Recipes By Dorie Greenspan
72 recipes found
Mulling-Spice Cake With Cream-Cheese Frosting
The spices in this cake from “Live Life Deliciously” by Tara Bench (Shadow Mountain, 2020) are, indeed, those you’d use if you were mulling cider or wine. They’re the flavors of fall and winter, and especially of the holidays; that their aromas linger in the kitchen is a bonus. They’re warm and hearty enough to hold their own when blended with the cake’s apple cider and molasses (use an unsulfured brand, such as Grandma’s). The batter is very thin, but it bakes up sturdy, easy to cut and ready to be generously filled and covered with cream cheese frosting. The cake is lovely on its own, but it welcomes extras. Ms. Bench decorates hers with almond and candy Christmas trees, but a little crystallized ginger or chocolate is nice too.
Dutch Oven Chicken and Vinaigrette
This is a simple dish: chicken that’s a little bit braised and a little bit roasted in a covered Dutch oven. The seasonings — garlic, onions, herbs and lemon — are basic and border on assertive until they cook together, when their aromas intensify and their flavors soften. Putting half the aromatics in the pot with oil and wine, tucking the other half inside the chicken and cooking in this enclosed, steamy environment means that everything that goes into the pot goes into the chicken. When the chicken’s cooked through, pour off the pan juices, crush the tender garlic and add sharp mustard and vinegar to make a vinaigrette that’s as good over salad greens as over the chicken.
Goat Cheese and Fig Quick Bread
Here’s a recipe from France, where savory loaf cakes are often served with drinks before dinner. This one started with bits of goat cheese and snips of dried figs, and then moved closer and closer to the Mediterranean. It’s got fruity olive oil, a handful of parsley (for brightness), a little rosemary and thyme (to set the mood and further establish the locale), some honey (always good with goat cheese) and scrapings of clementine zest (for surprise). You can use a neutral oil, if you’d like, olive or dried tomatoes instead of figs, basil instead of parsley, lemon instead of orange, or experiment with other cheeses. The loaf’s pleasantly crumbly, and best enjoyed cut into thick slices.
Créme Anglaise
Lemon Curd
Lemon curd sits in that elusive space between soothing and exciting. Its texture is smooth and comforting and its flavor is zesty, a delicious contradiction. Curd is easy enough to make, just stand by the pot — it calls for attention. Once made, the curd can be packed in a closely covered jar or container; it will keep well in the fridge.
Double-Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies
Deeply chocolaty like devil’s food cake, speckled with sugar on the outsides and filled with soft chocolate or jam in the centers, these cookies are a double pleasure: delightful to eat and fun to make. While “thumbprints” is an adorable name, it’s a misnomer: You use every part of your hands to form these. The cookies need to be pinched, patted, rolled around and poked before they’re sent into the oven. It’s a great project to do with kids — small thumbs are perfect for forming little dimples in the dough. What you fill the centers with is up to you. Chocolate with chocolate is great — naturally pink ruby chocolate is particularly pretty — and jam is delicious, too.
Cheddar-Walnut Gougères
Gougères, small cheese puffs made from the same neither-sweet-nor-savory dough you’d use for cream puffs or éclairs, are my favorite pre-dinner nibble with wine. They’re slightly crusty on the outside, custardy on the inside and, because I add mustard and chopped nuts, surprising. The traditional cheese for these is French Comté or Swiss Gruyère, but lately I’ve been using shredded sharp American Cheddar, which makes them a tad more tender and gives them a little edge, nice in a morsel that’s meant to whet your appetite. I like these a few minutes out of the oven, but room temperature puffs have legions of fans as well. It’s good to know that raw puffs freeze perfectly (pack them into an airtight container as soon as they’re solidly frozen) and bake perfectly from the freezer. Arrange them on a lined baking sheet and leave them on the counter while you preheat the oven.
Swedish Almond Cake
Fika is the Swedish custom of stopping twice daily for coffee, conversation and a little something sweet; the word was created by flipping the two syllables in kaffe. Minutes after I had a fika in the Stockholm studio of the pastry chef Mia Ohrn, I started thinking about what I’d serve at my own first fika. This cake, so much easier to make than you’d guess by looking at it, has become my favorite. The recipe turns out a moist, buttery, tender cake, which would be lovely as is. But when the cake is half-baked, I cook a mixture of butter, sugar, flour and sliced almonds, spread it over the top (a homage to Sweden’s famous tosca cake), put the pan back in the oven and wait for the mixture to bubble, caramelize and create a shell that is a little chewy, a little crackly and very beautiful. It’s a perfect cake for fika, and great for brunch.
Garlic Chicken In A Pot
Roasted Peppers With Lemon Ricotta
Roasted peppers are culinary chameleons — they have their own distinctive flavor, yet they mix easily with so many ingredients. In this recipe, the peppers are slicked with olive oil and vinegar (use either sherry or balsamic) and served with ricotta that’s enlivened with lemon zest and juice. If you’ve got it, add also the finely chopped rind of a salt-preserved lemon to the ricotta. Because the peppers can be made ahead and the ricotta is better chilled, this is a great recipe for a dinner party — it takes just a few minutes to assemble the dish at serving time and it looks good whether you arrange it on a platter or take the time to make individual plates.
Buttermilk-Biscuit Shortcakes With Strawberries
Making biscuits is a combination of technique, faith and magic. You pull the dough together with your hands, pass through a stage where only a belief in the baking gods keeps you from ditching the mess and then, presto chango, the dough smoothes, and the oven’s heat makes them rise tall and beautiful. These biscuits are sweeter than most, because they’re meant to be shortcakes topped with berries and cream. (For a savory biscuit, use just 1 teaspoon sugar and omit the citrus zest, if you’d like.) Although they’re best soon after they’ve come from the oven, here’s a baker’s trick that makes biscuits a convenience food: Freeze the cut-out dough. When you’re ready to bake, let the pucks sit out to warm a bit while you preheat the oven; give them an extra minute or two of baking time if you think they need it.
Quick Classic Berry Tart
Belgian Waffles
Spiced Red Wine Poached Pears
As elegant as they are delicious, poached pears are a splendid finish to dinners dressy or plain. Here, the poaching syrup is red wine, honey and good cold-weather spices: cloves, cinnamon and star anise. Look for pears that are ripe but still firm, and if you can, choose pears that have stems — they make for a more attractive dish. You can serve the pears soon after they’re made or you can cover and refrigerate them in their syrup and serve them chilled or at room temperature. They’re good on their own or alongside whipped cream or crème fraîche.
Galette des Rois
The galette des rois, celebrating Epiphany, the day the Three Kings (les rois) visited the infant Jesus, is baked throughout January in France. Composed of two circles of puff pastry sandwiching a frangipani filling, each comes with a crown and always has a trinket, called a fève, or bean, baked into it. It’s an invitation to gather, as much party game as pastry – if your slice has the fève, you get the crown and the right to be king or queen for the day. Happily, the galette can be made to fit your schedule. The pastry circles can be cut, covered and refrigerated ahead of time as can the almond filling (it will keep for up to 3 days). And the whole construction can be made early in the day and baked when you’re ready for it. Tuck a bean or whole almond into the filling — warn your guests! — and, if there are children in the house, put them to work crafting a crown.
Torta Sbrisolona
The torta is really a big cookie whose texture is a cross between a perfect shortbread and the best crumb topping you can imagine. The addition of almond flour and cornmeal is partially responsible for the cookie’s wonderful texture; the technique claims the rest of the credit. The dough is quickly mixed in a food processor — whir just until you’ve got a bowl full of morsels; you don’t want a smooth dough — and then you pinch off nuggets of the dough and press them lightly into the pan. It’s as if you were baking a pan full of streusel. You can cut the big cookie into individual pieces or put it out whole and let everyone break off chunks — messy, but fun.
Yeast-Raised Waffles
Stephanie Johnston’s Bakewell Tart
A classic British bakewell tart is a threesome: a crust; a layer of raspberry jam – one chockfull of seeds; and a sponge cake redolent of almonds. Sliced almonds and a drizzle of icing may or may not be optional, depending on whose recipe you’re using. I got my first taste of a bakewell, and this recipe, in Paris from my friend, Stephanie Johnston, who got it from her mom, Granny Annie, in England. Granny never used almonds or icing but occasionally swapped her homemade raspberry jam for red currant jelly or lemon curd. When I asked what made a good bakewell, Steph instructed, “The crust, the jam and the almond cake.” Well, of course. That settled, Stephanie confessed to using Bonne Maman jam from the supermarket. As for the crust, both Steph and her mom make a plain, all-butter crust, think pâte brisée or pie dough. We polished off Steph’s tart in one go after dinner, but had we shown more discipline, it would have kept at room temperature for three more days.
Craquelin-Topped Cream Puffs
Pâte à choux, aka cream puff dough, is a baker’s putty, the mixture that becomes the cream puff as well as éclairs, beignets, churros, croquembouches, gâteaux St. Honoré and tens more desserts. The dough is cooked before it’s baked, and it's a quick-change artist – a lump when it goes into the oven, it emerges golden, ping-pong-ball light, a couple or three times its size and smelling of warm butter and eggs. It's simple to master, and it lends itself to tweaks and endless embellishments. Here, the puffs are capped with a round of frozen sweet dough called craquelin, which produces a crunchy coating that's a little like streusel. It adds enough texture and sweetness so that filling becomes a choice, not a necessity.
Osso Buco With Orange-Herb Gremolata
Cross-cut veal shanks are the cut for osso buco, a braised dish. The sauce for my rendition is tomato-based, bolstered (subtly) by anchovies as well as white wine and broth. But it’s the addition of orange zest and oil-cured black olives that makes this a standout. Like most slow-cooked dishes, you can make this a few days ahead and it will only be better for the wait. The tradition is to serve the veal (you can use pork, if you prefer) with a last-minute dusting of gremolata, a mix, in this case, of basil, orange zest and garlic. Osso buco is good over rice, noodles or other grains; I like it over mashed potatoes or a smooth squash purée.
Crackery Potato Bugnes
Pierre Hermé’s Ispahan Sablés
Pierre Hermé, France’s most celebrated pastry chef, has created a family of desserts called Ispahan, named for the ancient city in Persia that was famous for roses. Each of the almost 40 members of the clan include the flavors of roses and raspberries and many include lychees, too. They’re all memorably aromatic and their flavors are haunting. This sablé, a French shortbread, might be the simplest sweet in the family, but its textures and tastes are no less sophisticated – or irresistible – for being easy slice-and-bakes. The cookies get both their flavor and fragrance from freeze-dried raspberries and rose extract. I’ve been using Star Kay White extract. If you choose a different one, start with just a little and then decide if you’d like more. Floral flavorings can be tricky – a little is lovely, just a smidge more than that can be too much.
Caramel Pots De Crème
All the textbooks say the same thing: cooking granulated sugar until it turns into caramel involves complex chemistry. And I'm sure they are right. But I'm just as sure that what turns sugar into caramel is magic. Not only is caramel simple, but it is also versatile. Caramelized sugar mixed with butter and cream makes candies soft as taffy or hard as lollipops; thinned with water, it makes a glaze; thinned with cream, it makes a sauce; added to chocolate, it provides complexity; and added to custards, it can provide all the flavor needed for a spoon dessert. This luscious, golden pudding is a perfect example.
