Homemade Cornbread Dressing Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is cornbread dressing made of? ›

Add sautéed onion and celery to the crumbled cornbread. Stir in chicken stock, eggs, sage, salt, and pepper until well combined. Pour dressing into the prepared baking dish. Bake in the preheated oven until dressing just starts to turn golden brown around the edges, about 30 minutes.

In a large bowl, whisk together broth, soup, eggs, poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper; stir in vegetable mixture. Crumble cornbread into broth mixture and stir until well combined. Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake until center is set, 45 to 55 minutes.

So stuffing is cooked inside the bird. Dressing is cooked outside the bird, usually in a casserole dish.

A great make-ahead recipe: You can make this Thanksgiving side dish up to a day in advance, and keep it in the fridge until you're ready to bake it. The leftovers are good for up to 4 days so you can enjoy leftover cornbread dressing with your turkey leftovers the next day.

If your dressing doesn't turn out right, don't fret. You can usually fix it. If you find your stuffing is too dry, add additional warmed broth to it, stir well, and return to the oven, checking periodically. If the stuffing is overly wet and too gummy, cook it uncovered for a bit longer, checking periodically.

Southern cornbread has traditionally been made with little or no sugar and smaller amounts of flour (or no flour), with northern cornbread being sweeter and more cake-like. Southern cornbread traditionally used white cornmeal and buttermilk. Other ingredients such as pork rinds are sometimes used.

A quick Google search will tell you that Southern cornbread is oftentimes devoid of any sugar, while its Northern counterpart is light, sweet, buttery and cakelike.

If your cornbread dressing is mushy, be sure you baked it in a wide enough pan. Plenty of surface area will help the top crisp and the bottom bake completely. Also, be sure you measured your ingredients properly and didn't add too much liquid.

There are some basic differences between Southern corn-bread and what many people call "Yankee" cornbread. Southern cornbread, besides being made from white corn meal, has very little sugar in it - between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. And it is made with buttermilk.

But for the Thanksgiving side dish in the South, the term dressing was adopted in place of stuffing, which was viewed as a crude term, during the Victorian era. Although dressing and stuffing are interchangeable terms, the signature ingredient of this Thanksgiving side dish in the South is cornbread.

What did cornbread used to be called? ›

The name came from the Algonquin word apan, meaning "baked." The Narragansett word for cornbread, nokechick, became no-cake and then hoe-cake. Because cornbread traveled well, some began calling it journey cake, which evolved into the name Johnny cake. But whatever it was called, it was all cornbread.

The stuffing should be moist but not wet. If there is a puddle of broth at the bottom of the bowl, you've added too much.

I got you! Bake in cubes at 350 for 15 minutes, toss and bake again for 10-15 minutes. And you have stuffing bread.

Be sure to leave enough time — the cornbread needs to sit out overnight to harden slightly before you make the dressing.

To make the dressing, add the dried cornbread and crumbled toast into a large bowl. Set aside. In a saucepan, sauté onions, celery and green bell peppers in a little bit of butter or olive oil until tender. Add the sautéed veggies into the cornbread mixture.

The term dressing, per the History Channel, originated around the 1850s, when the Victorians deemed stuffing too crude for the dish to be named. This happened around the same time that the term “dark meat” began to refer to chicken legs and thighs.

To understand the difference between the two, all you have to do is look at the cooking method. Stuffing is stuffed (literally) inside the cavity of the turkey, while dressing is roasted in a separate casserole dish.

Dressing: Dressing typically includes ingredients like cornbread, white bread, or biscuits, mixed with vegetables, herbs, spices, and sometimes sausage or other meats. It is often moistened with broth or stock and baked in a casserole dish until it forms a crust on top.