Is it worth your money to splurge on the best ingredients for your Thanksgiving dinner? Or should you save your money and spend less on generic ingredients?
We teamed up with Chef Gio Osso, owner of Virtu Honest Craft in Scottsdale, to find out.
We went to two grocery stores. First, we splurged on organic, name-brand, fresh ingredients and spent $147.99. For the second store, we saved by buying generic, boxed, canned, and jarred ingredients, spending a total of $64.40.
Chef Osso then prepared both meals side by side, labeling the expensive dinner A and the cheaper dinner B. We invited a group of people to taste test the difference.
Some liked certain dishes better than others, but overall, the A dinner won by a majority.
The bottom line, Chef Osso says, “I think you really don't want to skimp on everything. You want to get a beautiful fresh organic turkey. You want to get the fresh cranberries, you want really good stuffing from fresh bread. Veggies and things like that, potatoes, you don't have to worry about that stuff too much.”
Here are five secrets from Chef Osso to making your Thanksgiving dinner even more delicious:
1. A great way to cut your cook time in half is to 'Spatchcock" your turkey. This just means that you remove the backbone of the turkey with a really good pair of kitchen shears.
Flip the bird onto the breast side and carefully cut along both sides of the backbone, removing it. You then flatten the bird from the breast side.
2. Instead of cooking your turkey on a rack, place vegetables in the pan and use that as your rack. Onion, celery, carrot, garlic, tomato, fresh herbs and maybe even a little drizzle of wine all seasoned with salt and pepper, of course. This will help you create a very flavorful pan gravy when you're done cooking your turkey as well as another side dish. Try adding parsnips, butternut squash or leeks.
3. It's very easy to just open a can of cranberry sauce but it's really just as easy to make your own from fresh cranberries and the flavor is incomparable. Rinse two bags of cranberries in cold water, drain and place in a sauce pot. Add a half cup of sugar, a teaspoon of honey, zest and juice from one orange, a pinch of salt and let it cook on low heat until the cranberries break down and it looks like a jam. The longer you cook it, the softer it gets, so if you like a chunky cranberry sauce, don't cook it too long.
4. Stuffing is one of my favorite side dishes to have on Thanksgiving. We all grew up with having that boxed stuffing, but making your own is easy and you can improvise and put your own spin on it.
Use a good bread; for a sweeter stuffing try using brioche or Challah bread. For a more savory stuffing use a rustic style loaf. Cube your bread and toast in the oven on low heat to make the bread a little crispy. For my stuffing, brown Italian sausage in a pan, add onion, celery, garlic and fresh thyme. Once the onions become translucent, add the bread and toss through until the bread begins to break down a little. Add some chicken broth to moisten the stuffing.
At this point, you can fold in some nuts if you like. I like to use chestnuts or walnuts. Place your stuffing in a greased baking dish and bake until the top gets crispy. This way, when you smother it in gravy, it will soak it all up! YUM!!
5. Candied sweet potatoes are pretty easy to make, however, the mistake I see most people make is putting the cooked sweet potatoes in a baking dish with dollops of butter and brown sugar. It usually winds up being a greasy mess.
What I like to do is basically make a toffee sauce while my sweet potatoes are cooking. Simply melt your butter and whisk in the brown sugar so the sauce becomes emulsified. Once the potatoes are done, pour the toffee sauce over the potatoes. Add chopped pecans if you like and serve, or you can add marshmallows at this point and bake until they become melted and gooey!