One of my absolute favorite things to eat is cornbread dressing. I’ve been making my Grandmother’s recipe for many years and I make a double batch so there is plenty left over to enjoy the week after Thanksgiving. It was with great excitement that I found out that the cornbread made with the Southern Cornbread recipe on the Pamela’s Products website was absolutely divine! In fact, it’s probably some of the best cornbread I’ve ever had. The main ingredient in cornbread dressing is cornbread so as long as you have that, you can make a phenomenal cornbread dressing – ‘nuff said!
Most sweet potato casserole recipes don’t call for flour, but the crumble topping might. We leave the flour out now but you can use a gluten-free flour mix if you really want to use flour in the topping mixture. Some people like candied yams and I’ve never heard of a recipe that calls for any gluten but doesn’t assume something is gluten-free on the buffet table. As always, it’s best to check before scarfing down something seemingly safe and paying the consequences later if the dish contains gluten.
My second favorite Thanksgiving dish is green bean casserole. Obviously, I’m super excited to be able to use the new condensed soup from Pacific Natural Foods for the first time this year. In previous years I had to thicken non-condensed soups down and while it’s easy to do, it’s just one more thing to do in the kitchen and one more pan to clean. Who needs that? The new condensed soups are not quite as thick as Campbell’s so no milk will be needed in the casserole recipe. The good news is that the Pacific Natural Foods cream of mushroom soup tastes much better than the one made by Campbell’s.
If you like fried onions and in your green bean casserole, it’s easy to fry up your own with gluten-free flour. I’ve used the gluten-free Pantry and Jules Gluten-Free flour mixes for the onions and they both work perfectly. I make the onions the weekend before Thanksgiving and store them in an airtight container like the ones from Snapware. They are really good though, so make extra or you won’t have enough for the casserole when you go to make it.
By far, the pie crust for my pecan (pronounced pacon in our neck of the woods, not pee-can as in Paula Deen country) pie was my biggest challenge to reproduce gluten-free. I tried every ready-made gluten-free crust and none of them floated our boat, so to speak. Finally, I tried the mix from Breads from Anna which contains no rice flour. It was wonderful and I’ve used it many times for many pies. Eventually, I settled on the basic crust recipe on the Pamela’s Products website. The almond flour in the mix seems to offer the best overall pie crust in terms of taste and texture (to me) and it’s very easy to work with. To say the crust is better than the frozen Pet Ritz gluten crust I used in the past is an understatement, to say the least.
Basic dinner rolls for Thanksgiving are something we’ve not found a perfect replacement for. When I was growing up, we used those airly white rolls with lines on top. If you want some ready-made dinner rolls, there are a few brands I can recommend highly. Challah rolls from Katz gluten-free are wonderful as are basic dinner rolls from The Grainless Baker. If you want something with a twist, try a Brazilian cheese roll from Sweet Oven and Company, a Georgia-based company.
Though you might read over and over a tip about saving bread that you don’t like to use in your dressing (or stuffing) recipe during the holidays, I agree with the advice in the article from Gluten-Free Living that spoke to that exact tip. If you don’t like a certain gluten-free bread in the first place, there is no reason to think it will taste better in any recipe you use it in. Don’t ruin your dressing by using that trick – just don’t do it.
In the end, remember to enjoy yourself, make sure you have plenty of great food to eat (even if you have to make it all yourself), and have fun with your loved ones. After all, you never know how many of them will be gluten-free next year.
Seeking Thanksgiving recipes? Check out our Gluten-Free Thanksgiving recipes.
There’s a neat gadget out there for rolling out your pie crust. It’s a pie crust making bag that is two clear plastic circles with a zipper around the outside. There is a small hinge that is cotton. You open it up and dust both sides with flour. Form your dough into a disc and place in the middles of one side. Zip it closed and roll out the dough until it fills the circle. You can moisten the counter under the bag to keep it from sliding. Open the bag, place your pie pan on the crust upside down.Flip it over and the crust will fall into the pie pan. Easy as pie! I bought mine at Bed Bath and Beyond but have seen them in catalogs also.
Barb – I saw that bag in a catalog and wondered if it worked as well as it looked like it did. I’m thrilled to find out it does so I’ll be asking for that neat gadget for Christmas. Thanks for the info 😉
I like Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Cornbread mix for my turkey dressing. Even if I wasn’t gluten free, this is the cornbread my husband now insists we use. He likes it because it doesn’t crumble. Bob’s Red Mill is more like corn cake. I make a couple batches near Thanksgiving time and make dried croutons in the oven then freeze them until time to make the dressing. Nobody would ever know it is gluten free.