Thanksgiving is all about getting together with your family to eat food. Which is kinda weird considering many Thanksgiving staples are straight garbage. Sure, a fair few of them are amazing enough to make up the difference — stuffing, creamy mashed potatoes with warm gravy, gooey homemade macaroni and cheese — and you get to top off your dinner with a slice of decadent pumpkin pie. Those are wins. But for every good dish, there are two dishes you’d never eat any other time of the year.
Candied yams? Canned cranberry sauce? F*cking Ambrosia?! WHY AMBROSIA??? WHYYYYYYYYYYY???
If you’re going to spend a day passively aggressively arguing over the political agenda of the Barbie movie and comparing incomes over lukewarm food… well, at least eat the stuff that’s likely to taste good. And we’re here to help by shouting out all the worst Thanksgiving side dishes, from bad to “why in the world would you ever eat that, don’t you understand that your stomach capacity is finite?”
Let’s dive in!
8. Glazed Carrots
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Why We Hate This Dish:
I love carrots but what the f*ck is going on with these things? Admittedly, Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday known for its vegetable sides. But when they do show up, it’s… these things.
That’s because it’s super easy to make this dish, so if you’re the person who shows up with glazed carrots just know that everyone thinks you slacked. Also, carrots are already naturally sweet, do you need to toss them in brown sugar and butter? No, but you’re going to because bringing just a bowl of steamed carrots to a dinner party is insane and will get you thrown out.
People hate on green beans, but green beans you can toss with bacon and cook them in the grease. Carrots are too thick for that.
The Bottom Line:
These are just for show. There’s enough sugar on Thanksgiving.
7. Creamed Spinach
Why We Hate This Dish:
“Oh, thanks for bringing this wet mushy dirt-flavored dish, we can’t wait to microwave it and make the texture even weirder.” This is what everyone really wants to say to you when you show up with this dish in hand. Creamed spinach? Get the hell out of here!
I’ll admit, there is a time and place for creamed spinach. My editor likes it. Zach Johnston probably knows how to make it good. But that time and place isn’t Thanksgiving dinner. This is the sort of dish you pair with a bloody savory steak, not dry turkey and ham.
The Bottom Line:
Maybe it works if you’re making it fresh, but you probably aren’t — which means it’s going to need to be microwaved and no one likes microwaved leaves.
6. Apple Pie
Why We Hate This Dish:
The only other pie aside from pumpkin that is acceptable to bring to the table during Thanksgiving is pecan. I will not argue or belabor this point.
The Bottom Line:
If the pumpkin pies are sold out, you don’t pick up apple. You go to another store and hope they have pumpkin.
5. Turkey
Why We Hate This Dish:
I know it’s weird to place the centerpiece dish of Thanksgiving in this list of worst Thanksgiving sides, but let’s face it, turkey is always the worst dish (roast and ham are always the go-to proteins). No shade to turkey, outside of Thanksgiving I love it, but because this is a holiday that centers around food that is cooked elsewhere and then re-heated hours — sometimes days — later, the turkey always suffers.
Unless it’s deep-fried or you’re eating one of those big roasted turkey legs, your Thanksgiving turkey is probably dry and requires layers of gravy to even be palatable. There are better ways to enjoy gravy, my friend.
Don’t blame your family too much, either — cooking a whole turkey is something most people do only once per year, resulting in few masters of the craft. Better to put all the turkey you have coming your way aside with some gravy and do turkey tacos the next day.
The Bottom Line:
We should be able to admit that Thanksgiving turkey is terrible without hurting someone in our family’s feelings.
4. Sweet Potatoes
Why We Hate This Dish:
If your family goes all out and makes the sweet potato casserole, you get a pass. While I don’t love that dish, at least it’s a legit dessert that reheats wonderfully and feels tied to the holiday. Mashed sweet potatoes, on the other hand, are awful. Once you go for that “walk with the cousins” you might fool yourself into thinking this admittedly beautiful-looking dish might be delicious, but even high, I promise you it’s not.
What are we supposed to pair this dish with? We already have baked ham which when combined with this dish is overwhelmingly sweet, and if you’re going for the roast beef then mashed potatoes and gravy are going to be a way more satisfying side dish. So that leaves what, turkey?
The Bottom Line:
The lazy version of the sweet potato casserole. It’s not even 1/10th as good.
3. A Corn Dish That Isn’t Cornbread
Why We Hate This Dish:
If you’re bringing corn to the table it’s because you were straight up too lazy to make an actual dish and instead opened up a can of corn, boiled it, and then put it in a bowl pretending you did your part.
The only corn-related dish you should be bringing to Thanksgiving is cornbread. Specifically jalapeno corn bread which doesn’t have to be hard to make. Let me help you: buy a box of jiffy cornbread mix, a single jalapeño, and some Greek yogurt. Follow the recipe on the box, dice up a jalapeño and throw it in the mixture as well as a spoon of the Greek yogurt (this will help make it creamy and not too dry), toss it in the oven and bam, you have a dish that is one thousand times better than a bowl of corn and is just as easy to make!
The Bottom Line:
At least pick a food that is in season. This isn’t Fourth of July, friend.
2. Canned Cranberry Sauce
Why We Hate This Dish:
It feels shallow to hate canned cranberry sauce because of the way it looks but, I mean, look at it! Now granted, no one is eating canned cranberry sauce the way that it’s photographed, but once you’ve seen those can ridge in the gelatinous goo, it’s hard to enjoy it.
Now let me defend cranberry sauce for a second. It’s an interesting way to add complexity and dimension to your dish, it’s tart and sweet and pairs well with various Thanksgiving staples. But so does gravy, and why you’d opt for this over gravy is beyond comprehension.
When done right, this dish can be amazing, look no further than Uproxx’s own Zach Johnston and his recipe for homemade bourbon-cranberry sauce. Doesn’t that just sound great? Now compare that to the words “canned cranberry sauce.”
The Bottom Line:
If you’re willing to make your own — which isn’t hard by the way — you get a pass, but canned cranberry sauce is more about tradition than pleasing anybody at the table.
1. Ambrosia
Why We Hate This Dish:
Aside from this dish looking like what I imagine clown throw-up looks like, Ambrosia is just straight-up weird. A fruit salad made from pineapple, mandarin oranges, marshmallows, coconut, and whipped cream — ambrosia is one of those dishes that should work because each of the individual ingredients is delicious on its own, but fails to come together harmoniously.
The mix of vague tropical fruit notes and intense artificial sweetness is stomach-turning. It is by far the sweetest dish you’ll ever find on the table, and I struggle to see how this fits alongside any of the staple Thanksgiving flavors.
Also, most of the time people leave the ambrosia out on the table — probably because no one knows what to do with it — which allows the whipped cream to melt, making this a soggy puddle of sweetness.
The Bottom Line:
Ambrosia gets its name from the food of the Greek gods. Whoever invented this dish and called it “ambrosia” must’ve had Hermes (famous for being a prankster) in mind because this is a joke of a dish.
