Giving thanks for turkey cheesesteak

Read Time: 8 minutes

This year, like the past two years, I have decided to make Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks before the actual day of Thanksgiving to have leftovers for planning out my yearly leftover Thanksgiving sandwich. This year I decided to make turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce a couple of weeks ago and this is the sandwich that I ended up making.

Here are the sandwiches I made with leftover Thanksgiving ingredients for the past two years. Bookmark them out if you want but keep scrolling to read more about this year’s version.

The point of these sandwiches has never been to create a new sandwich from raw ingredients like I do with the other sandwiches I write about so I have to change my way of sandwiching to figure out what to do with leftovers from Thanksgiving.

First, we need the best soft roll I can make for a comforting sub sandwich.

Soft submarine sandwich roll

I think this roll is probably the first or second most consistent sandwich roll that I have created a recipe for. It’s an easy dough to work with and when I want a 10 to 12-inch soft, sub or hoagie roll, this recipe produces an extra consistent roll. Some recipes will require you to do a little guesswork when mixing the dough to add small amounts of water or flour depending on the humidity of your kitchen, but for me, this recipe is perfect every time (as long as you use the gram weights to measure ingredients).

For this sort of long roll that you might find sandwiching an American-style sub at your local deli or sandwich shop, I use a silicone sub roll mold to help shape the rolls for consistency reasons. I have made this recipe several times with and several times without this mold and I find myself grabbing it often since I purchased it. It’s less than 20 bucks on Amazon but you can probably find similar versions elsewhere.

Cranberry sauce

Stuffing or dressing?

What is the difference between stuffing and dressing? If you go looking around the internet for the answer to this question you will find a lot of old articles from Food Network or Food & Wine, and they typically will say that stuffing is something that was stuffed and cooked inside the bird and dressing was served alongside the turkey. But I don’t really think that is what the difference is in 2023.

In this day and age, I don’t think most people are putting wet, seasoned bread inside of a raw turkey to bake. Doing this means that you must cook the turkey for a super long time or else you will give all of your Thanksgiving guests some sort of foodborne illness. This is anecdotal and I have no actual data to back it up, but I believe most people are cooking stuffing in a pan when Thanksgiving rolls around.

In my experience from my own childhood eating dressing and from scouring the internet for dressing recipes vs stuffing recipes, a dressing is typically packed much denser in the casserole/baking dish to form a bit of a soft brownie consistency. Stuffing on the other hand seems to be packed into its baking dish much looser so you can see the individual pieces of bread and the top of the stuffing has more nooks and crannies because of the loose packing. Either way, they both use almost the same ingredients and are both great side dishes if gravy is on the table. You can’t go wrong with either one in my opinion.

Stuffing science

One pound of bread to one pound of liquid = stuffing/dressing.

A good thing about using a 1-to-1 bread-to-liquid in the base of your stuffing is that you can make a small amount or scale it up for a bigger event. Once the stuffing ingredients are all combined and mixed well you can bake it in pretty much any oven-safe dish if you cook it covered with foil for the first 45 minutes and uncover it for the last 15 minutes to allow the stuffing to brown.

My stuffing recipe below is meant to be baked in a 9 x 13-inch baking dish until it reaches 165 degrees F. As you can see below the method I use cooks the stuffing much higher than the required temperature but that doesn’t mean it’s overcooked like it would be if you overshot your meat temperature.

Here’s my stuffing recipe that you can use for this sandwich, or you can use whatever stuffing that your aunt made for Thanksgiving. Bring your own Tupperware.

Roasted turkey

I only cooked a boneless skinless turkey breast for this sandwich because I didn’t have the time or stomach capacity to eat a whole turkey by myself two weeks before Thanksgiving. I used my Cajun roast turkey recipe that you can find below which is basically perfect for quite a few sandwich applications.

You don’t have to season a turkey breast with Cajun seasoning if you think it will interfere with the other flavors, but it worked for this sandwich for sure. If you just want to use salt and pepper, that works well too, just make sure to be overly aggressive with the seasoning because there’s only a little bit of surface area on a turkey or turkey breast and way more internal meat that you can’t apply seasonings to.

I don’t list a time in my roast turkey breast recipe because it will vary from oven to oven, but in this case, it took me exactly one hour and twenty minutes to get my turkey breast to 155 F in a 375 F oven. In the past, my attempts have been around this and 1.5 hours in my oven.

Here’s my Cajun spiced roasted turkey breast that I make quite often to slice for sandwiches.

Giving thanks for this cheesesteak

This is a comforting sandwich that will use up some of the more expected items that you might have left over after Thanksgiving. At least, that’s the case in my house. There is always a little bit of turkey and some dressing/stuffing left over. And no one eats all the cranberry sauce. So, we can put them to work here with some cheese and turn leftovers into something magical.

Giving-thanks turkey cheesesteak process

I’ve written about several different cheesesteaks and cheesesteak-adjacent sandwiches for this blog and this one is pretty similar in the cooking process. I use a fairly inexpensive griddle when I’m making cheesesteak-style sandwiches because it has plenty of space for moving things around and since it is cast-iron, I can use metal flat-top spatulas without scratching anything.

You can make a cheesesteak in your mom’s non-stick skillet if you want, it just might be a tiny bit harder to move the ingredients around as easily.

Basically, we want to crisp up the stuffing, warm and crisp up the turkey, and then use these hot ingredients to help melt the provolone cheese. The whole process will only take ten minutes or so and things move quickly so get your ingredients ready before you start.

Now that we have our hot turkey, crispy stuffing, and melty cheese, we’re done and ready for the tart cranberry sauce to complete the whole package.

Here’s my recipe for the Giving-thanks turkey cheesesteak that you can make with your Thanksgiving leftovers. Or you can be like me and make all the ingredients two weeks before the big day.

Check back next week

Next week I will be writing about my next Patreon sandwich. It’s gonna get a little German but also a little local. Join the Bounded by Buns Patreon community to get insider-information about upcoming sandwiches and get an opportunity to suggest future sandwiches that I will make.