The Most Popular America's Test Kitchen Recipes in November

For many of us, November means one thing and one thing only: Thanksgiving. Everyone has different traditions, celebrates with different amounts of people, and cheers for different football teams. But, one thing we all have in common is food. We spend the whole month daydreaming about a dinner plate full of traditional and non-traditional Thanksgiving dishes while surrounded by the ones we love the most. Based on our most popular recipes this month based on pageviews, our web members were focused on what Thanksgiving recipes they were going to serve this year. Potatoes, pumpkin, veggies, and of course turkey topped the list. Get inspired for your December holiday table with by checking out the top six most popular recipes for November and check out the rest of the top 25 in this collection.

Pommes duchesse is a classic French preparation of piped individual mounds of egg-enriched mashed potatoes. They can be made in advance, they look festive, and they taste great with a variety of entrées; however, they are rather fussy to prepare. To make this dish easier to pull off, we skipped the piping and baked the mashed potatoes in a baking dish. Our mashed potatoes, made from butter Yukon Golds, are enhanced with butter, egg yolks, half-and-half, and nutmeg. To give the casserole a crisp, golden brown, attractive finish, we coated the top with a mixture of butter and egg whites and then scored the surface with a paring knife before baking. [GET THE RECIPE]

For a pumpkin pie recipe that produced a pie with a crisp crust and a soft, custard-type filling, we began baking our crusts almost completely before filling them; that way we knew they would start out crisp. Next, we made sure that both shell and filling for our pumpkin pie recipe were hot when we assembled the pie, so the custard could begin to firm up almost immediately rather than soaking into the pastry. Finally, we baked the pie quickly, in the bottom of the oven, exposing the bottom of the crust to the most intense heat. We avoided curdling by taking the pie out of the oven immediately once the center thickened to the point where it no longer sloshed but instead wiggled like gelatin when the pan was gently shaken. [GET THE RECIPE]

The classic combination of green beans, condensed soup, and canned onions isn’t bad. But for a holiday centered on homemade food, shouldn’t every dish be great? We wanted to upgrade green bean casserole to give it fresh, homemade flavor. Our first tasting determined that we definitely needed to use fresh green beans rather than frozen or canned beans. A preliminary blanching and shocking prepared the beans to finish cooking perfectly in the casserole, enabling them to keep a consistent texture and retain their beautiful green color. For our sauce, we made a mushroom variation of the classic French velouté sauce (chicken broth thickened with a roux made from butter and flour, then finished with heavy cream). Our biggest challenge was the onion topping. Ultimately we found that the canned onions couldn’t be entirely replaced without sacrificing the level of convenience we thought appropriate to the dish, but we masked their “commercial” flavor with freshly made buttered bread crumbs. [GET THE RECIPE]

To get a flavorful dinner roll recipe with a crisp crust and chewy crumb without a steam-injected oven, we replaced a few tablespoons of bread flour with whole-wheat flour and added honey. For an airy crumb, we determined exactly how much water and yeast would produce bubbly yet shapely rolls. A two-step baking process—baking the rolls in a cake pan to set their shape before pulling them apart to crisp up—gave our rustic dinner roll recipe the crust we were looking for. [GET THE RECIPE]

For our big turkey recipe, we wanted a Norman Rockwell picture of perfection: crisp, mahogany skin wrapped around tender, moist meat. It was difficult to find a container large enough for brining such a big bird. So we chose either a self-basting or a kosher turkey. Both have been, in essence, brined— a self-basting bird is injected with a saltwater solution and the kosher bird packed in salt during koshering. Initial high heat gave our turkey a crisp skin, while lowering the heat for the remaining cooking time finished it off without drying it out. For such a showpiece, we wouldn’t think of serving store-bought gravy. We had plenty of time while the turkey cooked to prepare our tried-and-true giblet gravy recipe. [GET THE RECIPE]

We knew from our experience with chicken that cooking poultry in a covered pot over low heat for an extended period of time produces wonderful results, so we decided to develop a turkey breast recipe using this method. We chose a 6- to 7-pound bone-in turkey breast for our turkey breast en cocotte recipe because the bone lent the breast deep flavor and this size breast fit into the pot. As with chicken, we found that browning the turkey breast was an essential step in developing deep flavor. Adding some aromatics—in this case, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, thyme, and a bay leaf—to the pot further rounded out the flavor. [GET THE RECIPE]

Want to see the rest of our top 25? Check out our Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in November collection. And view these recipe collections to see which recipes were popular in past months:

• Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in October 

• Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in September

• Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in August