Keto Stuffing with Sausage and Low-Carb Bread

Keto stuffing with low-carb bread is the perfect indulgent holiday side dish, but it only has 3 g net carb per serving! It’s a flavorful mix highlighted with ground sausage, onion, and sage. This is a naturally keto-friendly, low-carb, gluten-free, and nut-free recipe with a dairy-free option.

Keto Stuffing Recipe for Thanksgiving

Staying keto over the holidays has never been easier! You can remake almost anything with keto macros. This recipe for keto stuffing is a great example of that. It’s holiday comfort food that doesn’t sacrifice flavor or texture. 

Thanksgiving, and Christmas, too, for that matter, are hard to enjoy without stuffing on the table. So often, it’s the recipe that people miss most when they go low-carb, and no wonder because it’s darn good!

Low-carb keto stuffing is a helpful bridge for introducing a keto diet to friends and family. Serving foods that are “too good to be true” (but are!) is a fun strategy for surprising guests and showing them (in a non-threatening way) the potential of healthy foods and low-carb dietary choices.

How to Make Keto Stuffing

Gather many traditional stuffing ingredients with a few low-carb substitutions, and you can make the best keto stuffing recipe that tastes like traditional stuffing but only has a fraction of the carbs and calories. 

Ingredients

Keto bread – Use store-bought keto bread or, my choice, Psyllium Husk Keto Bread and cut slices into ½-inch cubes. Then, dry them according to the recipe directions and make “stale” bread. You’ll need about 6 cups of cubed bread. 

Bulk sausage – You can also substitute it with ground pork. Note that bulk sausage is made with added herbs and spices so choose a flavor that will complement the other ingredients and not overpower them.

Butter – I love butter in everything but substitute it with extra-virgin olive oil or coconut oil if you want a dairy-free version instead.

Onion and celery – Yellow onion is usually my first choice, but you can use pearl or red onion also. Both one chopped medium onion and three stalks of celery equate to about 1 cup.

Herbs – The recipe below gives measurements for dried sage, thyme, and rosemary. Use a 3:1 ratio of fresh to dry herb. That’s roughly three times as much fresh herb as dry herb.

Salt and pepper

Bone broth – Broth prevents the stuffing from drying out while baking. I almost always have beef bone broth in my freezer and tend to use it most often. Chicken broth is also great here. You can save money by purchasing an organic shelf-stable bone broth bundle from Kettle & Fire and storing it in your pantry for easy and convenient use.

Eggs – These are important for holding the ingredients together and thickening the stuffing. There are only two eggs in the whole recipe and no eggy flavor.

Step-By-Step Directions

Follow the simple directions and you can’t go wrong! This keto stuffing recipe takes about 40 minutes to prepare and then another 40 until it finishes baking in the oven. The overall process is a little more work than most of my recipes, but still easy and straightforward. I think recreating such a classic holiday dish with keto-friendly macros is worth the effort.

Preheat the oven

Begin by preheating your oven to 350 degrees F or 175 degrees C. Getting into the habit of doing this as soon as you walk into the kitchen to bake something is good. You’ll avoid awkwardly waiting around for the oven to heat up later. Grease a 9×13-inch baking dish with a small portion of butter.

Dry bread cubes

Usually, stuffing uses stale bread. If you already have stale keto bread around, by all means, use it for this recipe. However, chances are that’s not the case, so we’ll dry it out a little first before mixing it into the stuffing.

Arrange the cubed bread in a single layer on a large baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes until dry and toasted. It’s fine to do this while the oven preheats. Toss bread pieces and turn them over once, approximately halfway through the cooking time.

Cook Sausage

Brown the sausage over high heat in a large skillet for about 6 minutes. Break apart any large clumps with a spoon or spatula. Remove from heat and set aside in a large mixing bowl.

Sauté and season, then combine all

Add butter to the skillet. Sauté the onion and celery until tender, about 5 minutes. Season with sage, thyme, rosemary, salt, and pepper. Add everything to the bowl with sausage. Add the toasted bread cubes and broth, then mix well.

Whisk eggs

You have a good mix going now! Whisk the eggs in a small bowl and pour them over the sausage bread mixture. Toss until eggs coat all the ingredients evenly.

Bake

Here’s the last and final step. Pour the stuffing into the greased baking dish and bake for 35 minutes until the top is golden brown. Viola!

Nutritional Info for Homemade Keto Stuffing

The recipe yields 12 servings.

Each serving contains:

• 266 calories
• 7 g protein
• 22 g fat
• 9 g total carbs
• 6 g fiber
• 3 g net carbs

Please note that the nutritional value will change if you substitute ingredients. Use a nutrition app like My Fitness Pal to recalculate and reflect your changes.

What to Serve with Keto Stuffing for Thanksgiving

Sip on keto eggnog while this bakes and your guests arrive.

Then serve on the table with:

• Slow Cooker Keto Pot Roast
• Braised Cabbage
• Low-carb Alternative to Mashed Potatoes
• Chicken Liver Pate

It’s great for putting in a roast chicken or a roast turkey. Although, since stuffing is so good even on its own, serve with low-carb holiday seafood recipes too.

This dish complements many easy low-carb vegetable recipes, so you can have keto sides for everyone.

Finish the meal with a few keto holiday desserts, then rejoice because you stayed keto throughout the entire feast!

Don’t forget to add this recipe to your list of keto Christmas dinner recipes, too. It’s such a crowd-pleaser.

This recipe originally published on November 19, 2018 and was republished with new tips and details on November 9, 2022.