The Big Thanksgiving Special | What's for Dinner? | Francisco De Negri

Now I need to make room for it in the fridge, which I will say, that is the most difficult part of Thanksgiving, like real estate. That is the key word of Thanksgiving. This needs to go here, okay. Yeah? Oh, perfect. Are we ready? Oh my God, I'm so nervous. My name is Francisco, and I am going to be cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for 14 people all by myself. I mean, I say this year, this is really, I love doing this, I do this every year. This is my fifth Thanksgiving since I moved to Canada. I'm gonna teach you my favorite menu for Thanksgiving. This is the menu that I've been sort of developing throughout the years, and it's kind of the best version of each dish that I have made. I want you to see that it is possible. I want you to see that it can be a little bit intimidating, but honestly, so long as you organize yourself, you can put together something that is really, really delicious, that is really complete, that feels really festive, that feels really special, and it just allows for that really nice opportunity to get together with your loved ones, with your friends, with your family once a year, and show them with food and with a night of drinks and warmth that you love them. My Thanksgiving menu, I hope that you'll see that sort of it ticks all of the boxes of everything that you wanna see in the table, but it's very simple. It is a turkey with a corresponding salty, delicious umami gravy. It is a spicy, sweet, savory cranberry sauce. It is three very simple sides, carrots, potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. It is a delicious sausage stuffing. It is a beautiful, tangy, creamy, oily citrus salad that I am really excited to show you. And for dessert, it is a very simple tarte tatin. I am going to make two because I'm feeding a lot of people, but this tarte tatin is simple to make. It is way simpler than making a pie and has like the most delicious, like caramelly candied whole apples on top of a beautiful, crunchy, delicious buttery crust. It's so good. Today, the prep day, I do want to sort of make things as simple as possible tomorrow, but I am gonna leave most of the cooking for tomorrow. I do think that everything tastes a lot fresher and the flavors are a lot more vibrant when you do everything the day of. I'm gonna take out my turkey now and I'm so excited for you guys to see this turkey because my God. Okay, oh my God. Give it up for the turkey. So I would say that the work for Thanksgiving begins two days before eating, which is when you should be going to the butchers to get your meat. So yesterday, I went to my local butchers, Fernandos. They are the best butchers in Montreal. Always go to a good, trustworthy butchers specifically for something like Thanksgiving. Getting your meat from a butchers will ensure that A, that the quality of the meat that you get is way, way higher than what you would usually find in a grocery store. This bird is a whopping seven kilos and a half. Really good butchers like Fernandos. They don't use preservatives. They air dry the meat so that the meat is never in contact with water and therefore it's not waterlogged. So as always, Fernandos, top quality, always. Come on, give me a break. So the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to brine my turkey. And what it is is a combination of sugar and salt. And not only does this flavor the turkey, because obviously the salt is gonna penetrate the skin and it's going to flavor and season the turkey meat, but salt also draws out moisture content. Also before brining, this is a good time to take all the giblets out. So for example, in the cavity, you will find the neck, the livers. There's no sexy way of doing this, I'm sorry. Parts of the bird that we're not gonna really eat, we're not gonna roast and eat, but they have a ton of flavor. So we're actually gonna use those for our gravy. This now needs to go into the fridge and to rest for the rest of today and overnight. Now the next thing that I'm going to do is that I'm going to tear my bread for the stuffing. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hand tear it. I want big chunks, I want them to be irregular. I think that that makes for a stuffing that is clearly homemade. It's not, you're not trying to replicate some sort of store-bought product. And then I'm gonna leave those pieces of bread air dry overnight. Essentially what you never want to do with bread ever, you want to do with bread for stuffing because later we're gonna take that bread that has been super hardened and we're gonna mix it in with sort of like our custardy, apple cider-y, fatty situation. And if we didn't do this, then the bread would turn completely into mush. And now this goes somewhere in my apartment that is not gonna bother me. Last step for today is that I'm going to prepare my potatoes. I'm gonna give these a quick rinse because this is amazing. They smell like outside. They smell like dirt. Like I feel like I'm in a field. It's actually really nice, but I don't want it in my dish. So I'm gonna rinse them, and then I'm gonna peel them. Then I'm gonna kind of quarter them. I want irregular sizes, maybe like one inch, like pieces. Guys, an hour has elapsed. My potatoes are soft. So I'm going to now drain them and I'm going to lay them out in a baking sheet just to let them cool. And afterwards, I'm going to just store them in the fridge. So as you can see, they are incredibly soft. They are developing this like beautifully starchy exterior that is kind of breaking apart. And that in the oven is what's going to brown and develop a lot of texture and flavor. Cool. So my potatoes are prepped. My bread is drying. My turkey is brining. I think I'm done with today. I am going to have a chill afternoon. I'm going to clean my apartment and yeah, I'll see you tomorrow for the big day. How exciting. Good morning, everyone. It's been two seconds for you, but it was overnight for me. I had a great night. I slept really well. So the first thing that I want to do in the morning is to get my turkey out of the fridge and let it come a little bit up to room temperature. It's a little bit too cold to just stick in the oven. Meanwhile, I preheated my oven at 325. So as you can see, there is liquid that accumulated in the bottom of my baking dish. That's because of our brining. Because I got this bird fresh from a good butchery, it was never frozen. So the amount of water that it's going to release is a lot less. Also it was air dried, so it has less water, but look, it did accumulate some liquids. And now what I'm going to do before I stick it in the oven is stuffing it. I like stuffing it with ingredients that I'm going to use throughout the meal and that make an appearance in other dishes because I think that that's how the entire menu kind of talks to each other. So in my case, I'm going to stuff my turkey with onions, with garlic, with sliced orange, and a little bit of fresh herbs, maybe some parsley, some thyme. Some people like to separate the skin from the flesh and smear butter in between the skin in order to attempt to give it a little bit more richness. I'm not really going to do that. I don't think that does anything, really. So I'm just going to combine in a bowl butter and olive oil, mix it well, and then with my hands, I'm just going to go in. That is beautiful. It looks uneven. There are pieces of butter that are in the top and some of the butter melted. That's okay, don't worry about it. And I'm just sprinkling with a tiny bit more salt just so that it sticks to the fat. Now, the last thing that I'm going to do is that I'm going to put a little stock on the bottom of my baking sheet and a little bit of apple cider. As the drippings and the fats from the bird start falling, the combination of cider and stock are going to catch these and they're not going to burn. They're just going to turn into this beautiful, delicious pan sauce that we are going to add to our gravy. This bird is going to roast for approximately three hours and a half. But after an hour and a half, I'm going to rotate it just so that it cooks evenly. Oh, my apartment is going to start smelling like Thanksgiving now. I can't wait. The next thing in our schedule is to prepare and to cook the apples. So what I'm going to do for the dessert is that I'm going to peel all my apples and I'm going to core them and then I'm going to slice them in half. I have some green apples and I have some honey crisp. So I tested this recipe actually many times before writing it. And a lot of cooks tell you to roast your apples in very, very low heat for a long time, like for two hours or two hours and a half. It was very complicated and it was very finicky. And after like the third try, I just decided to cook the apples directly in caramel. And it is definitely like the absolute best option. It's just so much simpler that way. Great, all my apples are peeled and sliced. And in a big pot, I'm going to start making my caramel. I make a wet caramel, which means that I take sugar, I put a little bit of water, then I let that water cook off. And then once I have the desired color, I add butter to the caramel to kind of stop the cooking and to give it that beautiful richness. I add a little salt and then I'm going to add my apples. And I'm going to start stirring them and stirring them and stirring them around until all of the water from the apples has evaporated. They have reduced in size, but they are not falling apart. They're just soft to the touch. Around the one and a half hour mark, I also rotated my turkey. I made myself a third cup of coffee. What's next is the prep for our vegetables. Got this beautiful, beautiful carrots from the farmer's market. I think that it is beautiful to find these and to serve them with a little bit of the stem. And you can use the leaves for a little herb salad. Some of them are going to leave whole because some of them are quite small actually, but the ones that are larger, I'm just going to half lengthwise. And then I'm going to add them to a baking sheet with a lot of olive oil and salt and pepper. And I'm just going to roast them. Same treatment with my Brussels sprouts. I'm really just going to prepare them. I'm going to cut the core. And again, going into the oven with olive oil to roast for maybe like an hour. And then after they are like roasted and cooked through and really like shriveled, the carrots I'm going to place in a beautiful honey butter glaze. But the cooking time, the actual like roasting time, they're just going to go in with olive oil because anything else would burn. Guys, my turkey is done. I checked it at the three hour mark and it is registering at the deepest part of the breast, 163, 164. So I'm just pulling it out now because there's going to be a little bit of carryover. Guys, look at the color. We're going to let this baby rest. Everything inside, all of the juices, all of the fat, everything is going to reconstitute. It's going to congeal. It's going to take shape. If I carve it right now, all of the juices will spill out. And also the flavors wouldn't have had a chance to kind of intensify. Beautiful. So now that my turkey is resting, I have kept the drippings that it accumulated on the bottom of the pan. And I'm going to now use these to make a fortified sort of stock that I'm going to use for both my gravy and for my stuffing. So in a tall pot, I'm going to combine a little bit of leftover stock that I had. Please know that I usually use store-bought for this because we're going to make this sort of fortified version. If you buy chicken stock or vegetable stock from the store, it's absolutely okay because combining it with the turkey drippings and with the giblets from the turkey, so the neck and everything that we didn't use, we are going to create a delicious, intense, flavorful stock that is going to give great flavor to both the stuffing and the gravy. So I was debating what to do next in my mastermind schedule. I feel pretty good in terms of time. I don't feel like things are going that hectically. My cranberries are cooking, by the way. I added my cranberries with some honey and a little bit of apple cider just so that they cook down and that pectin releases. I really need the cranberry sauce to work sort of overtime here because it is an opportunity to cut through all of the, like, roasty, toasty, like, fatty dishes that are in the table. So the cranberry sauce, yes, it needs to provide contrast, but it also needs to be a little savory because I don't like it when, you know, it's just like mindless sweetness without anything that kind of, like, talks to the other ingredients. So it is highly seasoned with salt, with MSG, with olive oil. It's a little fatty, acidic. It's spicy. It hits all the notes. My carrots and my Brussels sprouts are almost out of the oven. They're gonna be out in 10 minutes. And in the meantime, I'm going to prepare the labneh for my potatoes. So my potatoes are going to be very crispy because we boiled them yesterday, but they're going to be landing in a delicious, super creamy, seasoned labneh. The labneh is gonna be sort of like a very luscious bed, and then on top go the potatoes. And that way, when everyone kind of gets a scoop of the potatoes, you get a little bit of creaminess and then a little bit of crunchiness on top. I'm just gonna very simply season it with olive oil, with salt, with pepper, and with dill. This is one of my most delicious things in the world. And I know that it's like, well, of course it is. It's like labneh with dill. Like, how could it be bad? But man, it's good. Okay, setting this aside, somewhere in my apartment, my Brussels sprouts are ready to come out of the oven. They are toasty. They are beautiful. They are delicious. I hope you can hear that. I'm happy with them. I'm gonna leave them to cool. My carrots need a little bit more time. I'm just gonna like get them out of the oven. I'm gonna shake them a little bit, and then I'm gonna get them back in there. And I might broil them just a little bit. Carrots are roasted. So are the Brussels sprouts. Turkey is resting. What I'm gonna do now is I'm going to prep my potatoes and roast them so that they get nice and brown and crispy. I'm going to combine them with a combination of olive oil and duck fat. And then I'm gonna stick them in the oven. While that's happening in the oven, I feel like everything else is resting, and this is a perfect opportunity for me to start on my gravy. The reason why I'm starting with my gravy now is because that fortified broth that has all the turkey giblets and the turkey drippings and everything, that has been simmering away for a while now. So what I'm gonna do for my gravy is a very simple roux, which is a combination of flour and melted butter. I'm going to be sort of toasting the flour in the butter. So think about it like as bread, even though it's like in powder form. We want to toast that bread and like develop all of the flavors before I start introducing cups of my broth. It's not gonna look like liquidy at all, but we're gonna start combining it with our broth. We're gonna start combining it with, you guessed it, apple cider. This gravy is savory. It is intense. It tastes like roasty, but also it has the perfect amount of like sweetness and acidity thanks to our cider. So in the end, I might add just a little bit of Dijon mustard. Once it's done, I'm just gonna let it simmer with some herbs. So I'm gonna put some thyme and some rosemary in there, just let it perfume. And then when I'm done, I'm gonna let it reduce a little bit. And then I'm just gonna keep it on low, simmering until everyone arrives. Let's do a little sanity check. You have to do that every once in a while when you're doing Thanksgiving, just to make sure that everything is still on track, that you still have your marbles on, that you still have your wits about. I made a quick olive oil, honey butter glaze for my carrots. And then I am going to spoon that glaze over my carrots, get them nice and coated and then roast them again for like 40 minutes, not too much. It's just enough time for the sugars and the honey to caramelize and for the carrots to like become nice and sticky. So I'm also gonna toast my walnuts. So the walnuts, they're gonna toast and fry a little bit in fat. And I'm gonna add them finally to my roasted Russell sprouts with some herbs, some leaves. They're gonna be absolutely delicious. I think that what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to do the desserts. I'm gonna bake them. The caramel, the leftover caramel that was in the pot, I transferred it to the bottom of my molds. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna place my apples, core side up. I'm gonna assemble them as best as I can. And then on top, I am doing a puff pastry. So the puff pastry is, I made it this morning. No, I'm kidding. Can you imagine? Oh my God. I don't know. This is store-bought. And I'm just gonna extend it. I'm gonna cut a ring the size of my mold. I'm gonna place it on top of my apples. And then they're going into an oven at 420. I like to kind of like blast a lot of heat onto my puff pastry at first, maybe for the first like 15 to 20 minutes. And then the rest I'm gonna reduce at 375 just so that it cooks through. But I feel like that blast of heat at 420, that's what you get. That's where you get like the layers of the puff pastry. And that's when it becomes like a nice sturdy base for our tarte tatin. I know no one's gonna find this as satisfying as me, but my potatoes are done exactly at the time that I'm gonna put my tarte tatins in the oven. Look at them. Okay, first these are gonna go in. Then you're gonna look at them. I'm just gonna like, I'm gonna leave them to cool for a hot second. And once they are cool to the touch, even though I'm already touching them, but don't do that. I will add them and serve them on top of my creamy labneh. I need another coffee. This is coffee number four, five, five. I mean, after this, I should really eat something. Don't do that, don't be like me. Break for lunch. While my coffee is brewing, it gives me great pleasure to announce to you that the next step is to make stuffing. Oh, stuffing. Is there anything better? My stuffing has two types of alliums. So this is some beautiful pork and garlic sausages that again, I got from Fernando's. So I'm gonna start by browning my sausage. And then after it's browned, I'm gonna keep the fat of the sausages in the pan. To that, I'm going to add my chicken fat and my butter. And all of this goes on medium high heat to really brown it. My coffee's ready. In the meantime, I'm gonna slice my leeks. I'm going to submerge them in water just to make sure that I get rid of any dirt. Can you tell that I sharpened my knives? Keep the fat of the sausages in the pan. To that, I'm going to add my chicken fat and my butter. And then I'm cooking my leek and my onions. So my alliums are softening in all of that fat. I want them to lose all of their water. I'm just gonna season them with a little bit of salt, a little bit of freshly cracked, what? Freshly ground black pepper. Once they are like frying and they have shrunken, I'm gonna add my celery. Once I see that they are starting to like caramelize on the bottom of the skillet, they're kind of like sticking. That means that now they're like frying, frying. And that's when I'm gonna stop the cooking with my apple cider vinegar. I said apple cider vinegar, it's apple cider. LOL, it's not vinegar. The apple cider brings acidity to the dish. It kind of does what most people do with white wine. Oh my God, my tartar tans are looking amazing. You guys are gonna freak. Otherwise, it is looking beautiful. I scraped up the bits of the bottom of the pan. So now there's almost like a pan sauce. That is flavor, that's what we want. That's what makes the stuffing a stuffing. My friends Danny and Amaya are here to help me sense of order in this place. And in the meantime, I'm pleased to announce that the tartar tans are ready to come out of the oven. It's like caramelly and appley and like buttery. And I hope everyone's very hungry because there's a lot of food. Aren't you proud of us? Oh my God, I'm so, so proud of you. Customized shots. Like that's how you gotta do it on Thanksgiving. You just need a Danny and an Amaya. I'm gonna let this tarts cool and set a little bit. So I'm just gonna wait for maybe, let's say 10 minutes and then I'll flip them over. Amaya, can you pass me the bread? Okay, please give it up for our bread. Thank you. In a bowl, I'm going to combine my stock with four eggs. And then I'm going to start mixing everything together. I'm gonna start coating my bread in that mixture. Kind of shuffle them around. And you see that there's like liquid on the bottom of the pan. All of that is gonna get soaked. Like our bread, this is why we dried our bread yesterday. And then once they're finally coated, I am adding my onion mixture. Equally distributed, of course. So that everything then is baked in the oven. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna top with a little bit of fresh herbs, I think. And then both of these are gonna go into the oven at 350. I'm gonna add one final glug of olive oil. In it goes. For about 45 minutes to an hour. And then after that, we are gonna uncover them and they're gonna go back into the oven without the tinfoil. And it's just gonna be to get those tops nice and brown. Thanks for the tinfoil, girls. Okay, so now that the stuffing is in the oven and everything else is prepped, this is a perfect opportunity for me to carve my turkey. She's a big lady. Usually what I like to do is just making long strokes with my knife. So for example, to cut the leg, I am going to locate the middle of the skin that's like being taught here. Carving the turkey is something that I recommend you doing before your guests arrive. You have to use your hands a lot. Some people get uncomfortable with you. Just do it before people arrive. And then once everyone is ready to eat, just stick it in the oven just to warm it through. Not to cook it, but just to warm it through. But it's already carved and everyone can just help themselves. I'll start with some wine and let's just keep our fingers crossed that I don't faint in front of the camera. So this is dad's prep. Okay guys, so I think this is it. I think I'm done. I am ready for everyone to come in. I already have everything prepped. The only thing else I have to do is to set the table. We're gonna light a couple of candles. We're gonna maybe put a little bit of flowers. I am already drinking some wine, so Lord knows that the night has started. As you can see, the menu required all day work, but if you're organized, you can get everything done. But as you can see, the menu is quite simple. What I have is a turkey, a beautiful gravy, cranberry sauce, sides, which are Brussels sprouts, carrots, and potatoes. I have a beautiful citrusy, fruity salad to kind of cut through all of the roastiness from the meal. And finally, I have my two tartar tans, which I was able to bake, I was able to flip, and now they have cooled. I can just leave them hanging in the fridge until everyone is done eating. We can slice them. Thank you for being here. I hope that you learned how to make a Thanksgiving meal. Now it's just a matter of time to let everyone in. I'm gonna change because I smell like chicken fat and puff pastry and stuffing. Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one. Ciao.