There’s a Better Way to Reheat Thanksgiving Leftovers in Your Microwave (It Makes a Huge Difference)

Thanksgiving is basically my favorite holiday. I’m a passionate food professional who loves cooking and planning, so for me it’s a total dream. I even love the lead-up to Thanksgiving, which involves days of slow-cooking tasks that culminate in a giant made-from-scratch feast full of foods I eat only once a year (although, for the most part, mashed potatoes make their way into many a non-Thanksgiving meal in my house).

Perhaps more precious to me than the actual Thanksgiving meal are the leftovers. We eat Thanksgiving food at my house for about a week after the big day, and I plan accordingly — I make extra portions of our favorite dishes so we won’t run out before we get through all of the roasted turkey. That said, I have a lot of experience reheating plates full of Thanksgiving food, and over the years I’ve come to rely on a specific trick to ensure that the plate is uniformly warmed through and as delicious as it was on day one: reheating the mashed potatoes first.

Mashed potatoes are very dense and take a much longer time to heat all the way through than the other dishes on a typical Thanksgiving plate. Heating everything together at the same time inevitably leads to a plate that’s 3/4 hot food, 1/4 cold-in-the-center mash.

If you’re reheating a plate of leftovers in the microwave, start with just the mashed potatoes on the plate and heat them alone first to give them a head-start. The rest of the Thanksgiving dishes — stuffing, gravy, green beans, turkey — can come after, as they heat up significantly faster in the microwave than the mash. 

• Start with the mashed potatoes and stir every minute or so. Exact reheating time will depend on the density of your potatoes, the strength of your microwave, and the amount of potatoes on the plate, but microwaving in one-minute intervals works well for me. I usually wind up heating them for two to three minutes total. Remember to stir them after every minute to redistribute the heat and keep the edges from drying out.
• Add the stuffing second. While stuffing is not as dense as mashed potatoes, depending on the recipe it can be close. I usually add the stuffing to the plate after the potatoes have been in for a minute or two, before adding the rest of the leftovers to the plate.