WhyNot, I bow to your experience. My stuffing shall remain unchanged. Maybe this is the year I finally get the flavor right! (I won’t.) Honestly, my adult life has been one long quest to replicate the taste and texture of my grandfather’s bread stuffing. It was always such a favorite of mine and every year, every year I think I’ve surely finally got it … and then I don’t. Again. sigh
Anyway, I roasted the turkey legs earlier today and right now the bones and vegetables and seasonings are simmering away on the stove to make my lovely stock. I’m definitely going to try out the roux with the gluten-free flour tomorrow as I make it into gravy, and I’ll report back!
If you are making your gravy in advance, gluten-free options do not hold up to refrigeration the same way flour-thickened gravy will and may thin or separate.
Personally, I’d use potato starch, cornstarch, or arrowroot instead of a GF flour blend. I try to avoid the gums as they cause digestive issues for some people and I don’t feel they really add anything when you are trying to thicken instead of bind.
Another option would be making your normal gravy, but thickening a separate portion for the GF using a blender and a bit of the non-dairy potato mash. I know it’s a pain to make a lot of separate dishes, but it wouldn’t be much extra work as you’d have all the stuff out anyway.
Oh, dear. The gravy was going to spend the next week and a half in the freezer. I’d hate to have it seem to turn out all right tomorrow and then be too liquidy on the big day. Hrmm. Maybe it’s time to let go of my attachment to the roux and go the cornstarch slurry route.
Yeah, don’t bother with the stuffing. I LOVE stuffing, and have been trying to replicate my mothers for years. And my mother in law loves different stuffings and has been trying to find one for the ten years I’ve been off gluten. For me, its simple, I don’t really want any stuffing but my mothers anyway - and hers I’ll have a bite or two of and hope I don’t end up in the bathroom for half an hour.
There are foods that as a GF person, I really wish people just wouldn’t bother with. Its really nice that they are thinking of me - but everyone now has to eat a bad cake. Just feed everyone else the good cake - the bad cake isn’t even good enough to tempt me - but if you slip me a bit of chocolate as a substitute dessert, you’ll have your cake and I’ll know you were thinking of me.
Same with rolls - everyone else can have the good rolls. If you call me, I’ll bring a roll or two for myself - I have some in the freezer and they are expensive and not very good.
Hey, as long as I’m on a roll here, and just slightly off-topic – Dangerosa and anyone else with gluten issues, what sort of desserts do you enjoy? To make it interesting, I will be feeding people who have problems with gluten, dairy, and eggs. What I’m leaning towards doing now is making cookies for the kids and cranberry sorbet for the adults. The advantage to both is that I can make them the day before, taking some of the pressure off the day itself, but is there something even nicer that I just haven’t thought of yet?
I just buy gluten free gravy at Whole Foods. Easy game expecially if you only have one gluten-free guest and they might feel better seeing a sealed box get opened and heated.
For dessert, I’ve used gluten free pie crust from Whole Foods or Wegmans.
A lot of the gluten free stuff is not great and it almost always is expensive. I prefer to just bring my own for some of these side items.
Pumpkin cheesecake without the crust. Pumpkin pie without the crust. Wait, that’s just “gluten free”. Dairy and egg and gluten free? Cranberry sorbet it is.
Or, roasted orange sweet potatoes, cooked long enough to caramelize a bit. Drizzle with melted browned sugar, toasted pecans, and cranberry sauce. Toppings “on the side” so people can dress to taste, plus you can include some dairy toppings and pie crust “cookies” on the side.
I agree with the advice to not bother with “gluten free” versions of stuff. Either use things that are inherently gluten free, or forget it. You can make all-corn-cornbread and make stuffing from it, or make wild rice stuffing, or whatever, but using “gluten free bread” for stuffing is wrongheaded. Also, stuffing is evil. Or rather, don’t stuff the bird, make it in pans. Toss some chopped onion into the bird cavity instead, and use the roasted onion in your gravy.
Also, high roast. Roast your turkey at 450 F. Yes, you heard me. Foil over the breast and wing tips, take off the foil half-way through. High roast baby!
when you get into dairy issues plus gluten, you pretty much can’t feed everyone dessert unless you serve fruit. Sorbet is good. Good chocolate - not milk chocolate, with wine and fruit. Berries with chocolate drizzled over the top.
I like flourless chocolate cake, but its got dairy in it. My husband likes cheesecake and creme brulee, so we split lots of those - I’m not a big cheesecake person (my husband was thrilled when I went gluten free, he sometimes now gets cheesecake) - both dairy. You can make a pretty good tofu mousse by just putting tofu in a food processor with chocolate - or whatever sort of mousse you want - and sugar - I think that’s it but its been a long time, you would need to look up the recipe (my sister ex law was a gluten free vegan, I baked her wedding cake - it was the worst wedding cake EVARRR! And cooked a lot for her - I remember the tofu mousse being among the best).
Cranberry sorbet wouldn’t be my thing. I like cranberries with dinner and am one of those “make my own cranberry sauce for dinner” people, but it isn’t a dessert flavor for me. I’d probably do the mousse, and make a chocolate, pumpkin tofu mousse parfait. I’ve had some really good vegan pumpkin pies over the years. Pecan pie with a GF crust would be dairy free (but without the whipped cream, WHY?) However, tofu mousse isn’t going to freeze well. For me, pumpkin at Thanksgiving is like mom’s stuffing, it sort of needs to be there.
Gluten-free bread, pizza crust, pasta, pretzels, pie crust, etc. don’t usually measure up because the elastic property of the gluten is important to the texture.
But gluten-free cakes, muffins, quick breads, and cookies can be much better that ones made with wheat flour. Notice how you are often cautioned not to overmix the batter so as not to produce toughness from the gluten. Wheat flour is used because it is common and cheap, not because it tastes better. In my pantry, I have almond meal, tapioca flour, potato flour, sweet potato flour, oat flour, brown rice flour, white rice flour, sweet rice flour, teff flour, arrowroot, sorghum flour, corn flour, and buckwheat flour. Each has its own taste and properties.
A coconut cake made with coconut flour, almond meal, and tapioca flour has a superior taste to one made with wheat flour, it isn’t an imitation.
Rather than try for a flaky pie crust, I often make an oatmeal crust, sometimes with crushed pecans. It goes very well with pumpkin pie. Coconut oil is a nicely-flavored substitute for butter, unlike nasty margarine to go dairy-free, but your egg-avoiders would require egg substitute, so no telling how that would turn out.
A sorbet is definitely a good idea, but of you are hoping to make it a couple days in advance, be careful of your freezer temperature. It can easily crystallize or get a stretchy texture that is not great.
This pumpkin rum sorbet with cinnamon walnut brittle sounds and looks amazing.
The brittle does contain a small amount of butter. I’d substitute coconut oil or peanut butter.
And having thought it over, I think this is the winning idea. I try to do as many of the preparations in the days before the Big Day as possible, so I hesitated about adding a task to the frenzy of throwing things together in the final two hours, but honestly, I’ve got this down after all these years, and the gravy is important enough that it’s worth taking more trouble. I made a grand stock yesterday and I’m going to freeze that and make it into gravy on the actual day.
<snipped with respect> Yeah, it’s actually dressing, not stuffing, but old habits die hard. I stopped stuffing my bird a couple of years ago and now I fill the cavity with onion, celery, apple, thyme, and other aromatics, and slip the pan of dressing into the oven as soon as the turkey comes out.
Dear holy God. That recipe looks flabbergastingly awesome. I like the cranberry sorbet as a tarter dessert to cut through the heaviness of the feast that preceded it, but I could see making this either instead of or in addition to, depending on how ambitious I find myself. Given that I am in the Land Without Canned Pumpkin, I’d best get my hands on an actual pumpkin soon before they’re impossible to find.
I’m less concerned about dairy than about gluten or eggs, since it isn’t as large a problem for the friends and family who have an issue with it; a couple of tablespoons in a particular dish is okay, whereas any amount of eggs will see my husband paying the price afterwards. They just need to know what has which amount, so they can make their own decision about how much they can safely indulge.
If you can’t get a decent cooking pumpkin, you could substitute acorn squash, butternut squash, or sweet potato/yam to no ill effect. My local grocery store has frozen “cooked squash” (they must say which squash in the ingredients, but it’s an orange winter squash anyway) in the frozen veggie section, already puréed and in a block that would surely work, so check the frozen veg area too if you don’t find anything suitable fresh.
Update! We celebrated Thanksgiving today and everything went just splendidly! I ended up using a cornstarch slurry on the gravy. It got a bit thicker than I wanted it, so I thinned it back out with some white wine, and it was absolutely delicious! I was so inspired by the recipe for pumpkin rum sorbet with walnut brittle that I got an ice cream maker last week and used it to make both that and orange sorbet. Both sorbets were fabulous, and complemented each other nicely. The brittle was my first and turned out exactly right and extraordinarily flavorful.
This may have been the best Thanksgiving dinner I’ve ever made. Thanks again for all the input! Y’all’re the best!