Stuffings, also known as forcemeats, fillings and sometimes also referred to as farces, can be used in a number of ways. They can help keep meats which can be traditionally ‘dry’ food moist during the cooking process or help absorb some of the natural oils and juices found in some meat, or they can help increase a meal size which has small amounts of meat in it to a meal portion at little additional cost.

Ingredients

Makes enough to stuff one medium size chicken

50g butter

1 medium size onion, peeled, sliced and diced

3 slices of wholemeal bread, made into breadcrumbs

2 tsp sage (dried or fresh)

1 egg, beaten

Salt and pepper

Method

• Melt the butter in a saucepan and then add the onion and sage cooking for about 5 minutes.
• Stir in the breadcrumbs.
• Add the beaten egg and mix the ingredients together. Season with salt and pepper.

Dawn: Warm water can be added in place of a beaten egg and works as well to bind the mixture together to allow it to be handled when you come to stuffing poultry and/or meat. Don’t add the liquid until you are ready to use the stuffing. Don’t put the stuffing into poultry or meat until you are ready to cook it as bacteria could penetrate the stuffing which might not reach a sufficiently high temperature during cooking to kill them. 

It’s also a good way of using up bread that is 2-3 days old and a blender is a very quick way of turning the slices of bread into breadcrumbs. If you don’t have a blender, a cheese grater works just as well in making breadcrumbs, too.

There are also other options that can be used instead of bread and they can include rice, suet or sausage. I tend to shy away from suet because it’s pure fat.

And when cooking poultry or meat that is stuffed, calculate the cooking time based upon its total weight. 

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