 2 teaspoons kosher salt; 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper; A 13x9x2" or other 3-quart baking dish

The best Thanksgiving side dishes to accompany your turkey from refreshing salads to the creamiest mashed potatoes we've...

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Prop Styling by Anna Surbatovich, Food Styling by Olivia Mack Anderson

There are over 250 Thanksgiving dressing and stuffing recipes on Epicurious, including a heap of cornbread stuffing recipes. Some are packed with Italian sausage and Parmesan, some are meat-free and enriched with buttermilk biscuits, others are gluten-free and docked with sweet potatoes and spicy pork sausage, and still, there are many, many more.

To determine how to make our ultimate cornbread dressing recipe, the Epicurious Test Kitchen baked batch after golden-brown batch of the classic Thanksgiving side dish. Rounds of testing lead us to our most delicious Thanksgiving stuffing ever, which has a mix of country bread and cornbread, savory breakfast sausage, and plenty of fresh herbs to make it truly irresistible.

The tricks to making this great, crispy-topped stuffing are easy: tear the two breads into bite-sized pieces and dry them out slowly in the oven so that they retain texture and body when mixed with flavorful chicken stock, fresh sage, and other herbs. Cook sausage in a pan over medium-high heat until crusty and browned, then melt butter in the same pan and sauté diced white or yellow onions and celery, scraping up any stuck-on sage sausage bits so that you don’t miss out on an ounce of flavor. And bake in a covered casserole dish (butter or spray it with cooking spray first, so that the baked dressing doesn’t stick) at a steady medium heat until cooked through, before removing the cover to brown the top.

Editor’s note: This recipe was originally published October 9, 2017.

Cooks' Note

Omit the sausage and use vegetable broth instead of chicken to make this stuffing vegetarian-friendly.

Recipe notes

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