turkey meatloaf for skeptics

Meatloaf has a PR problem. It took me a while to come around to it; I didn’t grow up eating it, and certainly nothing about the name — aloaf, a loaf ofmeat— convinced me I was missing a thing. But, slowly, I have tiptoed into the light, and now I get it. It’s not cute, but it’s objectively delicious. Imagine if we only ate things that were camera-ready — it would be a world without gravy, mushroom soup, and lopsided made-with-love frosted cakes. We absolutely must not stand for that.

But I’d only made meatloaves with eitherground beefor ground pork, never turkey. Turkey, which I suspected would be too dry or bland for any recipe to overcome, was the final frontier, and I tried it a whole bunch of ways before realizing that what I wanted most on top was not strips of bacon or a thick layer of ketchup, but a simple barbecue-type sauce. In the oven, it gets glossy and dark, and it goes really well with Crushed Ranch-y Potatoes (recipe follows). Unlike their mashed counterparts, crushed potatoes are full of contrasts: big and small chunks, some parts puddled with cream, some parts saltier-and that slight chaos of forkfuls plays well off the reliable, steady slices of meatloaf.

[This recipe is excerpted from my third cookbook,Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The top 5 photos were styled by Barrett Washburne, who can even make meatloaf look good.]

Podcast!The second episode of my new podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt,The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, is out this week and it’s all about — yes! — meatloaf, including this one. You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts and I’ve set up a newpodcast tab/page where you can keep up on it here, too. We will have new episodes every two Mondays. We’ve been working on this behind the scenes for the last year — I hope you enjoy listening along.