Honey dijon pretzel stuffing
A thanksgiving recipe inspired by a warm freshly baked pretzel with honey mustard. Made from pretzel rolls, it keeps it’s classic roots just with a slight twist.
The common stuffing players are all still there - celery, onion, sage, chicken stock, now there’s just a bit of a dijon mustard and honey touch.
Ingredients:
10-12 pretzel rolls, torn to bite size pieces, about 10 heaping cups
65g butter, salted (plus 1 tbsp for greasing the baking dish)
4 celery sticks, finely chopped
1 small or 1/2 a large white onion, diced
5 garlic cloves, grated
handful of each, sage and rosemary, finely chopped
2 heaping tbsp dijon mustard
1 heaping tbsp honey
1 tsp each salt and pepper
2 cups chicken stock
2 large eggs
Method: you’ll need a 9 x 13 inch baking dish (or a 10 inch round cast iron shallow dutch oven like I used)
Tear bread, toast it: preheat oven to 95C/200F. Tear pretzel rolls into bite size pieces and spread evenly on a baking sheet. Toast for 1 hour, tossing halfway through. They should just gently dry out, but not gain much color. Once they are out the oven, increase oven temperature to 190C/375F.
Saute veggies: add 65g butter to a fry pan and bring to medium-low heat. Once butter is melted, add celery and onion and gently saute for about 5 mins. Add garlic, sage and rosemary and saute for another 3-5 mins. There’s no salt added in this step, btw!
Make the pouring liquid: add chicken stock, dijon, honey, salt and pepper to a large measuring cup or bowl and whisk to combine. Some small pieces of dijon are okay.
Initial soak: once the bread is out of the oven and nicely crisped, grease a baking dish with 1 tbsp butter, up the sides and base. Add toasted bread pieces to the greased dish. Pour over the sautéed veggies and toss to combine.
Pour over half of the liquid and toss to combine, mixing until the bread has soaked up most of the liquid and there isn’t much left in the baking dish. You may wait a couple of minutes just until the bread has soaked up the liquid.
Add eggs: crack two eggs into the remaining half of the liquid and whisk really well to combine so it’s evenly mixed in. Pour the remaining liquid over the bread, mixing to evenly combine. Once you’ve given it a chance to soak up, it should feel moistened all the way through but not like water-logged. It should have some firmness left to it.
Bake: cover with either aluminium foil or a lid and bake for 20 mins covered, then remove the cover and bake for 30 mins uncovered. Remove from the oven once the top is a deep golden brown and the center is set.
