To Eat, Perchance To Stream: Get Hyped For Thanksgiving, AKA The Best Holiday

Hello and welcome to “To Eat, Perchance To Stream” (TEPTS for short), the inaugural edition of what will ultimately become a monthly roundup of food-related video content. I am Jonathan Beecher Field, aka the retired food blogger The Gurgling Cod. We are coming up on Thanksgiving, and one of the best ways to get hyped for the best holiday is to watch sexy Thanksgiving videos. Here is the most sexy Thanksgiving video, where we get to see Chef Tony Maws make gravy. You don’t think gravy is sexy? Here is how to make cauliflower rice and I am sorry for you and your joy-free life.

More seriously, Thanksgiving is to cooking what New Year’s Eve is to drinking – a day when the casual hobbyist is expected to step up their game. Instead of drinking to excess, though, the home cook has to prep and roast a whole animal, prepare a bunch of sides, and several pies. The best way to manage is to plan and to clean, then clean some more. The most powerful tool for managing this is not a video you can stream on your laptop, but a bunch of pieces of paper with words and pictures on them stuck together on one side, AKA a book. In a perfect world, this book would be one of a series of guides to the challenges of adulthood, but it is the best ally you can have in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day. Here’s an NYT video that gives a taste of Sifton’s no-nonsense approach to gravy. (Again with the gravy videos? My desires are unconventional, so sue me.) Here is Sifton in a Buzzfeed video laying out the main points of his Thanksgiving manifesto, including his no salad at all mandate.

For occasional cooks, the turkey is the major hurdle. Why is there not a John and Jane Worldwide doc live from the Butterball Hotline room? (We do have President Bartlett hitting up Butterball.) As far as tackling the bird, itself, there is nobody I trust in the kitchen more than Kenji Lopez-Alt. He brings science to the kitchen to make your food taste better, and unlike Alton Brown or Christopher Kimball, he does it in a way that will not make you want to hurl your device across the room. One place video can definitely help is learning how to spatchcock a chicken. (You will need poultry shears, so get some now.) The downside of this method is you don’t have a whole Norman Rockwell looking bird to bring to the table; the good news is there the bird cooks more evenly, and there is more crispy skin, which is, after all, the reason for the season (along with gravy).

Sides. Sides are huge, and controversial. If you are ever bored at work, check out Sweet Potato Casserole Twitter; team marshmallow vs. team pecan makes Edward vs. Jacob look like a tea party. Another major contention is stuffing (in the bird) vs dressing (outside the bird). If you spatchcock, there is no inside of the bird, and the stuffing and the bird cook better separately than they do together. You can keep the dressing from drying out if you have plenty of turkey stock on hand. Here is Martha Stewart showing you how to make turkey stock. I would never, ever step to Martha, but get some necks and gizzards ahead of time and make your stock ahead of time, not on the day itself. While the stock simmers, you can make sure your knives are sharp. Once your knives are sharp, you can get your mise en place together for the Tony Maws Ultimate Stuffing. If Tony’s stuffing seems like a lot, you can take a riff from 2018’s most exciting food person, and cook Samin Nosrat’s prune and sausage stuffing.

Kitchen dance break? Kitchen dance break. Mashed Potatoes, come and get ‘em. This is a video for a criminally underrated James Brown song, which may, in fact, contain more information about James Brown’s prowess as a lover than about preparing mashed potatoes, per se. Martha Stewart offers a good approach here, 100% agree with ricing rather than mashing the cooked potatoes, but cannot countenance her suggestion to include horseradish. Green bean casserole has its fans, but I advocate for plain steamed green beans to offset all the richness on the plate. What would Samin do? For just a touch of acid on the plate, this is the cranberry relish you want.

The two Ds of Thanksgiving survival? Delegate Desserts. If you need a moment, find a quiet spot to watch this deeply NSFW trailer for Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. If you have family members who find themselves embroiled in political disagreements, YouTube offers an unlimited supply of turkey fryer disasters to distract them.

Are you done? You are not. While your guests clean up, you will break down your turkey carcass so you can make Turkey Bone Gumbo like Pableaux Johnson does. What else would you want to eat on the Saturday after thanksgiving while you stream the Bayou Classic?

The upcoming week is a lot of turkey, turkey stock, turkey gravy, turkey carving, turkey bone stock, turkey gumbo, turkey sandwich. Here are a few side dishes and palate cleansers, in case you need a vacation from this holiday:

• Something to stream while you do the dishes? Catch up with Dave Chang’s Ugly Delicious.
• Netflix goes hard in the cooking show paint with The Final Table, dropping Nov 20th.
• Jiro Dreams of Sushi comes to Netflix on Nov 22nd.

Thanks for reading, and we will be back next month with more seasonal streams for your snacking satisfaction.

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.

Watch Tony Maws' Thanksgiving videos on YouTube