How To Easily Dry Out Bread For Stuffing

It's probably safe to say that the only time of year that you want your bread to get stale on purpose is during the fall and winter holidays, when stuffing figures in large on your dinner menus. Turning week-old dried bread into stuffing counts among the tastiest ways to save a forgotten loaf. However, counter-dried bread shouldn't be your go-to option here. Instead, be the savvy home gourmand that you are and bake your bread bits dry in the oven.

There's a slew of reasons for this, chief among them being a desire to cook out all the extra moisture. This is something that doesn't always happen if you let bread dry out on the counter. Instead, you may find that there may be spots here and there where the bread's moisture remains intact.

If this happens, those un-dried portions won't drink up the flavors of the stock and other spices that you put into your dressing to make it taste delish. It also means that your bread might take on an almost leathery consistency. More plainly, misplaced moisture makes for chewy bread — a problem you'll avoid if you dry your bread out in the oven instead of just letting nature take its course.

Finally, the oven-drying method additionally ensures that you're working with uniform pieces of bread come stuffing-making time. Once your bread becomes completely hard and stale, it tends to break up, usually unevenly. If you're starting with fresh bread slices, it's easier to cut the pieces into even, half-inch cubes because the bread's still pliable in a way the stale bread won't be. 

There are a few things to bear in mind if you do dry the bread in the oven. On Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, the real estate in your oven will be at a premium. And if you routinely fill your turkey with the stuffing, the makings for it need to be done by the time you're ready to put the bird in the oven. In light of that, plan on drying the bread out in the oven in the days before the big day. Once they're done drying, stash the bread cubes in sealed plastic containers until you're ready to use them. 

As far as how long to cook them and at what temperature, you have a few different options. Some home chefs like to cook their bread on their oven's lowest setting possible — around 200 degrees Fahrenheit — for about an hour. This is basically a set-it-and-forget approach to drying the bread, though it does help to push the bread around with a spatula from time to time to ensure that it dries as evenly as possible. 

If your oven doesn't dip to temps that low, then you'll want to try to bake the cubes at temperatures between 250 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit. You'll have to take a more active role here. Check the bread every 20 to 30 minutes or so. The pieces will start to turn golden in that time frame and will need to be flipped over the ensure that the golden color makes it onto all sides of the bread.

Drying your bread out in the oven allows you to take advantage of one of the smartest hacks in home cooking — making stuffing from croutons, or at least, from bread that has the flavoring of croutons. You get the flavors of butter and aromatics, like onions, garlic, and celery, and your favorite herbs — all the ingredients that normally go into a crouton recipe. In other words, before you stuff the stuffing into the oven, it's possible to flavor your bread up with your go-to crouton ingredients. 

And there's another advantage to going this route. You have more options when it comes to baking your favorite flavors into your stuffing bread. For example, if you'd like your stuffing to take on the flavorful overtones of Parmesan, you can bake the cheese onto the bread bits as you dry the bread out in the oven. 

Lastly, when you dry the bread out on your own terms, you give yourself more control over the taste and texture of the bread than you'd have if you just let it dry out on the counter. Given how important dinners are during the fall and winter holidays, it pays to take as much of the guesswork out of cooking as you can. Drying your stuffing's bread in the oven means your holiday cooking plans aren't slowed down by your attempts to turn bread-gone-bad into something better. Just start with good bread to begin with and work from there.