Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, a blog where one man bites off more than he can chew, and terrifies onlookers by simply swallowing it whole. I’m your half-Anaconda Author, Jon O’Guin. And let me tell you, today I bit off a LOT. Metaphorically, I choked my own ass out. Was the meal worth the wait? Well, you can skip the deets and get to the eats with this link here, but the rest of us are going to find out.

 

Betting on Bad Back-ups.

As you may have forgotten after our week-long visit to Vietnam, a little over a week ago, I was lashing out at people for being culinarily inflexible. I’d apologize, saying I was in a bad place when I wrote that, but I’m in exactly the same place, so I’m just going to keep lashing out. I blame inertia.

Newton, you bastard.

The point culminated in point-ing (ha) out that people were over-stating how hard the Bon Appetit recipe for Cornbread Stuffing was to make, and/or convince people to eat; and realizing, as I did so, that it would be quite bad form to say “You’re all being babies, this isn’t THAT hard to make”, and then not put in the effort to demonstrate how easy it was. Which is a pretty standard move for me: I will let my mouth talk a lot of shit, as long as I then at least ATTEMPT to back it up. Hell, back in my younger days, it was something of a party trick: if someone dared me, or bet me, that I COULDN’T do something that I kind of wanted to, suddenly, not only was I IN, but it tended to go fairly well. (In the short term. Long-term, it turns out basing your self-confidence on being challenged has some downsides.)

And so I paused the OTHER cooking plans I had, because, as my brother pointed out, it would be a dick move to prove I had the perfect Stuffing recipe 3 days before Thanksgiving, and expect you to read, shop, cook, and bask in that narrow window, so we had to make it TODAY if we wanted to be taken seriously. And if there’s one thing I want people to do, it’s laugh at me. The SECOND thing I would like them to do is take me seriously. I understand that’s confusing, but please, believe and/or laugh at it.

I am a very serious clown, madam.

So I buckled down, went shopping, and almost immediately proved people right by being an asshole about it. See, one of the things I complained about was that people weren’t ‘stopping’ at the right point: The video has, basically, three recipes, for three “stages”. You could just make the stuffing, and be fine. You could also make a “chile crisp”, to add a little depth and heat to it. And you could COMBINE the stuffing, the crisp, and more ingredients, to make a stuffing Fried Rice. And because I’m a dick, I said “You know what, I’ll prove that even step TWO of the process isn’t that hard! Cornbread stuffing and chile crisp!” And discovered that my local Safeway was out of dried chiles (well, the right kind of dried chiles. We’ll cover that later). And my local Walmart didn’t have any. I had to (and this may be one of the bougier sentences I’ve ever uttered) convince my brother to stop off at the Fred Meyer after an evening of theatre (Macbeth) and alcohol (A pre-show Scotch tasting),  where we found all three pepper varieties needed. SO IT’S NOT THAT HARD. Just…check all the local supermarkets. Or order them online. Or I suppose CALL the stores and ask, like it’s the 1980’s or something.

That little mishap out of the way, it was time for the only part of the process that didn’t technically go wrong, and STILL wasn’t quite right. (Oh, yeah, there’s a reason we didn’t do 900 words of history and etymology: this is a full-bore rootin’ tootin’ catastrophe. And also, I mean, this is CORNBREAD STUFFING, and this specific recipe was invented 4 months ago. I don’t have much in either category to cover. )

This is cornbread. So named because it is BREAD made out of CORN.

Things Get Corny

I’m going to start off with two major complaints: Firstly, second-tier foods are kind of a pain. By which I mean “Foods that must be made out of already-made foods”. Like, this recipe, rather obviously, requires that you have cornbread on hand. And sure, Cornbread is easier than fucking pie to make, and the recipe says you can use store-bought, but it needs 3 pounds, and my local stores only had 2 pounds for sale, so I was stuck making it. It just ate up a little more time.

Stir some shit up, heat it up, and call it.

Second, I want it noted that there’s a bit of dickery going on with the recipe they give you: the cornbread stuffing needs 3 pounds of cornbread, but their cornbread recipe makes a little over 2.6 pounds. What, am I supposed to make 2 batches, and only use a fifth of the second? (I actually presume it’s just a matter of discrepancies in shit like the local humidity, my particular brand of cornmeal, etc, as the recipe notes a VOLUME of cornbread to get, with a bit of a range.)

Again, it wasn’t HARD. It’s two bowls , a pan, 15 minutes of effort, and 30 minutes of waiting. Knocked it out in an afternoon before a Scotch tasting.

This is half the loaf.

And that was the last time things were truly good.

 

Dawn of the Last Day

So, Sunday rolled up, and my schedule was pretty clear: about 2.5 hours of cooking to achieve in…7 hours before an evening rehearsal.  I knew in my heart that there was at least another 30 minutes of shit to do, because I am TERRIBLE at mise-en-place, partly because, as I complained in the Shaking Beef post, my counters are too low. (And, while I know no one wanted an update: my kitchen counters are actually exactly average height. Which is about 2.5 inches under where would be comfortable for ME, a problem WORSENED by the fact that the built-in cutting board is another 1.5 inches under the lip of the counter. I MEASURED.)

But so, I began the day with a simple task: dry out the previous day’s cornbread in the oven, so it can absorb everything later. Just throw the oven to 400 degrees, cut up the cornbread into chunks, and toss it in to dry. Except DON’T do that, because, fun fact, the recipe says to dry it at 325 degrees, not 400. Some my cornbread ended up less “dry with some browning on the edges” than, well… “very browned, veering into char”.

Cornbread Crouton sounds like a weird Southern band.

This was…frustrating, but workable. I forced Nate to stop watching one of the three football games of varying degrees of unimportance he was watching that afternoon to help me by scraping off all the overly browned bits on the cornbread. (which, all told, cost us 5 ounces of cornbread, through lost water and crumb) Meanwhile, I…did something stupid. In that I started the Chile Crisp BEFORE I started the rest of the stuffing. Despite the Crisp having a cooking time of 40 minutes, meaning it could be done, in totality, while the stuffing was in the oven, I decided to make it first for reasons that I cannot explain. I think I was trying to delay needing the cornbread, since it hadn’t even fully DRIED: the outsides had darkened before the insides desiccated!

So, the Chile Crisp is, in theory, a pretty simple thing: You fry some shallots and garlic, get them golden brown and crunchy, then infuse the oil you cooked them in by frying some dried peppers in it for a minute, then blitz the peppers into chunks, and mix it all back together.

Boiling Shallots in oil is at least a novel experience.

You get crispy alliums, pepper flakes, and seasoned oil…And, mine went weird. Specifically, for some reason, my garlic and shallots just REFUSED to get crispy. Like, looking at the recipes from BA, the process SHOULD take between 14 and 25 minutes. Mine cooked for at LEAST 25-30 minutes, and came out soft, like, “consistency of jam” soft. That could be because my stove is, again, nearly 30 years old, and therefore just wasn’t heating the oil as much as it should be, or it could be because it was a humid day yesterday, or both.  And you know what? The chile crisp, while not, exactly “Crisp”, still tasted pretty good.

It looked pretty good, too, if, again, not at all crisp.

It’s not truly “spicy”, in my admittedly biased opinion, but instead it’s got a kind of smoky, deep flavor, with a little bit of spice.

Once I finished that, I was ready to get everything working together. And find out how things went wrong with THAT.

 

Meddling in the Mix

So things went very slightly wrong in the mise-en-place stage, which I’ll bring up because it highlights one of the weird parts of this recipe: the Corn Nuts. So, this recipe includes Corn Nuts. Kind of. What it does is take Original flavor Corn Nuts, so just toasted corn tossed in salt, and it grinds them up to make, basically, “salty toasted corn dust”, which it uses to reinforce and add to the corn flavor of the stuffing. And my brain kind of fritzed out on the process, and ground up too much.

For context, the stuff on the left is ALREADY more than enough. That’s how far off I was: I was less than half-way through, and had already completed my task.

The reason is kind of obvious: I did a miscalculation. The recipe called for 3/4s of a cup of corn nuts, ground down. That is roughly 6 ounces, by volume, which my brain then misfired, and counted as “6 ounces by weight”. And Corn Nuts are very light. So that cup or so of corn dust you see above was almost TWICE as much as I was supposed to have. Which is fine: having too much of an ingredient just means you can play around with it more later.

From there, the next couple steps are all pretty standard stuff: you brown up some sausage, pull it out, and melt a TON OF BUTTER IN THE PAN:

Two full sticks of butter!

And in that sea of butter, you sweat out some onions and celery, add some garlic and a diced jalapeño,  add the corn nut dust, and then add in some white wine, and cook it for 3 minutes, until mostly evaporated. And that is where MY shit went bad, because this is what my pan looked like after SIX minutes of cooking.

The herbs just appeared! And also, there’s just standing liquid.

So I just had an ongoing moisture problem today. My crisp was too wet, my veggies were too wet. Everything was taking too long. Remember, this was supposed to be, from start to finish, a 2.5-ish hour process. By mis-timing my crisp, and the various difficulties, I was ALREADY over that time, and still had an HOUR OF COOKING.

Let’s get this sucker in the oven at least: So after the white wine, you add some herbs, toss the veggies, and then toss the veggies, cornbread, and sausage together in a large bowl. Then you add the liquid: a mixture of eggs and chicken broth to soak into the cornbread. Mine took about 5-6 minutes to soak up, with me tossing it pretty frequently, and then it was time to pour it into a buttered casserole dish, and get it baking.

It’s like tossing a very weird salad.

The baking is a pretty straight-forward affair: 45 minutes covered with foil, and 15 minutes with the foil off and the heat cranked up…and I just realized I didn’t crank the heat up when I took off the foil. I couldn’t even BAKE IT RIGHT. At this point, I’m really starting to consider that I was maybe cursed yesterday. Like, 20 minutes after I finished this recipe, I was almost in a car accident because my ABS system coasted me into a roundabout while I was trying to yield to an oncoming car. Maybe it wasn’t humidity at all that was screwing me up, but hoodoo.

In the end, despite, as I have violently illustrated, having problems, confusion, and frustration at EVERY STEP of the process, I can tell you: the stuffing turned out fine.

Golden brown and functionally fine.

Look at it. It looks like stuffing. It TASTES like stuffing. The prominent flavors aren’t the jalapeño or corn nuts, they’re sage, thyme, onion, and celery. The corn is just a toasted and slightly sweet canvas for pretty standard stuffing tastes. If anything, I’m underwhelmed with the recipe. This doesn’t taste like a revolution, it tastes like a pretty good version of a pretty normal stuffing. Which, when you think about it, is pretty damn amazing: I screwed up this recipe at EVERY step. Mis-cooked the cornbread, and ended up with too little because of it, then I couldn’t sweat the veg, couldn’t get my crisp to crisp, couldn’t even BAKE it right, and it STILL turned out something that I would have been happy to eat if it showed up on my table. I can only assume that when shit goes RIGHT, it’s even more enjoyable.

So yeah, LOSERS, it’s NOT THAT HARD. (He said, mere minutes after accusing his numerous difficulties on dark sorcery.) Actually, funnily, since I only baked it at 350, I kind of made the “make-ahead” version, and thus can TRULY finish it by reheating it in a hotter oven. Which is good to know, because my family only ate half of the 5 pounds this recipe makes the first night, so we have a fair bit left-over. Seriously, though, if you learn from my mistakes, and just make your chile crisp and dry your cornbread ahead of time, and take the time to do them RIGHT, this recipe is functionally no different, compositionally, from any other higher-end stuffing recipe. I hope you consider giving it a shot. Heck, you can actually just BUY chile crisp, so you could avoid that hassle altogether.

 

THURSDAY: JON TALKS PEPPERS, BECAUSE IT’S A FUN TOPIC, IT’S CONNECTED TO TODAY’S RECIPE, AND HE’S VERY TIRED.

MONDAY: SOMETHING MUCH SIMPLER. MAYBE BEEF BALLS, OR PSEUDO-SALAMI SANDWICHES.

 

Recipe

Bon Appetit Cornbread Stuffing

Serves 8-10

Ingredients

3 lb. cornbread, cut into ¾" pieces (14–16 cups) (or one batch Buttermilk Stuffing)

1½ lb. breakfast sausage, casing removed if needed

1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks), plus more for pan

1 large onion, chopped

4 celery stalks, chopped

Kosher salt

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 jalapeño (with seeds), chopped

¾ cup corn nuts, finely ground in a food processor, blender, or mortar and pestle (about ½ cup)

¾ cup dry white wine

1 Tbsp. finely chopped sage

2 tsp. finely chopped thyme

3 large eggs

3½ cups turkey stock or low-sodium chicken broth

Freshly ground black pepper

Chile Crisp (recipe below)

 

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 325°. Divide cornbread evenly between 2 large rimmed baking sheets and bake, tossing occasionally, until dried out and lightly browned around the edges, 40–50 minutes. Let cool at least 10 minutes. Increase oven temperature to 350°.

2. Meanwhile, cook sausage in a large skillet over medium-high heat, stirring and breaking up with a spoon, until lightly browned and cooked through, 6–8 minutes. Transfer to a plate.

3. Reduce heat to medium and melt butter in same skillet. Add onions and celery; season with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until softened but not browned, 8–10 minutes. Add garlic and chiles. Cook, stirring once, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add corn nuts and cook, stirring often, until very fragrant and vegetables are starting to brown around the edges, about 3 minutes. Add wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until almost completely evaporated, about 3 minutes. Add sage and thyme and toss to combine. Remove from heat.

4. Combine cornbread, sausage, and vegetable mixture in a large bowl. Whisk eggs and stock in a medium bowl until very well combined. Pour over cornbread mixture and let sit, gently stirring every minute or so, until cornbread has absorbed all or virtually all of the liquid. Season with salt and pepper (about 1 Tbsp. Diamond Crystal or 1½ tsp. Morton kosher salt).

5. Lightly butter a 3-qt. or 13x9x2" baking dish. Transfer stuffing to dish and tap dish lightly against counter to distribute and compact stuffing. Cover tightly with foil and bake until stuffing is very hot throughout and bubbles appear around sides, 40–45 minutes. Increase oven temperature to 425° and remove foil. Continue to bake stuffing until top is lightly browned, 15–20 minutes longer.

    

Chile Crisp

Ingredients

3 large shallots, thinly sliced into rings

1 head of garlic, cloves separated, thinly sliced

1 2" piece ginger, crushed

10 allspice berries

2 cups vegetable oil

8 guajillo chiles, seeds removed

3 ancho chiles, seeds removed

3 chiles de árbol, stems removed

1 Tbsp. sesame seeds

1 tsp. agave nectar or honey

Kosher salt

 

Preparation

1. Bring shallots, garlic, ginger, allspice, and oil to a boil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to maintain an active simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until shallots and garlic are golden brown, 14–17 minutes. Remove solids from oil with a slotted spoon and transfer them to a plate. Discard allspice and ginger.

2. Add chiles to oil and return saucepan to medium heat. Toast, stirring constantly, until chiles just begin to darken, about 1 minute. Transfer chiles to the same plate; add sesame seeds to oil and set oil aside.

3. Pulse chiles in a food processor until finely chopped, adding some of the cooking oil as needed to loosen it. Combine chopped chiles in a large jar with shallots and garlic, and remaining oil. Add agave and season with salt.