- 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, custard-
like 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 do 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 high-
quality white sandwich bread) makes for better flavor
absorption and retention, and that’s what stuffing is all
about.