Greatest Thanksgiving Facet Dishes | Thanksgiving Recipes 2025 | NYT Cooking

Let’s be trustworthy: Turkey’s nice, however Thanksgiving is concerning the facet dishes. A few of us wait all 12 months for stuffing and potatoes (candy and common), mac and cheese — and even cranberry sauce. To say nothing of rolls.

We’ve assembled a few of our most interesting recipes, new and previous, to spherical out your meal. These supporting gamers are so good, you’d be forgiven for those who forgot concerning the turkey.

For Melissa Clark’s gratin, thinly sliced potatoes are layered in a gratin dish, then topped with crisp-edged sautéed leeks. A heady mixture of cream, garlic, thyme and nutmeg is poured over prime, then baked till bubbly.

Recipe: Potato Leek Gratin

This three-ingredient, one-pan facet dish from Sheela Prakash supplies some a lot wanted coloration to the desk. Freshly floor black pepper provides just a little warmth, and Parmesan lends umami.

Recipe: Cacio e Pepe Inexperienced Beans

Perhaps you assume the traditional candy potato casserole is simply too candy? Strive Julia Moskin’s smoky, spicy, just-sweet-enough dish that will get its warmth from Thai curry paste and its nuttiness from coconut milk.

Recipe: Fiery Candy Potatoes

Salty bits of pancetta pair fantastically with hearty sprouts on this fantastic facet dish from Suzanne Goin. Balsamic vinegar and inventory, added within the final 10 minutes of cooking time, create a sweet-tart glaze that brings all of it collectively.

Recipe: Brussels Sprouts With Pancetta

The French know this dish as gnocchi Parisienne, however no matter you name it, this variation from Ali Slagle is a straightforward and glorious substitute for a conventional potato gratin or casserole. No mashing or slicing required.

Recipe: Gnocchi Gratin

Eric Kim’s riff on the traditional Thanksgiving facet strikes a pleasant steadiness between candy and savory. The mashed potatoes are infused with bay leaf and black pepper, then topped with halved marshmallows and pecans that crisp within the oven, for a crunchy lid that enhances the silky potatoes.

Recipe: Marshmallow Pecan Candy Potato Casserole

Crusty-edged and arduous to cease consuming, this traditional baked mac ’n’ cheese from Julia Moskin evokes the boxed form of your youth, solely higher. The key is utilizing a mix of extra-sharp Cheddar and American cheese.

Recipe: Baked Macaroni and Cheese

Eric Kim cooked greater than 30 kilos of inexperienced beans to return to this recipe — his platonic splendid of the Thanksgiving favourite. To realize this easy but scrumptious model, he prioritizes frozen-cut beans and skips the mushrooms. Nonnegotiable, although, are the French-fried onions within the can. As he places it, “they can’t be improved.”

Recipe: Inexperienced Bean Casserole

In the identical household as collard greens, mustard greens are just a little extra tender and peppery than their cousins. Right here, Vallery Lomas cooks them down merely, with onions, garlic and inventory. Liquid smoke, elective right here, provides smokiness with out the normal addition of meat. What’s not elective? Savoring the potlikker, the liquid the cooked greens depart behind.

Recipe: Braised Mustard Greens

Hashweh means “stuffing” in Arabic, and this one, a staple of Arab American Thanksgivings, is used to fill nearly any poultry that may be stuffed. Constructed on Calrose, jasmine or basmati rice, it’s studded with tender beef or lamb and fried nuts for distinction. Make it for Thanksgiving, or bookmark it for a weeknight. Because the reporter Reem Kassis writes, “it’s a meal in its personal proper.”

Recipe: Hashweh (Spiced Rice and Meat With Yogurt)

Sure, corn casserole, beloved within the southeastern United States, is usually made with Jiffy cornbread combine, however right here, Ali Slagle makes it from scratch for one thing that’ll have company clamoring for extra. As a reader wrote, “Seconds and thirds have been had by all.”

Recipe: Corn Casserole

A relaxing potato is usually a nasty one, stiff and starchy, however Genevieve Ko cracks the code on how you can get your mash additional silky once more by topping it with milk and reheating it gently over steaming water.

Recipe: Make-Forward Mashed Potatoes

Woodsy, fragrant sage joins fennel seeds and poultry seasoning to imitate the flavour of sausage on this easy however wealthy vegetarian stuffing from Eric Kim.

Recipe: Thanksgiving Stuffing

Beautiful inside and outside, this showstopping facet dish from Alexa Weibel layers common and candy potatoes, squash and beets for his or her vibrant vary of colours. Scrunched phyllo sheets prime the entire thing, including crunch and rustic magnificence.

Recipe: Ombré Gratin

Melissa Clark lets the cook dinner select their fighter — white bread or cornbread — on this lush stuffing, wealthy with mushrooms and bacon fats. However in case you’ve gotten vegetarians on the desk, or simply want to in the reduction of on the meat this vacation, it’s nonetheless filled with taste for those who skip the meat.

Recipe: Stuffing With Mushrooms, Leeks and Bacon

For a lot of households, a potato dish on the Thanksgiving desk is nonnegotiable. You’ll have a beloved recipe, however for those who don’t, could we advocate this one from Alexa Weibel? Roasted garlic offers it deep taste, whereas crisp garlic chips present just a little chew.

Recipe: Creamy Double-Garlic Mashed Potatoes

This recipe from Julia Moskin is a welcome spot of inexperienced amid the Thanksgiving starches. It comes collectively rapidly, and its vivid flavors and daring crunch are simply the factor to counter all of the mashed potatoes and stuffing.

Recipe: Inexperienced Beans With Ginger and Garlic

A traditional cornbread is central to Thanksgiving. This one, from Yewande Komolafe, is made in a skillet and gorgeously easy, able to both stand by itself or be constructed right into a cornbread dressing.

Recipe: Cornbread

Impressed by a snack that Kenji López-Alt had in Xi’an, China, this dish deserves a outstanding place in your Thanksgiving desk. The potatoes themselves are good. The spice mix, to which Sichuan peppercorns lend their spicy tingle, whereas anise and fennel add their heat, is excellent.

Recipes: Sizzling and Numbing Stir-Fried New Potatoes

Say what you’ll. Stuffing often is the pinnacle of Thanksgiving sides, and this one from Melissa Clark makes use of buttery brioche and equally traditional roasted chestnuts. It’s a comparatively conventional pairing, and no much less scrumptious for it.

Recipe: Brioche Chestnut Stuffing

This recipe for boiled yuca, doused in mojo, got here from the journalist and cookbook creator Von Diaz’s grandmother. It’s an excellent vianda, or starchy vegetable, particularly in style in Puerto Rican and Cuban houses, and it’s as at residence on the weeknight desk as it’s within the Thanksgiving unfold.

Recipe: Yuca con Mojo

Yewande Komolafe pairs flippantly candy roasted carrots with yaji, a warming spice combine ubiquitous throughout West Africa. Making your individual is simple (requiring simply peanuts, paprika, ginger, onion and garlic powders, and salt) and sensible, because it’s sensible utilized to all method of roasted greens.

Recipe: Roasted Carrots With Yaji Spice Relish

This straightforward candy potato recipe from Vallery Lomas has an surprising ingredient: pineapple juice. The juice provides sufficient acidity to verify the dish is good, candy however not too candy.

Recipe: Glazed Candy Potatoes

There’s only one step on this Martha Rose Shulman recipe: Throw the whole lot in a meals processor and blitz. That’s it. Save the leftovers to toss into yogurt.

Recipe: Cranberry-Orange Relish

Brussels sprouts have a nasty popularity, so actually because they’re boiled previous recognition. When roasted, they’re one thing else completely, crisp on the skin, tender on the within with simply sufficient char. With 1000’s of five-star scores, Mark Bittman’s brussels sprouts with garlic couldn’t be any higher — or simpler.

Recipe: Roasted Brussels Sprouts With Garlic

Handed down by way of her household for generations, Millie Peartree’s can’t-miss, extra-cheesy mac and cheese skips the roux and begins with a milk and egg base for additional silkiness. As one commenter put it, “You gained’t discover a richer, crispier, creamier, cheesier mac & cheese recipe.”

Recipe: Southern Macaroni and Cheese

Nobody has to know you didn’t toil over these rolls from Erin Jeanne McDowell. A protracted, gradual rise offers them their power and construction. Bake them within the half-hour earlier than you’re able to serve your meal: You’ll need to eat these heat out of the oven.

Recipe: No-Knead Dinner Rolls

Brown butter and butternut squash are a match made in side-dish heaven, as this recipe from Ali Slagle proves. Roasted in a sizzling oven, the squash will get good and crisp on the edges earlier than being drizzled in a brown butter French dressing. Skip peeling the squash right here, for just a little little bit of chew and lots of ease.

Recipe: Roasted Butternut Squash With Brown Butter French dressing

True to their identify, these biscuits are the pinch-hitters of the carb world, able to sop up all these juices in your Thanksgiving plate. Sam Sifton’s are baked sizzling — at 425 levels — for a crisp outdoors and a flaky, tender center.

Recipe: All-Objective Biscuits

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