Recipes By Dorie Greenspan
72 recipes found
Honey Mustard Salmon Rillettes
Salmon rillettes are the perfect party food for several reasons: They come together quickly and are easily made ahead, best served chilled and happy to be tinkered with. While classic French rillettes are prepared by cooking pork, duck or goose in its own fat for hours and hours until the meat is so soft that it’s spreadable, these rillettes wink at tradition. They’re adapted from the version in “Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook” (Harvest, 2018) and include a mix of fresh and smoked salmon that are mashed with mayo and a bit of butter, then brightened with mustard and capers. The fact that they sound fancy only makes them more fun to serve super casually with bread and bagel or potato chips.
Birthday Baked Alaska
Baked alaska is beautiful, elegant and dramatic. It’s easy to make; it’s convenient (it must be made ahead); it’s got ice cream (enough said); it’s got meringue — which is the same as saying it’s got magic. It looks gorgeous whole and just as gorgeous sliced; it’s creamy and icy cold inside, marshmallowy all around and warm on the edges. In other words, it’s perfect. This one was made in the colors of the French flag to celebrate the 117th birthday of the French nun, Sister André. Reverse the colors for the Fourth of July — it’s what the creator of this recipe, Zoë François, did originally — or use whatever flavors of ice cream you love; the loaf pan will hold 2 quarts.
Bittersweet Chocolate-Almond Cake With Amaretti Cookie Crumbs
Here’s a cake that comes together with the push of a button — butter, sugar, eggs and cocoa as well as dark chocolate, almonds and amaretti cookies are blended in a food processor. Although it looks like a brownie, the cake tilts toward a nut torte. It’s low and sleek, simple, sophisticated and packed with flavor. The original recipe appeared in my debut cookbook, “Sweet Times,” in 1991, and when I made it for Julia Child that year, I got her thumbs up. Over time, I haven’t fiddled much with the recipe’s basics, but these days I finish the cake with a glaze and a sprinkling of crushed amaretti for style and crunch. I prefer amaretti di Saronno by Lazzaroni for the cake, but other amaretti work well too. And don’t be distressed if the cake develops a mound during baking (it happens now and then). Press it down with a spatula — it doesn’t diminish this cake’s deliciousness.
Maison Aleph’s Sesame-Halvah 1,001 Feuilles
This sweet straddles East and West. Its name plays on French mille-feuille (mille-feuille means 1,000 leaves), but its structure follows the lines of Middle Eastern baklava. It’s got layers of buttered and sugared phyllo dough and a filling made with tahini and vanilla halvah. The mixture is similar to frangipane, but not like any I’ve ever tasted — it’s completely original and wonderfully good. A word on the phyllo: If the sheets are smaller than 12-by-17-inches, don’t worry — the dessert will bake the same way, but the middle layer will be slightly thicker and the yield will be less. For the most delicious pastry, use clarified butter: Bring the butter to a boil in a medium saucepan. Lower the heat and simmer until most of the solids fall to the bottom of the pan; the bubbling will have subsided. Slowly pour the butter through a coffee filter or a strainer lined with cheesecloth; discard the solids and reserve the liquid. You can make the butter weeks ahead and keep it refrigerated.
Biscuits Roses
Guillaume Portier, a pastry instructor at La Cuisine Paris cooking school, encouraged me as I was trying to recreate Biscuits Rose de Reims, pink sugar-topped cookies that were once dipped into champagne, the most famous export from the French city of Reims. I kept making delicious cookies, but none of my batches matched the storebought, which used ammonium carbonate (best known as smelling salts) to give them crackle and shelf-life. Guillaume told me to stop striving for a replica, reminding me that if what we baked at home lasted forever, we’d be deprived of the pleasure of making pastries again and again. These cookies will hold for a week or so if you keep them in a sealed tin. After that, you can look forward to the pleasure of making another batch. A word on piping: If you don’t have a piping bag, use a zipper-lock plastic bag. Fill with batter, seal and cut a 1-inch diameter opening in a corner.
Classic Rice Pudding
Anyone looking to try one’s hand at playing around with a recipe can’t do better than to start with rice pudding. I began making rice pudding with our son’s babysitter, a Frenchwoman named Marie-Cécile, who cooked au pif, meaning she followed her instincts and would riff on just about everything she made. Moi? I followed Marie-Cécile’s lead and have been making my own version of rice pudding regularly, but rarely with the same flavorings. Sometimes I’ll stir chocolate into the pudding right before it’s cooked, and often I’ll top the pudding with roasted fruit. For apples, cut 2 unpeeled apples into 1/4-inch wedges. Cook 1/2 cup sugar in a nonstick skillet until amber (stir only after the sugar starts to color), add 2 tablespoons butter followed by the apples. Cook, turning the wedges, for 6 to 8 minutes, until translucent.
Gravlax With Yogurt-Dill Sauce
I’ve always thought that gravlax should be translated as “gift from the Norse gods” – it’s the perfect party dish. It’s a fillet of salmon cured in a mixture of salt, sugar and herbs. After two to three days, the fish emerges silky, flavorful to its core and easy to slice. While gravlax is traditionally cured with dill, I like to make a bouquet of herbs, heavy on the dill but including mint and basil as well. And while a sweet mustard-dill sauce is the usual sauce to go with gravlax, I’ve tinkered here too: my sauce is made with yogurt, a bit of mayo, white balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and yes, dill. It’s a bit tangier than the norm and perfect with the rich salmon. Serve on thinly sliced rye bread or crackers, and if you’ve got some pickled onions, add them to the platter.
Lemon-Spice Visiting Cake
Whether you pack this cake as a gift or have it ready when visitors come to you, the imperative to share is implicit in its name. The cake is built for comfort and durability – make it on Thursday or Friday and have it all weekend. And if it stales, toast it; the heat will intensify the lemon and spice deliciously. The cake is easy to make (no machines needed) and, like all spice cakes, better after a day’s rest. Giving it a swish of warmed marmalade when it comes out of the oven is optional. What shouldn't be passed up is what I call the ‘lemon trick’: Use your fingertips to rub the recipe’s lemon and sugar together until the sugar is moist and aromatic. This easy step transfers everything essential from the lemon to the cake. Think of it as aromatherapy for the cake and you.
Carrot Cake
This classic carrot cake recipe is not overly spiced, and it has texture from the grated carrots, shredded coconut, chopped nuts and raisins. If your dried fruit feels dry, plump it either by steaming the fruit for a couple of minutes; pouring boiling water over the fruit then draining it; or even just running it under hot tap water. Pat the fruit dry before using it. There’s enough frosting to fill the layers and cover the sides and top of the cake, but each layer is covered generously, so generously that when the next layer goes on the frosting ripples out around the edges. Then just swirl the frosting over the top, leaving the sides bare.
Strawberry Baby Cakes
Created as a first birthday treat for a little girl, these are a sweet example of something that is simple but memorable. The look is adorable: a cake sized for a baby’s hand, covered in a soft white-chocolate glaze and finished with sprinkles. The taste is primarily vanilla — that’s the extract and white chocolate at play — and there’s a sly hint of rose, added as much for mystery as for bolstering the best qualities of the fresh strawberry that’s tucked into the cake’s middle. But it’s the cake’s texture that’s most confoundingly wonderful. It’s tender and chewy, with a compact crumb still light enough to bring you back for another serving. When it’s not a baby’s birthday, skip the candles and have the cakes with espresso — or even Champagne.
Chocolate-Chocolate Birthday Cake
This is the birthday cake I’ve made for my son since he was about 11. After boxed cakes, ice-cream cakes, a cake in a Darth Vader mold (that year, the party’s theme was “May the Fours Be With You), this cake hit the spot and remains a favorite. It’s a double-layer devil’s-food cake made with cocoa and bittersweet chocolate, the same pair that makes the frosting so luscious. You can make the layers ahead of time, wrap them and freeze them for up to a month. As for the frosting, it’s best spread between the layers and over the cake when it’s just made. Once assembled, the cake can be refrigerated overnight. It cuts most easily when it’s cold but tastes best when it’s at room temperature, which is about what it will be once the candles are blown out and the slices put on plates. Ice cream alongside is unnecessary but nice. Hey, it’s a birthday!
Sweet Potato Galette
Every part of this simple galette has its charms. The crust is easy to pull together and since it’s rolled out flat — no crimping or fluting — it’s doable even if you’re not a pie-hand. The topping is thin slices of sweet potato and apple brushed with maple syrup. And the filling is a hidden gem, a mix of cream cheese, Parmesan and maple syrup spiked with chile powder. Here, it’s piment d’Ville, a California chile grown from the seeds of piment d’Espelette, native to French Basque Country. This type of chile is warm and toasty, a little hot and a little sweet and a jazzy partner that swings sweet and savory, just like the rest of the galette.
Ham and Cheese Quick Bread
This is the kind of savory cake that you make once and then play around with for years to come. In this version, there are chopped roasted red peppers, small chunks of ham, some herbs and three cheeses (mozzarella, Parmesan and fontina). The cheeses could be Cheddar and Gruyère and a semisoft, easily meltable cheese of your choice. The batter could have chopped Calabrian chiles or pepperoncini (go easy on these hot peppers), a different mix of herbs, scallions or shallots for the chives and pancetta or bacon bits for the meat (or you can skip the meat). Cut the cake into fingers to have with wine or serve it alongside soup or salad. And if it goes a little stale, simply toast it.
Skillet Gingerbread Cake With Apple Butter
Apple butter is the surprise ingredient here. Along with molasses, it makes the gingerbread moist, flavorful and a good keeper. The cake’s got a mix of traditional spices — ground ginger, cinnamon and cloves — as well as crystallized ginger, which has a soft, chewy texture and adds a bit of heat. If your ginger is hard, steep it in hot water for 30 seconds, drain and pat it dry. The gingerbread is sweet, but not very, so it’s as good with ricotta, yogurt, a swish of cream cheese or even a slice of Cheddar as it is with whipped cream, ice cream or hot fudge.
Cranberry Spice Bundt Cake
This tall and tender Bundt cake pulls off the trick of being cozy and zingy at the same time. It gets its soft crumb from yogurt (although you could use sour cream or buttermilk) and its pop from puckery fresh cranberries and a mix of cardamom, coriander and ginger. It’s festive with a cranberry icing and classic with a dusting of powdered sugar. And it’s a cake that can go through the seasons — think about swapping the cranberries for dried fruit in the winter and berries in the summer. It’s great with blueberries.
Tuna-Salad Sandwich, Julia Child Style
This was one of Julia Child’s favorite dishes for a working lunch. For decades, Julia was on the road more than she was home and, when she returned to her beloved kitchen, she craved simple foods. For Julia, the important ingredients for this sandwich were the tuna (it had to be packed in oil) and the mayo (she preferred Hellmann’s). Her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh, said, “The rest was up for grabs.” Make it with capers, cornichons and chopped onion, a squirt of lemon juice and some herbs, serve it open-face on an English muffin or between slices of white bread, and you’ll have Julia’s midday signature.
Baked Apples
I don’t remember my mother at the stove. When asked what childhood dish was my favorite, I’d stammer and come up empty. And then, walking down the stairs in my Paris apartment, I got to the third floor and said out loud to no one: baked apples! My mother made baked apples. Her apples were big Cortlands or Rome Beauties, and she cored and stuffed them with raisins, because my father loved raisins. I also bake with Cortlands or Romes when I can get them, Fujis or Galas when I can’t. I’ll often stuff them with raisins, but I think they’re especially nice filled with bits of dried apple and candied ginger. And I like to baste them with apple cider and honey. They’re good hot or cold, but best served warm and topped with something creamy. Cinnamon (my mom always used too much) is optional.
Joanne Chang’s Maple-Blueberry Scones
These scones, created by Joanne Chang for her Flour Bakery & Cafe in Boston, are studded with fresh blueberries, sweetened with maple syrup and made with a blend of whole-wheat and all-purpose flours — but don’t think of them as health food. They’ve also got crème fraîche and plenty of butter. They’re big. They’re glazed. And they’ve got a singular texture: tender, like a layer cake, but also flaky, like a traditional scone. It wasn’t until I made them myself that I realized that their texture is different because the technique is different: Most scone recipes call for the butter to be rubbed into the flour mixture until it’s coated with flour. In Ms. Chang’s recipe, half the butter gets this treatment, which makes the scones characteristically flaky. The other half of the butter is beaten into the dry ingredients so that it becomes the coating for the flour, making the scones tender.
No-Bake Chocolate Clusters
These little cookies are a bunch of good things all at once: crunchy and chewy, sweet and salty, craggy and never neat, or ever the same, which is just as they should be. The must-have ingredients are melted chocolate, either dark or white (or both), and cornflakes. The coconut is optional, and the cranberries are up for grabs — you can swap them for raisins or small bits of other dried fruit. Since these require nothing but melting and stirring, and because the ingredients are so basic, these can be a spur-of-the-moment cookie, a boon when there’s often not enough time.
Mokonuts’ Rye-Cranberry Chocolate-Chunk Cookies
These are the cookies that stopped me in my tracks. I was wandering along a side street in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, saw these cookies on a counter in the back of Mokonuts, a small restaurant, and walked right in to buy a few. The baker Moko Hirayama has worked on her recipe with so much care and invention that it’s almost difficult to see any family resemblance to cookie's inspiration: the classic American chocolate-chip cookie. Her cookies have chunks of fine chocolate (not store-bought chips), dried cranberries, rye flour and a good measure of poppy seeds, for color, crunch and surprise. Plan ahead: Once the dough is made and formed into balls, it should be refrigerated overnight before baking. Fresh from the oven, the cookies are fragile; they firm as they cool. They’ll keep for about three days at room temperature or they can be frozen for up to two months; in either case, they should be wrapped well.
Lisbon Chocolate Cake
On my first day in Lisbon, I became a statistic: I lost all my credit cards to a talented thief on the No. 28 tram. After “the incident,” I wanted to leave Lisbon, but instead, my husband Michael and I decided to tackle our must-taste list. It was on our last day in Lisbon that we tasted the cake at Landeau Chocolate. It was intense, but not overwhelming; truly chocolate, but somehow each layer’s chocolateness was different. I returned home and made this cake, my version of the cake that cured my pickpocket blues. It’s a dense-but-not-heavy, brownielike cake topped with a whipped chocolate ganache (think: mousse) and a substantial dusting of cocoa. Because this cake is completely about the chocolate, choose one you love.
Poilâne’s Corn Sablés
In her book, “Poilâne, The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery,” Apollonia Poilâne, who heads the legendary Parisian boulangerie, describes the sweets in her shop as pâtisseries boulangères, bread-bakers’ pastries, which are typically less sweet, less fussy and less fussed over. These corn shortbread-style cookies, known as sablés in French, fit into that category perfectly. They’re made with all-purpose flour and corn flour – corn ground so fine that you can barely feel a bit of grit when you rub a little between your fingers. (Do not use cornmeal or cornstarch.) Baked, the cookies have the characteristic sandiness of sablés and the beautiful golden color of corn. To get the best texture, make sure your butter is soft and creamy. The dough is a pleasure to work with and, because it holds its shape when baked, a good choice for fanciful cutouts. At Poilâne, the cookies are always cut into simple rounds, so that, as Apollonia says, “they look like minisuns.”
Chocolate-Flake Raspberry Ice Cream
A few years back, I made a delicious discovery: I could get the luxurious texture of French-style, custard-based ice cream with a recipe for eggless, Philadelphia-style ice cream. My ice cream has the usual cream, milk and sugar, but it’s also got powdered milk for richness, honey for smoothness, and alcohol for scoopability. The vodka keeps the ice cream soft and creamy, desirable in any ice cream and vital when there are berries, which have a tendency to go from juicy to rock-hard in the freezer. Any berries will work in this recipe, but I use raspberries, fresh or frozen, and bolster their flavor and color with a little freeze-dried raspberry powder (optional, but nice). The chocolate flakes are made with melted dark chocolate and coconut oil. Drizzled into the ice cream at the end of churning, the chocolate spins into flakes; drizzled over the ice cream before serving, it hardens on contact.
Moka Dupont: A French Icebox Cake
When my Paris friend, Bernard Collet, told me about this cake, a favorite for over 60 years in his family, I was expecting something tall, soft, frosted and fit for candles. I expected a gâteau but got an icebox cake: four layers of cookies held together with four layers of frosting. The cake, originally a back-of-the-box recipe, was created for a French tea biscuit called Thé Brun, but I could never find them, so I used Petit Beurre cookies. Lately I can’t find them either, so I use old-fashioned Nabisco Social Teas. You can use whatever cookies you’d like, but they should be plain, flat, square or rectangular. Depending on the size of your cookies, you might need fewer of them; depending on how big or small you make the cake, you might need to juggle the number of layers or the amount of frosting. It’s a recipe made for improvisation.