Thanksgiving is in full swing, and the turkey was not only beautiful but juicy and easy to make. Next up on this year’s Thanksgiving menu is the stuffing. No Thanksgiving dinner is complete without it! After scrolling through Pinterest, I noticed a lot of stuffing recipes include sausage. That’s not something we eat often, but I decided to give it a try. I settled on this Bacon Wrapped Sausage Stuffing recipe because bacon. I can’t turn down bacon, and working it into the biggest meal of the year was irresistible. Let’s get into it!
This recipe is not just for holiday dinners, it’s so good you’ll be eating this all year round.
The Ingredients
This recipe is all about the bacon and sausage, so I made sure to get something special. Since I had to go to Wild Fork for my turkey, I also got the bacon and sausages there. I chose their Argentinian Style Pork Sausages and Original Country Bacon. One package of each was exactly enough for this recipe.
Everything else I needed to buy was available at my regular grocery store except the large bread crumbs. All they had were the finely milled bread crumbs, so I made my own using Jessica Gavin’s Homemade Bread Crumbs recipe. It was easy to do, and I made them a few days before the dinner using bread I already had.
The Process
With my ingredients in hand, it was time to make the Bacon Wrapped Sausage Stuffing. I’m not gonna lie, I was really looking forward to this! Things didn’t go totally smoothly, though, but it all worked out in the end. Here’s how my time was spent:
- 31 minutes to prep
- 1 hour 15 minutes to cook
- 1 hour 46 minutes total
That was a lot longer than the 1 hour 10 minutes listed. Let’s talk about it.
Prepping the Stuffing
The first step was to line a loaf pan with strips of bacon, making sure there were no gaps. There isn’t a photo of this in the recipe, so I had to refer back to the blog post to see how it was done. It was actually quite easy. Tip: Although my pan was nonstick, I still sprayed the inside with canola oil. This ensured the bacon wouldn’t stick and helped it adhere to the sides.
Next up was cooking the sausages. I stripped off the casings and started cooking them in a large saute pan. The recipe doesn’t say it, but the sausage needs to be crumbled. I referred back to the post to make sure.
With the sausage cooked and set aside, it moved on to the stuffing. This part went smoothly, except the instructions don’t mention what to do with the cooked sausage. Again, I checked the blog post and saw a photo of it added to the stuffing mixture right after the bread crumbs and chicken stock.
This is where things started going off the rails. My homemade breadcrumbs seemed to disappear once they got wet. The stuffing was all sausage. I added an extra cup of bread crumbs, and things looked better. Not perfect, but better.
Cooking the Stuffing
After letting the stuffing cool and mixing in an egg, I added it to the prepared loaf pan, turned down the edges of the bacon, and popped the stuffing into the oven for 45 minutes. It looked done when I removed it from the oven, so I cranked the temperature up to 400℉ and started roasting the turkey.
There was a lot of grease in the pan, so I gently tipped it and let that drain out. Then I turned the Bacon Wrapped Stuffing onto a sheet pan and saw that the bacon on top was still mushy. This was mild panic time, and it took a while to fix.
First, I put the stuffing back into the loaf pan and put it into the oven with the turkey. I checked it at 5-minute intervals for 10 minutes and didn’t see much of an improvement. It was apparent that the bacon was not going to crisp this way.
My new air fryer/convection oven came to my rescue! I lined its sheet pan with foil, sprayed that with canola oil, and turned the stuffing loaf onto it. Then I put the stuffing into the air fryer for 10 minutes on the roast setting at 350℉. Things started looking better, but it took a total of 20 minutes to get the browned and somewhat crisp stuffing in the main photo.
The stuffing held together pretty well through all this. Once corner started to come apart, but I was able to tuck it back in and it wasn’t noticeable.
