Serious Eats: Essential Recipes

Simple Roast Turkey With Gravy

Your grandma’s roasting pan may have sentimental value, but it’s not the tool for the job. Use a Baking Steel instead for a bird that’s tender, moist, and juicy throughout.

Easy Stuffed Roast Turkey With Giblet Gravy

The classic, Norman Rockwell–style turkey that everyone oohs and ahhs over, with a couple of twists—we use a Baking Steel to avoid dry meat and par-cook the stuffing to make sure it’s heated through.

Basic Deep-Fried Turkey

For those willing to take the risks involved, deep-frying a Thanksgiving turkey yields rewards in the form of ultra-crispy skin and beautifully juicy meat. Here’s our recipe for doing it right.

Crisp-Skinned Butterflied Roast Turkey

Spatchcocking your turkey—that is, cutting out the backbone and flattening it out before roasting—is the fastest, easiest route to a guaranteed juicy bird.

Spice-Rubbed Butterflied Smoked Turkey

Real barbecued turkey is juicy and fork-tender, with deep smoke flavor.

Easy Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Forget mushy, boiled sprouts; these little cabbages are at their best when they get a fast dose of blistering heat to preserve their sweet flavor.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts With Shallots and Balsamic Vinegar

The sweetness of these Brussels sprouts, charred and crisped in a fiery-hot oven, plays well with sliced shallots and tart balsamic vinegar. Rendered bacon fat or duck fat makes them extra flavorful.

Creamed Brussels Sprouts and Bacon Gratin

We rarely use the phrase “over the top,” but this casserole, packed with bacon, cream, and cheese, achieves a richness that’s not often associated with the humble sprouts. Plus, it’s 100% make-ahead.

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

So long, cloyingly sugary sweet potatoes. This take is so rich and packed with sweet potato flavor, it needs only the simplest of embellishments to shine.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Par-cooking the potatoes before roasting brings out so much of their natural sweetness and flavor, you won’t need more than a couple of spoonfuls of honey or maple syrup to finish the job.

Sweet Potato Casserole

Our sweet potato casserole uses slow-cooked sweet potatoes for natural sweetness that isn't cloying. A hint of ginger adds just enough spice to tame the sweetness of the marshmallow topping.

Hasselback Potato Gratin

Stacking sliced potatoes on their sides creates a golden-brown, crisp-ridged crust without sacrificing the creamy, cheesy intensity of the best gratins.

Fluffy Mashed Potatoes

For the fluffiest cloudlike mashed potatoes, peel your potatoes before cooking, rinse away their starch, and run them through a ricer or food mill instead of using the usual masher.

Ultra-Crispy Roast Potatoes

For a winning combination of deliciousness and ease of preparation, roasted potatoes are hard to match. The key to getting that crisp crust: Parboil the potatoes in vinegar water before roasting.

Crispy Mashed Potato Casserole

Mashed potatoes aren't widely considered a make-ahead dish. A casserole of mashed potatoes, however—loaded with sour cream and baked-potato toppings—does the job wonderfully.

Basic Cranberry Sauce

Ditch the canned stuff for this five-ingredient, 15-minute sauce that combines fresh berries with just enough sugar and a little orange juice for a hint of citrus.

The Best Green Bean Casserole

Sure, it’s more work than dumping canned soup over canned green beans, but our homemade version, with a light mushroom cream sauce, delivers a fresher-tasting side that won’t send you to sleep.

Bacon-Braised Green Beans

Braised green beans don’t have to be mushy. We add vinegar to keep them crisp and bacon for extra flavor, for a tender, bright, juicy vegetable side.

Sautéed Green Beans With Cipollini Onions and Mushrooms

We take most of the flavors of a traditional green bean casserole (green beans, onions, and mushrooms) and subtract the cream for a less stodgy, altogether tastier side.

Classic Sage and Sausage Stuffing

A moist, tender, custardlike stuffing with classic Thanksgiving flavors. Think of it as savory bread pudding. Good in or out of the bird.

Slow-Cooker Sage and Sausage Stuffing

Making your stuffing in a slow cooker doesn't just free up much-needed oven space—it keeps the dish extra moist and flavorful, too.

Cornbread Dressing With Sausage and Sage

A classic cornbread stuffing starts with the best cornbread.

Oyster Stuffing With Fennel, Tarragon, and Sausage

Adding oysters to Thanksgiving stuffing may sound like an odd choice, but it's a practice with a long history and delicious results. The oysters add a wonderful savory flavor and subtle brininess.

Cornbread Dressing With Oysters and Sausage

For this take on classic cornbread dressing, raw chopped oysters are mixed with toasted unsweetened cornbread, sausage, and aromatic vegetables and herbs.

Parker House Rolls

These no-nonsense rolls are just the right amount of buttery and sweet. The secret to making them extra fluffy? Instant mashed potato flakes.

Brown Butter Cornbread

Yes, we like our cornbread with a little sugar to make it moist and tender. We also like it with nutty browned butter, which forms an incredible crackly crust in the pan.

The Food Lab's Buttermilk Biscuits

These buttermilk biscuits come out tender and crisp, with tons of extra-flaky layers. Plus, they're incredibly easy to adapt to whatever flavor additions you want—think cheese, bacon, scallions, or honey.

Southern-Style Unsweetened Cornbread

A Southern staple, done right. The key: use the best stone-ground cornmeal you can find.

Glazed Pearl Onions

A simple, all-in-one-pan method for delicate, flavorful onions in a smooth and buttery glazy

Creamed Pearl Onions

Slow, slow cooking and a healthy dash of cream give these pearl onions a melting texture and rich, mellow flavor.

Roasted Shallots With Buttery Sweet-Tart Glaze

Our roasted shallots get a bright flavor boost from a simple glaze of butter, sugar, and sherry vinegar.

Warm Brussels Sprout Salad With Bacon and Hazelnut Vinaigrette

The trick to this salad's smoky richness is rendered bacon fat, which flavors the vinaigrette and serves as a cooking medium for the lightly charred Brussels sprout leaves.

Roasted Pear Salad With Endive, Pomegranate, Blue Cheese, and Hazelnut Vinaigrette

A Thanksgiving salad shouldn’t be boring. This one makes the most of seasonal produce for a simple but impressive take on fall flavors.

Spelt Salad With Leeks and Marinated Mushrooms

Grain salads are forgiving and flexible, which makes them a perfect accompaniment to an otherwise labor-intensive holiday meal. Here, quick-marinated mushrooms, leeks, and cucumbers combine for a refreshing, flavorful side salad.

Make-Ahead Roasted Squash and Kale Salad With Spiced Nuts and Cranberries

This salad combines sweet roasted butternut squash with roasted kale in a vinaigrette flavored with maple syrup and sherry vinegar, along with some spiced pecans for crunch and dried cranberries for a nice chewy texture.

Winter Greens Salad With Fennel, Citrus, and Creamy Citrus Vinaigrette

This easy salad features bitter greens, shaved fennel, citrus, and a sweet and creamy citrus vinaigrette.

Fall Harvest Salad With Roasted Brassicas, Fingerlings, and Radishes

A fancy salad that won't add to your holiday stress. Made with roasted brassicas, potatoes, radishes, and sunchokes plus frisee and radicchio, this dish can be prepped ahead with no loss in quality. Plus, it hardly wilts once dressed!

Creamy Roasted Broccoli Soup With Buttermilk and Spiced Pepitas

A creamy broccoli soup with no cream? Yep. Blending buttermilk with a purée of roasted broccoli yields a full-bodied soup with a little bit of acidic tang, while spiced pepitas add crunch.

Creamy Cauliflower and Bacon Soup

Cauliflower gets a flavor-packed, smoky jolt from bacon in this creamy, comforting soup. Not only is it dead-simple to make, but it reheats beautifully, so you can make it days ahead.

Roasted Pumpkin Soup With Brown Butter

Pumpkin soup shouldn't taste like pie. We ditch the spices and roast our pumpkin until it's caramelized for a creamy, savory-sweet take on the holiday classic.

Basic Gravy

The best gravy comes straight from the drippings. A quick roux is all you need to transform the rendered fat and juices into pure liquid turkey gold.

Easy Roasted Mushrooms

To bring out the flavor of mushrooms, nothing beats roasting. This recipe speeds up the process by draining off the liquid mid-roast, resulting in intensely savory mushrooms with a meaty texture.

Gingery Glazed Carrots

We give our glazed carrots some extra complexity by tossing sliced ginger, thyme, and orange peel into the cooking liquid.

Creamed Spinach

Tender, concentrated spinach is enriched with béchamel and a last-minute shot of crème fraîche for an extra dose of creaminess.

Extra-Smooth Pumpkin Pie

The secret to this pie filling’s unbelievable texture is the addition of cream cheese, which, happily, also helps keep the crust from getting soggy and adds a little pleasant tang.

Perfect Apple Pie

We’ve tested dozens of apple varieties, pie crusts, and baking techniques to develop the ultimate apple pie. Still easy as…you know.

Classic Pecan Pie

Our pecan pie calls for honey, brown sugar, vanilla, and freshly roasted pecans for deeper, richer flavor and a big nutty crunch.