9 Recipes You Can Make Ahead This Thanksgiving
Take some of the pressure off.
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Fortune favors the prepared on Thanksgiving; anything that can be prepped, par-cooked, or completely cooked and frozen should be. Whether you need make-ahead mashes or a boxed mix-inspired easy-bake stuffing, we’ve got tips and recipes to keep your Turkey Day schedule on track.
Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Aleppo Pepper and Crème Fraîche
For this mash, we roast the sweet potatoes instead of boiling them to concentrate and caramelize their natural sugars, rather than letting all that flavor leach away into the cooking liquid. We flavor the sweet potatoes with butter infused with honey and Aleppo pepper, which adds a gentle, fruity heat. Crème fraîche provides richness and tang that balances the sweetness.
These mashed sweet potatoes can be made up to three days in advance and are easily re-heated in a microwave.
Butter-Braised Mashed Potatoes
Inspired by Turkish mashed potatoes, we use a small amount of water and a massive amount of butter. By the time the water cooks off, the potatoes are tender and coated in butter. The melted butter doesn’t just provide flavor—the fat coats the potatoes' starch molecules, preventing them from becoming gluey when mashed. The result is mashed potatoes that are fluffy and rich, with a pronounced potato flavor that often gets lost under heavy cream.
Cook, mash, and chill up to two days ahead, then reheat with a splash of water for potatoes that are fluffier than most freshly made versions.
Cranberry-Jalapeño Chutney
Thanksgiving needs jalapeños. The bright chili heat cuts through all of the fat and starch on the table (so you can reset your palate and enjoy more fat and starch). This cranberry-jalapeño chutney solves the problem of overly sweet and highly acidic cranberry sauce. Cooking the cranberries into a jammy consistency tamps down the acidity, while cinnamon, jalapeños and ginger add layers of flavor.
This chutney can be made up to two weeks in advance! Cool completely and store in an air-tight container in the fridge.
Burnt-Leek Gravy
Deeply caramelized, earthy and smoky; Burnt-Leek Gravy transforms the simple Thanksgiving staple into something extraordinary. Borrowing a technique from Mexican and Vietnamese cooking, we char an entire leek under the broiler until blackened, which caramelizes the sugars and deepens the flavor. The charred leeks get pureed with stock and thickened with beurre manié (a paste of butter and flour), creating a 15-minute gravy that tastes like it simmered for hours.
This gravy can be made up to five days in advance. To give it a little extra oomph, we like to add the turkey drippings just before serving, but it’s just as delicious without.
Garlic-Parmesan Potato Bread Dinner Rolls
Perfectly plush potato rolls don’t have to come from a plastic package. Our secret ingredient? Dehydrated potato flakes, which helps the rolls retain their moisture. A garlic-rosemary infused butter makes them holiday-worthy; a crispy, frico-like layer of golden Parmesan topping adds a salty, savory texture.
These rolls can be shaped and refrigerated up to 24 hours in advance. Just let them stand at room temperature for an hour before baking.
Hawaiian Sweet Bread–Style Dinner Rolls
Hawaiian-style dinner rolls are known for their subtle sweetness and rich, plush texture. Our recipe sought to create an elevated version of the famous King’s brand rolls you find in grocery stores. Pineapple juice adds sweetness and depth; milk powder gives the rolls a soft, tender crumb (much like its grocery store inspiration).
While these are best day of, they will hold for a day or two at room temperature, or up to a week in the fridge. Rewarm per the instructions in the recipe headnote.
Garlic and Rosemary Potato Tian
This recipe is a cross between a traditional vegetable tian and scalloped potatoes. The shingled potato dish is creamy and rich without any cream. We impart deep flavor to the dish with a two-step cooking process. A garlicky broth—made with an entire head of softened garlic—flavors the butter-tossed sliced potatoes as they cook under foil. The tian is finished with a showering of grated Parmesan and returned to the oven, uncovered, to brown. The crispy layer of cheese gives way tender potatoes underneath for potato dish with plenty of texture.
The tian can be made in two stages, if convenient. After the first stage of baking, it can be fully cooled and refrigerated overnight before being finished the next day.
Easy-Bake Herbed Stuffing
This stuffing isn’t just make-ahead friendly, it’s downright speedy from start to finish. Rather than waste precious minutes mincing and sautéing aromatics, we speed things up and maximize flavor by blending raw shallots and herbs with butter in the food processor, to create a flavor-packed paste that seasons the bread cubes as they bake. It tastes like the best possible version of boxed stuffing (and it’s almost as easy to make).
The dried bread mixture can be cooled, bagged and stored for a day. In my experience, it can also be frozen for even longer, but would need to be thawed before using.
Sweet Potato Gratin with Vanilla Bean and Bay Leaves
This sweet potato gratin has the essence of the beloved, marshmallow-topped casserole, without the cloying, one-note sweetness. Infusing cream with vanilla preserves a hint of marshmallow that’s far more nuanced and aromatic; we also eliminated the mushiness by roasting, rather than boiling, which deepens the sweet potato flavor. Bay leaves, cayenne, and black pepper give the dish a savory backbone; a layer of brown and white sugar create a crunchy, almost brûléed topping that’s super satisfying to break with a spoon.
The potatoes for this gratin can be roasted up to a day in advance. Additionally, a Milk Street reader wrote in to say they had great success prepping the entire casserole a day before and baking it day of (but to leave the sugar topping off until just before baking).
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Willow Montana
Willow Montana is the Production Manager of Digital Media at Milk Street. Willow spends their days coordinating and planning video shoots, managing schedules and overseeing the execution of digital projects. They studied Baking and Pastry Arts at Johnson and Wales University and worked in restaurants while putting themself through six more years of college. They hold a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in English Literature and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Publishing and Writing. Willow is a firm believer in living a slow, quiet life and making things by hand. When they aren’t following the developers around with a camera at the Milk Street office, they may be found at home shaping loaves of sourdough, caring for dozens of houseplants and, occasionally, out in the wild at a punk rock show.
