Keep Thanksgiving meal simple and cook sides on a sheet pan

Cooking Thanksgiving dinner is stressful, even if you’re a professional. So this year I set out to chart an easier path.

For weeks, I experimented with the idea of doing a sheetpan Thanksgiving.

The approach, where everything is cooked in the oven on sheet pans, has caught on because it’s easy to do, easy to understand and because high-heat roasting generally makes food taste good.

After sometrial runs,

I’ve reached some conclusions: It works for Thanksgiving. And though I worried that it might be too basic an approach for a holiday meal, I can unreservedly say: I love it.

Using three sheet pans and one saucepan (can’t forget the gravy), I can serve eight to 12 guests a meal in under four hours. It’s a simple meal, but it covers the bases: Instagram-worthy herb-roasted turkey; roasted Brussels sprouts with pears and ham; garlic and rosemary Hasselback potatoes; and enough gravy to baptize everything.

I use rimmed half-sheet baking pans made for commercial kitchens, measuring 18 by 13 inches.

You can find half-sheet pans in most restaurant and cooking supply stores or online. The size is big enough for the bird and wide enough to give vegetables room to roast.

The trick to making the turkey work on a sheet pan is to spatchcock it — use heavy kitchen shears to remove its backbone.

Though it won’t look like a bird from a Norman Rockwell painting, it has many advantages: It will cook in half the time; the legs and breast meat — because they are all now about the same thickness — will cook at the same time, so you don’t have to dry out the white meat to fully cook the dark; brining is not necessary; and there’s a much better chance of getting browned, crispy and delicious skin.

Sheet-pan dinners are built for charring root vegetables; here, they shine.

And as everything roasts away, you can make the gravy.