Recipes By Gabrielle Hamilton
73 recipes found
Diplomat Cream
Diplomat cream is the professional baker’s tool for pastry cream that won’t collapse and turn watery. It uses both cornstarch and gelatin for the reliable structure, but a little cold butter and whipped cream keep it silky, tender and lightweight. You can fill the shells with this cream up to four hours in advance and not be disappointed.
Smoky Eggplant Croquettes
By placing whole, unwashed, plain and naked globe eggplants directly onto the stovetop burner grate and letting them burn until charred, hissing and collapsed, you bring a haunting smokiness and profound silkiness to the interior flesh that will have you hooked for the rest of your life. This way of cooking eggplant is a revelation in itself — easy, yet exciting and engaging — and requires nothing more of the home cook than a little seasoning at the end to be enjoyed, as is. But biting into a warm, crisp, golden fried croquette with that smoky, silken purée at its center is what restaurant-level complexity and satisfaction is all about. One key ingredient, but 11 steps to prepare it — that about sums up the difference between home cooking and restaurant excitement.
Boiled Whole Artichokes With Mayonnaise
This method for preparing artichokes is so simple and so effective because it does one important thing: It accepts the bitter, thorny truth of the artichoke and doesn’t try to fight against it. Instead of wrestling with the thing in order to prepare it for cooking, by trying to trim those tightly closed petals that stab your fingertips and leave them coated in a wretchedly bitter film, just leave the artichoke alone. Slice off the domed top, then drop the artichoke, stems and all, right into the boiling salted water and cook until tender. Once done and cool enough to handle, the artichoke is effortless to peel, revealing sweet flesh at the base of each leaf, and her large tender heart is yours for the taking.
Fried Oysters With Tartar Sauce
Getting fried oysters from your summer seafood shack is fun, but making them yourself yields something crispy, light and, most significantly, tender. Shuck carefully, bread delicately and fry to golden perfection, then serve with this bright, lively tartar sauce, which gets its spark from cornichons, capers and lemon juice. Eat while hot — whether you’re wearing flip flops or polished oxfords, that’s up to you.
Ice-Cold Martinez
Not nearly as hefty as a Negroni or as lean as a martini, this little beauty is a perfect welterweight cocktail for the early fall.
Scratchy Husband Pasta
In spite of the very few and very commonplace ingredients in this dish, there is an alchemy of sorts that takes place, transforming them from humble to holy-smokes-delicious in a way you will crave for the rest of your days. Be generous with your pinches, your grinds of the pepper mill, your scatter of cheese, your slivers of garlic and your final portions. It makes the difference.
Leeks Vinaigrette With Sieved Egg
Nothing brings down a leek like a few grains of sand, so be sure to wash and wash and wash again. I love to eat these leeks after my main course but on the same plate so that the vinaigrette mingles with the last traces of pan drippings.
Risi e Bisi
The classic Venetian dish of rice and peas known as risi e bisi makes for a perfect springtime Sunday lunch. This version includes the addition of baby zucchini, which is an acknowledged departure from tradition but a mighty delicious one. The desired final consistency is loose, almost brothy, not tight and creamy like risotto nor drippy like a zuppa. The Venetians use the term “all’onda,” a reference to the swell of waves in the sea. Short-grain rice helps get that distinct starchy quality, but the rice can’t do the job by itself; there has to be stirring throughout. Pour yourself a glass of a good Soave while you stir. You can have a nap after lunch, which is totally traditional.
Cold Candied Oranges
Slowly poaching fresh, firm seedless oranges in a light sugar syrup is a simple yet magical kind of alchemy. You still end up with oranges, yes, but now they are glistening jewels — cooked but juicy, candied but fresh, bitter but sweet — that make an uncommonly elegant and refreshing dessert after a heavy winter meal. These cold candied oranges keep up to a month in the refrigerator, and any that are left over can be delicious with thick yogurt in the morning, or beside a cup of mint tea in the afternoon. But in every case, they are most bracing and most delicious when super cold.
Crab Toast
Like the very best crab cakes on earth, which have as little dulling, distracting or deadening filler as possible, these crab toasts take that ethos to the extreme. There is no call for bell pepper or bread crumbs or diced celery; just the best fresh, sweet, saline crab meat you can buy, gently seasoned with a little lemon juice, bound with a tiny amount of tangy crème fraîche, then piled onto a slab of good toast, still warm. The toast is made ever so luxurious with a slathering of nutty brown butter mayonnaise. These two simple components — crab and brown butter toast — act in concert, and a glass of cold rosé to wash them down makes for the most exhilarating, satisfying spring supper imaginable.
Whole Roast Suckling Pig
A whole roast suckling pig is quite special. No other feast food of the holiday season cooks so easily, and presents so majestically. With its mahogany, crisp skin and its sticky-tender meat, people thrill to be at the party where this is on the buffet. Measure your oven, and be firm with your butcher about the pig’s size, so you can be sure it will fit — most home ovens can easily accommodate a 20-pounder. Then, just give the pig the time it needs in a low and slow oven for its meat to reach its signature tender, succulent perfection, while you clean the house or do whatever it is you do before a special party. For the last 30 minutes, ramp the heat of the oven all the way up to get that insanely delicious crackling skin.
Fried Saltines With Cheddar and Onion
McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York City is a perpetually crowded bar with sawdust-covered floors that has been in continuous operation since the 1800s. Besides its ale — dark and light — the bar sells a modest, quirky, perfectly unpretentious cheese plate: Cheddar, raw white onions and saltine crackers with a side of spicy brown mustard. Here, with the minor update of frying the crackers, is a major improvement to an old offering. The plain dry crackers become nutty and extra crisp and salty, warm and rich. It’s like the difference between raw cookie dough and a baked dark-edged batch fresh from the oven. With a sharp tang from Cheddar, the bite of raw onion and that final hit of vinegary mustard heat, this stacked fried saltine makes a lively bite with drinks in any era.
White Borscht
This white borscht, a nod to the tradition of sour soups in Ukrainian cooking, is simply a perfect meal: rich and satisfying, yet bright and delicate and clean all at once. It’s given its distinct tang up front, by soaking a hunk of sourdough bread in the simmering broth, and also at the end, by whisking in a little crème fraîche before serving. At the center is the delicious, subtle, complex broth. The better the kielbasa, the better the broth, obviously, and it’s worth using the whole garland for that complex smoky seasoning it imparts. There’ll be extra for snacking. The chopped dill keeps it all bright and fresh and lively in the mouth. A year-round classic to have in your repertoire, it’s especially beloved in colder months. When weather forecasters announce a dismal spell of sleeting days in a row, you’ll think, oh, good! White borscht weather!
Salt-Baked New Potatoes With Pink-Peppercorn Butter
This way of cooking recently harvested new potatoes, by burying them in a plaster of damp salt and baking them, is a triple pleasure: effortless, tasty and very fun. The salt crust seasons the potatoes perfectly, just as it would if you’d boiled or steamed them in salted water, but the airtight seal concentrates their special flavor and texture. They come out dense, waxy and almost creamy. Bring the pan of cooked potatoes to the table right from the oven as is, so everyone can puzzle over the curious-looking white crust, and then delight over the discovery of the piping hot little beauties revealed inside once the surface is cracked. Dig them out and swoop through the butter before popping into your mouth, their skins so paper-thin they snap when you bite into them. Their appeal is irresistible.
Deep-Fried Borek
You can make your own feuille de brick, but it’s one of those products, like burgundy wine and saltine crackers, better left to the professional artisans. Alas, even finding it commercially made can be difficult as well, but it is worth the effort to procure. Fortunately, it freezes beautifully, so when you find a source, get more than one package and freeze the extra for future use. Thin as a sheet of tracing paper and as transparent, the dough fries up shatteringly crisp, and makes an incomparable borek. Everyone at dinner will ask you how you did it.
Duck Breast With Braised Belgian Endive, Shaved Cauliflower and Green Peppercorns
Duck breasts are remarkably delicious, easy to cook and almost as tender as beef tenderloin. Once seasoned, the breasts go skin-side down in the pan and stay there for 20 or so minutes while the skin crisps, the fat renders out and the meat gently cooks to a perfect rosy medium. Along the way, you pour off the accruing melted fat every few minutes into a heatproof jar, and when it has cooled, you can save the duck fat in the freezer. It has such a special flavor; it would be a pity to throw it away. We use the duck fat for the best roasted potatoes but also love it for cooking trout and char and salmon fillets, and recommend roasting cauliflower and baby white turnips in it as well, for the most special combination of clean, juicy and luscious.
Pâte à Choux
These elegant swans are made just like an eclair — using two pastry kitchen workhorses: pastry cream and pâte à choux. Pipe the pâte à choux into perfect teardrops, pulling the pastry bag away from the bodies as you finish each one to achieve that pointed tail end. When you are piping out the question marks for the necks, drag the tip of the pastry bag against the baking sheet ever so slightly to create a tiny beak. You'll have so much fun running those golden beaks through a flame after they are baked and watching them blacken into the uncanny likeness of swans.
Smoky Pork Shoulder With Chile Paste
A well-seasoned, chile-paste-slathered pork shoulder is already going to win, no matter what you do to it. Which seems to me like the ideal reason to try a new technique: slow roasting, off-flame, with ambient heat, using your outdoor grill as a coal-fired oven in the off-season of dead winter. Even if your live coals snuff out, or smoke too heavily, or you get bored of the snow-muffled silence or feel lonely in the winter solitude of your backyard, even if you miscalculate sunset and find yourself in the dark with a cellphone flashlight trying to read the internal temperature of the meat to discover it’s still raw in the center — all you have to do is close up shop out back, come inside and shove the thing in your conventional oven and then read the newspaper until dinner.
Cheese Crackers
Cheddar crackers. Cheese wafers. Coins, biscuits, straws and crisps. Known by many names and claimed by many grandmothers, they are all the same, delicious thing: a savory, addictive, shortbread cookie. The key to any short dough — that distinctive tender sandy crumbly texture — is the high fat-to-flour ratio, and this version not only relies on butter but also counts on the delicious fats that come from sesame seeds, block Cheddar and even the oil from the pecans. For a remarkable distinction among the many, many versions of these to be found, toast them until just passing golden into brown, and see how that in itself sets these apart.
Beef Carpaccio
Beef tenderloin is called for here as it will unfailingly yield the tenderest carpaccio. It is a long, slender, tapered muscle that runs under the ribs and close to the back bone, and as such is, in a way, shielded from being worked very hard, unlike cuts lower on the animal. As for all of us, the closer to the ground the muscle lives, the tougher becomes the work. Some chefs have a real affinity for the harder-working muscles. Top round, for example, is also often called for in carpaccio recipes and is cut from a muscle that has to work harder, and therefore, is thought to have more character, and more flavor. I would gently warn that harder-working muscles come with a little more “chew.” Try it here, as written, with sure success, then explore other cuts if you're interested.
Taramasalata
While this is a sturdy and reliable recipe for making the greek cod roe spread called taramasalata from scratch, funnily enough it doesn't call for cod roe. I've come to prefer the commonly available and affordable salmon roe instead. If you are putting together a greek meze plate — with feta and kalamata olives, some marinated octopus and skordalia — save the brine from the feta and use it to season the taramasalata instead of lemon juice and see what you think. It lends a great acidity. Be sure to take the extra step of grating the cooked potato instead of more conveniently throwing it into the food processor and whizzing — to avoid a gluey texture. It'll keep in the fridge for a week and can be used a few ways all summer — add a grated white onion and toss with shaved celery and diced tomatoes as a salad dressing. Or thin with a little of the potato cooking water and some good olive oil and consider it as a sauce for whole grilled fish.
Caviar Sandwich
I now prefer the caviar sandwich to all other more classic presentations at the holidays. All that caviar crammed into a sandwich makes me feel giddy and extravagant and very lucky to be alive the second I set eyes on it. Context is everything; what I could reasonably splurge for would feel forlorn if showcased on a proper silver trolley atop a mound of shaved ice with a mother-of-pearl spoon at the ready on its nearby velvet pillow, but here, by contrast, in the context of a lowly sandwich, it feels as decadent as if I were eating caviar straight out of the tin, like a midnight pint of ice cream. Buy the caviar you most prefer from a retailer you trust the most—the most expensive may by no means necessarily be your favorite-- and see if this luscious sandwich doesn’t make you feel pretty giddy, too.
Onion Tart
The chef André Soltner served this classic warm onion tart almost every day for 43 years at Lutèce, his world-famous restaurant in New York City. It was for a whole generation the pinnacle of elegant French cuisine in the United States, and yet the tart is straightforward and uncomplicated, rustic and refined all at once. Let the onions slowly caramelize — don’t hasten the cooking by jacking up the heat — and you will be rewarded with a haunting savory-sweet tart in the end that is still irresistible decades later, the very definition of an enduring classic.
Galettes Complètes (Buckwheat Crepes)
If you can make pancakes for breakfast, you can certainly make crepes for dinner. These savory ones from Brittany — which use buckwheat flour and are filled with Gruyère cheese, ham and egg — are nutty, earthy and incredibly satisfying any time of day. Loosen the batter, if needed, using beer, water or hard cider; it all works equally well. Once you get the hang of the tilt and swirl, you can have your family fed in minutes, and unlike those nerve-shredded times when you brightly declare “It’s breakfast for dinner, kids!” — which children everywhere know is a sign that something is wrong for Mom — this is one instance where you can announce it, and mean it: Everything is actually alright. Galettes complètes are meant to be a meal.