The Bitten Word

The 2014 Thanksgiving Index: All This Year's Recipes in One Handy Place

Now that we've laid out this year's Thanksgiving trends, let's get to the recipes themselves.

And what a doozy of a year it is, with rye bread in the stuffing, veggie custards on the table, and Ethiopian spices on the peas. 

Below you'll find more than 150 recipes from 11 of this year's Thanksgiving issues. To be clear, this is not an index of every food magazine recipe this month. There are hundreds more recipes in these 11 issues. For the 2014 Thanksgiving Index, we've scoured the magazines for their Thanksgiving features, and that's what we've compiled here. 

We want to hear what you think! What sounds amazing? What reads like something your family would disown you for if you brought it to the Thanksgiving table? And what dish do you plan to try first? 

We've already made 20 of the dishes listed below. Tomorrow, we'll feature the first one. (Spoiler alert: It's not the Seitan Roast.) 

Share your picks and we'll see if you gravitated toward the same dishes we did. Happy exploring!

~ Zach & Clay 

Thanksgiving 2014 Trends: What's Hot in Turkey, Stuffing and all the Trimmings

Sharpen your knives and pull out your cranberry jello molds -- it's Thanksgiving cooking season once again!

What kind of Thanksgiving cook are you? Maybe you're someone who returns to tried and true family favorites year after year. Or maybe you like to mix it up with new preparations and twists, to keep your guests on their toes.

Either way, it's time to start planning your menu for the big day -- and we've got you covered. As we've done for the past 6 years now, we've scoured all the big food magazines to see what they're serving up for this year's Thanksgiving dinner. Today, we're going to tell you about some of this year's biggest Thanksgiving trends, including graphic visualizations of all the recipe names, showing which foods are most popular this year. Tomorrow, we'll inundate you with our exhaustive 2014 Thanksgiving Recipe Index -- more than 150 recipes from 11 current issues of popular food magazines. 

Then, leading up to Thanksgiving, we'll tell you all about the 20 different recipes we tried out for ourselves. We'll discuss what we loved, what we weren't crazy about, and which recipes have no place on your Thanksgiving table.

We're excited for the next few weeks! So let's get started:

 

Big Trend: Global Flavors

It's Thanksgiving: Do you know where your ras el hanout is?

Thanksgiving coverage in food magazines is always a mix of familiar flavors and more exotic twists. But this year we noticed a decided tilt toward spices and ingredients that would definitely have left the Pilgrims perplexed.

This year's recipes seem ripped from a Spice Road market, featuring ingredients like harissa, madras hot curry, Ethiopian berbere and, yes, ras el hanout. There's Portuguese linguiça, as well as Japanese miso and tamari (in separate recipes!). Two different magazines have a recipe for a Moroccan-spiced turkey.

And there are plenty of other recipes with ingredients that are less exotic but still quite nontraditional for Thanksgiving -- things like cardamom, coriander, coconut, mango, aged balsamic vinegar, sesame seeds.

It's a contrast from recent years, when we've seen a bigger trend toward regional heritage American flavors and ingredients -- bourbon, sorghum, grits, apple cider, bacon. You definitely still see some of that this year, but Thanksgiving 2014 seems to have a decidedly wider worldview.