Will I Kill My Family if I Cook the Stuffing Inside the Turkey?

By Julia Moskin
Jane Sanders
Q.

Will I kill my family if I cook the stuffing inside the turkey?

A.

Highly unlikely. But, both the Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend cooking stuffing separately from the turkey. The concern is that cold or frozen stuffing, sometimes sold already stuffed into packaged birds, won’t reach a high enough temperature to be eaten safely.

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But according to Mary Clingman, a turkey expert and director of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, so long as the stuffing is hot when it goes into the turkey, and then removed within two hours after cooking, the company’s microbiologists stand by stuffing inside the cavity. In fact, because hot stuffing raises the temperature of the bird and speeds the cooking, it can produce a slightly juicier turkey.

Additionally, she said, stuffing the bird provides a reliable and convenient spot to test for overall doneness. “Right in the center of the bird, when the stuffing hits 165 degrees, that turkey is done,” she said. (Apparently, many callers are mystified when directed to locations like “the thickest part of the thigh.”)

Mrs. Clingman herself is a lifelong stuffer, citing the incomparable flavor of stuffing bathed in the juice and fat of a roasting turkey. (But Butterball’s research shows that the anti-stuffing message is getting through: the percentage of cooks who stuff has dropped steeply, from more than 60 percent in 1990 to less than 40 percent today.)

In Mrs. Clingman’s house, all the ingredients are cut up the night before (benefit: this is a good way to dry out the bread that will be used) and cooked first thing Thanksgiving morning. Any stuffing that doesn’t fit is baked in a casserole; then she mixes both stuffings together before dinner is served. “It helps keep the fighting down,” she said.

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