But wait…how adorbs are these?! Don’t these bring you so much satisfaction just looking at them? Picture this: you are setting up your thanksgiving spread, and you have twelve of these little cuties sitting out on a serving tray, ready for someone to just grab and place next to their pile of turkey, ready to be smothered in gravy and eaten all together in one glorious bite.

I love thinking of fun new things to make for Thanksgiving each year, and these fit the bill perfectly. They are a copy of my all time FAVORITE stuffing recipe, but they are just stuffed into muffin tins and baked that way.

They are perfect little single serving stuffing muffins of love. We are big fans. My husband lovingly nicknamed these “Stuffins,” which is what they were called on a daily basis as many of them sat in our fridge after recipe testing. Real life examples:

“What should I bring to work for lunch? Do we still have stuffins?”

“Do you think Ford would eat a stuffin for dinner?”

“These stuffins make my life complete in every way – thank you, lovely wife, for creating them.”

That last one might not have actually been said…but I’m going to confidently assume it was being thought.

So, a few things you need to know here.

These aren’t traditional muffins…obviously…so they aren’t going to “rise” like normal muffins would. Meaning you are going to stuff and stuff and stuff some more into each muffin tin until each little muffin is super high in the pan. If you just fill them to the surface like you would a normal muffin, you’re going to half about half of the mixture left. So pack it in there and keep stuffing, people! It fits…you just gotta load it up
I don’t like my stuffing wet, and I don’t like it super dry. I like the top to be nice and crispy, crunchy, and brown, and I like the inside to be nice and moist. So – if you like yours dry, bake them for longer. They will be delicious no matter what. LOVE.

If you decide that these are cute but you don’t really want to put the extra effort into making them in muffin form, please for the love of PETE, make this stuffing in traditional, baking dish form. Here’s that recipe – if you haven’t tried it, YOU HAVEN’T LIVED. It’s the best. And that comes from a life-long stuffing hater 👋.

Ciabatta and Pork Sausage Stuffing Muffins

Author: Annie Chesson
Prep Time: 1 hour
Cook Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 2 hours
Yield: 12 muffins 1x

Ingredients

Scale

1/2 pound good ciabatta bread, diced into 1 inch cubes (about 4 cups)
1/2 pound good sourdough bread, diced into 1 inch cubes (about 4 cups)
1 pound pork sausage (not Italian, just regular [you can find it where the breakfast sausage is])
1 stick butter, divided
1 onion, finely diced
5 stalks celery, finely diced
2 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon mixture of fresh minced sage, rosemary, and thyme (doesn’t have to be exactly equal amounts of each as long as the mix comes out to be about 1 tablespoon all together)
2 eggs

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees
Spread your cubed bread evenly across a baking sheet and bake for 40 mins so that the bread is VERY dry
Set aside and crank the oven up to 375
Brown your pork sausage with some salt and pepper in a large saute pan over medium high heat (add olive oil if the pan gets dry). When browned, add the pork to a large bowl
In the same pan, melt half a stick of butter. When melted, add your onions and celery + salt and pepper and cook until softened. Add this to the bowl with your pork
Add your bread cubes + your herbs to the bowl and stir until combined
Pour in your chicken stock and stir very thoroughly until all the stock has absorbed into the bread
Season to taste with salt and pepper and then stir in your eggs. Make sure the mixture isn’t still hot when you stir in your eggs (tip: I add the chicken stock cold so it cools everything down and I don’t have to wait to add the eggs)
Line a muffin tin with muffin liners and scoop all your stuffing mixture into the tins. You have to really pack it in there and pile it HIGH to make all the stuffing fit, but this is what gives you the “muffin” look once they are baked, since they obviously won’t “rise” in the oven like regular muffins!
Slice your remaining butter into 12 thin pats and top each stuffing muffin with a pat of butter
Cover loosely in foil and bake for 30 minutes
Remove the foil and bake for another 30 minutes

Notes

I haven’t ever tried making these without muffin liners, but I would worry that they wouldn’t come out easily in one piece. I don’t have an issue with them falling apart, so they might be okay with no liner, but I can’t speak from experience on that!