A Baking Sheet Will Take Your Thanksgiving Stuffing To The Next Level

A holiday that consists of feasting upon heaping plates of food in the company of loved ones sounds anything but stressful. Nevertheless, preparing Thanksgiving dinner can feel like a pretty high-stakes situation for some. If you're opting for a traditional menu, there's the business of basting a turkey every 20 minutes to make sure it doesn't dry out in the oven, all while whipping up side dishes, rolling out pie dough, and maintaining a semblance of order in the kitchen. 

There are all sorts of Thanksgiving dinner hacks to save you some time on Turkey Day, but sometimes, accomplishing everything on your list before your dinner guests start to get antsy means 86'ing a dish or two — a creamed corn here, a stewed carrot there. But there's one dish that's far too dear to be sacrificed, one that might be even more beloved than the formerly gobbling centerpiece. It's the stuffing, the unspoken hero of the Thanksgiving feast. Here's how to take it to the next level the way it deserves by swapping your casserole dish for a humble sheet pan.

Though a casserole dish might seem like the only proper vessel for stuffing, a sheet pan can simplify the process of making this popular Thanksgiving side and save you from breaking out a heavy casserole dish. Per a Yahoo! News hack inspired by a recipe in Julia Turshen's cookbook "Now and Again," the method has you mix together your stuffing ingredients like you normally would. Then, grab your sheet tray and spread the mixture into an even layer, topping it with melted butter.

The sheet pan approach not only yields a faster cooking time but also makes your entire batch of stuffing as crunchy as the top layer of your standard casserole version (you know, as crunchy as you always wish the casserole's bottom layer would be). Bonnie S. Benwick also draws from Turshen's method in her "Sheet Pan Stuffing with Chestnuts" recipe featured in The Washington Post. In her vegetarian version, she reaches for celery, pears, chestnuts, dried cranberries, dried challah, and cornbread. For the starchy ingredients, she incorporates the sheet pan into the prep as well, spreading them to dry out overnight in a recently-used oven so they're ready to soak up all the flavors of the recipe as they roast on Thanksgiving Day.