Holiday Cooking: Chestnut Stuffing Recipe

Ingredients
chicken stock (see note, below)
dried bread cubes (see note, below)
1400g whole chestnuts, in shell
1 lb sausage meat
125g+ butter
2 med onions
1 sm. bunch celery
6 cloves garlic
1 large or 2 sm/med bramley apples
fresh sage


Method
This is better prepared the day before.

(1) roast the chestnuts, peel, and chop
score them first with a little 'x'
I roast at 200C for about 30 minutes, or until they are opening up and getting easy to peel
peel while still warm, as hot as you can tolerate, and reject any that don't shed their skins easily (that's why you start with so many, if you get 75% yield, that's great)
chop them as finely or as roughly as you wish

(2) cook the loose sausage meat

(3) dice and saute the onions and celery together in the butter, finely chopping and adding the garlic after they are well started

(4) shred and finely chop the apples

(5) mix together the chestnuts, apples, sauteed veg, sausage, fresh chopped sage, and dried bread cubes
what I do is layer each ingredient in the ultimate cooking pan to make sure the amount is right, adding the bread cubes last, and then move to a very large mixing bowl to fold them all together and to finish with the chicken stock before spooning back into the baking pan

(6) stir very hot chicken stock into the mix until it's the desired moistness
if there's a bit too much liquid, you can bake it out later

(7) bake, covered, at around 200C for 30 minutes or so

(8) to reheat for serving, bake again uncovered until piping hot
I prefer 180C+convection fan for about 30 minutes, but it's very forgiving so if you've got something else in the oven almost any temp will do as long as you let it get hot


Notes
For bread cubes, I made loaves of sandwich bread in our bread machine, with 100% wholewheat flour, cut the crusts off, cut them into cubes, and dried them in the oven (not overly so). Each loaf used 400g wholewheat flour, dry, fwiw.

For chicken stock, my standard method is to use roast chicken carcasses, onions, celery, carrots, and bay leaves (bay leaves are key).

Mushrooms work fine as an addition, too. Sautee them in butter, separately from the onions+celery+garlic. Undercook them a bit as they'll be baking a while.

For a vegetarian version, definitely use mushrooms instead of the sausage. And of course veg stock instead of chicken (marigold powder is better than any veg stock I've tried to make, but my heart's never been in it).

Overall, this is a very forgiving dish. It's not a cake. Proportions, cooking times, ingredients are all flexible. As long as there are enough chestnuts and some butter in there, it will be good.