FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT
Homemade or store-bought? We put a few Thanksgiving favourites to the test,
Every year, home cooks put themselves through the ringer with Thanksgiving dinner, feeling the pressure to please and impress everyone at the dinner table with the perfectly cooked bird and all its trimmings. But there’s nothing wrong with enlisting some help to lessen the stresses of cooking for the holiday, especially if it means saving money and spending more time with friends and less time huddled over a stove.
Aside from having a potluck where each guest is in charge of bringing a dish, or getting someone in the kitchen to help wash and cut vegetables, there’s also the option of using a few storebought items as a shortcut. But which dishes can be assembled using storebought items and which are best done from scratch?
I did an unofficial taste test in The Star test kitchen: preparing store-bought and from-scratch versions of three classic Thanksgiving sides to see which dishes could be made with a little help from store-brands and which need to be homemade. Some found that fromscratch dishes tasted vastly better, while some people found the difference to be negligible. There was also one factor I didn’t consider: nostalgia. Even if the dish is made of the most pro- cessed and unhealthy food, warm memories of grandma serving it trumps any gourmet or homemade version.
First up is dressing, which is essentially stuffing that is not served inside the turkey. Time-crunched cooks tend to favour dressing over stuffing because cooking a unstuffed bird is much faster, especially if the turkey is spatchcock (another word for butterflied). A flattened turkey may not look like something from the pages of a magazine, but it ensures much more even (and faster) cooking. A typical 15-pound spatchcock bird would take just a little under two hours to roast.
As for the dressing (or stuffing) itself, the most popular store-bought brand is Stove Top.
A box of the stuff costs just over a dollar, but you have to use 4 to 5 boxes to make enough for eight people. Nonetheless, preparing it is really simple: stir the dehydrated seasoned bread crumbs into hot water mixed with margarine and let it sit for five minutes. Homemade dressing, however, is a more involved process that first requires browning vegetables, fresh sage and crumbled sausages in a pan before adding the bread and a splash of orange juice.
Total cooking time is closer to the 30-minute mark, and the cost of a pound of sausages alone was just a bit over what I paid for 5 boxes of Stove Top.
While I found the taste of the Stove Top to be super salty and one-note with an odd spongy texture, some of my co-workers said that the reconstituted stuffing reminded them of their childhood (nostalgia is a heck of a drug). Still, all of them preferred the homemade version, with one editor calling it a meal in itself because of the addition of sausages and liked the subtle sweetness brought on by the orange juice. With that, I’d recommend making the dressing from scratch, but have a box or two of Stove Top around for the memories.
Then there’s the green bean casserole smothered in cream of mushroom soup and topped with fried onions, a creation from the Campbell’s soup company in 1955. To my surprise, the original recipe is more work than just pouring a can of mushroom soup over beans and baking it: two cans of the soup have to be first whisked with soy sauce, milk, black pepper and the French’s brand of fried onions that comes in a plastic container.
The homemade version requires making the cream of mushroom soup from scratch: first browning onions and mushrooms then adding cream, taking about an extra 30 minutes compared to using the canned soup.
The price of the homemade casserole is comparable, as two cans of soup and a container of fried onions cost around $8.50 total while fresh mushrooms, cream and raw onions cost about $8 altogether.
As for taste, it was pretty split between the testers. A few said that while the homemade version tastes less salty, if they were really short on time they’d have no problems making the green bean casserole with the store-bought stuff. Others would do a mix: make the mushroom soup from scratch, but use store-bought fried onions rather than frying their own at the end.
Lastly, is the ultimate of Thanksgiving foods: the wobbly cranberry sauce in the shape of a tin can. At $2.79, a 348 mL can from Ocean Spray is cheap, kitschy and easy to serve: open the can and pour it into a bowl. The downside is that my coworkers said it tastes too sweet, with little of the tart cranberries shining through.
At the time of my test, the bags of fresh cranberries that appear in grocery stores around Christmas and Thanksgiving had not yet appeared, but they would be a better option and would produce a similar result. Most cranberry sauce recipes use about 3 cups (750 mL) of cranberries, which is the amount in a fresh bag, which costs arount $2, however I used afrozen bag which costs around $4. The homemade version takes about 20 minutes from start to finish, but it’s a one-pot side dish that only requires some stirring (plus it can be made a few days in advance). The payoff is that my co-workers unanimously agreed that it is bursting with tart cranberry flavour that would cut through the salty, juicy turkey with just a hint of warm spices and had way less sugar than many recipes I’ve seen.
After the taste tests, everyone preferred the taste of the homemade dishes but if they were making it themselves, half of them wouldn’t hesitate to make green beans with canned soup and pre-fried onions or use a few boxes of Stove Top to relive their childhoods.
But in the end, the holiday feast shouldn’t be a contest to see who could make the most perfect meal: it’s about coming together with close friends and family, with the food enhancing the gathering.