I grew up with turkey meatloaf. You probably grew up with some version of a loaf of meat. 9-28: Stuffed Meatloaf doesn’t stray too far from the traditional mold.
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I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too thrilled if the planned dinner for a party was a meatloaf. Don’t get me wrong, I’d appreciate the gesture. However, it’s tough to get excited about…meatloaf.
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As I said in the intro, I grew up with turkey meatloaf. My mom would cover the top with barbecue sauce, cheese, and maybe some turkey bacon, and hers would usually be more of a Bundt or ring shape. I have no idea why, probably so it’d cook faster and everyone got more of the outside crusty part.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure she never made this one.
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Ingredients. I used breadcrumbs instead of the potatoes, and went with the whole wheat panko, since that’s what I had open. That sad looking apple in the front was probably a bit past its time, but it works well in this kind of capacity. Used dried parsley instead of fresh, since that’s what I had.
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My husband/sous chef, dutifully peeling the sad, wrinkly apple.
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He even diced it up for me. 🙂
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While he was peeling and dicing, I worked on the meat mixture.
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That’s a fine looking rectangle of meat, if I do say so myself. Here’s a change I would have made: put plastic wrap UNDER this meat but on top of the board. When you go to roll it up, use the wrap and it’ll be WAY easier.
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Sous chef man working on the rest of his dicing prep work.
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This stuff all goes together to become the stuffing for the loaf. The card suggests swapping things out if there’s other things you like more–here’s where you’d do it.
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Stuffing is evenly distributed on the meat rectangle.
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This took WAY more effort than it should have to roll up–it looks solid, but the meat layer on the outside is VERY thin. It cracks/separates really easily. Part of this however, is that we had way more stuffing than it called for–my sous chef went on a bacon dicing spree and included more than was listed.
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I made the last minute call to put the loaf on top of a drain/broiler pan to allow the fat to drip down. While this lent itself to a less fatty loaf, it was also a lot drier due to this technique.
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Loaf after it was done. There were some structural breaches at the top, but for the most part it stayed together well. There was a LOT of fat/grease at the bottom, but that might have been because of the extra bacon in there as well.
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Final cross-section shot. It was tasty, but kind of dry. That was probably my fault, but it wasn’t a huge deal. With a bit of barbecue sauce, it turned out to be a pretty good loaf. 😉
Grade: B+