A Single's Meatloaf: The Strongest Case for Ground Turkey

Table for One is a column by Senior Editor Eric Kim, who loves cooking for himself—and only himself—and seeks to celebrate the beauty of solitude in its many forms.

Most meatloaf recipes feed a crowd. You’re taking ground meat and stretching it—in volume and in flavor—by adding fillers like eggs, onions, and bread crumbs.

But there are nights when the "crowd" is just you. When you've spent an hour on a packed train after work and know that a warm plate of food is not waiting for you at home.

Though making an entire meatloaf for yourself is a great excuse for sandwiches with the leftovers, it's nice to have the option to eat something new the next day should you be craving something else. It's a practice I've adopted since living alone in a big city: cooking small-scale. If there’s anything I hate more than forcing myself to eat something just because I've made too much of it, it’s wasting that very food.

Dishes like meatloaf prove more difficult with this kind of cooking, as it can be hard to find packages of ground meat smaller than a pound—but then again, why would you want to? Ground meats like turkey (which I find myself buying more and more these days because it’s leaner and has a smaller carbon footprint than beef) are the perfect foundational ingredient to bring home, divvy into individual portions, and store in the fridge to do with however you like throughout the week.

Maybe one night you make yourself a burger. The next night: spicy, fish-saucy larb. This single-serving turkey meatloaf fits the bill, as well.

The whole dish comes together in under an hour, 30 minutes of which the meatloaf is quietly baking in the oven. This leaves you time to pour yourself a glass of wine, crack open an E.M. Forster novel, or boil a handful of new potatoes to mash with heavy cream and nutmeg.

As for the meatloaf, it's filled out, as most loaves are, with a wet thing and a dry thing. The wet thing here is an umami bomb of a mixture (onions sautéed, almost caramelized, in a pan with ketchup and heavy cream, plus lots of salt and pepper), which later seasons the meat deeply and provides moisture. The heavy cream in particular adds fat, which lean turkey desperately needs.

The dry thing in this recipe is rolled oats, which expand as they cook, offering structure to the loaf without the need for eggs. You could use bread crumbs instead if you have them, but I love the old-fashioned quality of an oat-bound meatloaf (and that it happens to be gluten-free). The turkey, anyway—especially as you work in the wet thing and the dry thing with your hands and form it into a loaf—releases myosin, a meat protein that acts as its own binder.

Ground turkey gets a bad rap, but I relish in its clean flavor. It’s the perfect canvas for richer seasonings like cumin, which adds warmth, and celery seed, which provides an herbal pepperiness. A simple glaze of ketchup, yellow mustard, and brown sugar lends that comforting, familiar sweetness that draws me to meatloaf in the first place.

Each flavorful component works together with the base protein to make this the kind of dish you'll want to eat over and over. And should you have more ground turkey in the fridge, you can.

But you can decide that tomorrow.

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