Recipes By Gabrielle Hamilton
73 recipes found
Tian
The tian is both a vessel and the name of what’s cooked in it: summer vegetables, sliced quite thin, arranged in careful layers, drenched in quality olive oil and then cooked in a slow oven until each individual vegetable surrenders to the others, becoming one. The true and complete melding of earthy zucchini, sweet onion, waxy potato, juicy and acidic tomatoes is the great achievement of a well-made tian, and resting the finished dish after cooking is no small part of that success. By using a cast-iron pan and starting on the stovetop during the build, covering with a lid along the way, you speed up the cooking significantly. Season every layer and generously drizzle each with olive oil to bring out tremendous flavor and aroma. The Sungold tomatoes are beautiful and bright and quite acidic — perfect against the other flavors — but I find the skins unpleasantly leathery-papery when they are cooked, so simply peel them first. Dropping the tomatoes for 30 seconds into seasoned boiling water splits their skins readily and they slip off effortlessly. I would even say it’s kind of fun.
Spicy Stewed Tripe With Scallions
This spicy, slippery tripe begs to be slurped like a bowl of noodles, so you may want a roll of paper towels nearby. Slicing the tripe as thinly as possible provides a soft, tender texture, and the collagen that yields from the calf’s foot makes the broth itself slick and full-bodied. The mix of chiles creates a great and powerful warmth that spreads across your chest and leaves a bold, pleasant zing on the tongue, but it is not the kind of sharp or angry spicy that makes your eyes water or your nose run. The paper towels are for tidying up around your enthusiasm, not for dabbing your tears.
Risotto al Salto
The Italian kitchen is famous for superior ingredients, and for letting nothing go to waste. This recipe for risotto al salto, which uses leftover, day-old risotto, is a perfect example: You start with a creamy, well-made saffron risotto, then make a crispy delicious cake from it the next day. I’m not the first to notice that many people make more risotto than they need just so they can have extras for this golden perfection the next day.
Celery Toasts
This was the first recipe that the chef and writer Gabrielle Hamilton brought to The Times as an Eat columnist for the Sunday magazine in 2016, a snack-tray-sandwich version of a celery-and-fennel salad served at her restaurant, Prune, in the East Village. It calls for thick, white toasted Pullman bread spread wall to wall with unsalted butter, with slices of blue cheese neatly laid on top, below a mound of shaved celery and thinly sliced scallions dressed in garlic, olive oil, lemon juice and salt, and the whole shebang dusted in ground black pepper before being cut in halves or quarters. "The ingredients come from the grocery store," she wrote in her column. "These toasts are not expensive or intimidating, but they are outstanding."
Stewed Chicken and Rice
This dish is rich and clean, but still lively and interesting — all things to all tastes — in one single pot. We brown and then braise the chicken, toast and grind the rice before steaming, “chicharron” the skin, parbake the meatballs, julienne the lemon peel, thinly slice the shallots and, at the very end, soften tender spinach in the hot broth. It’s deeply satisfying, the workhorse of family meals.
Salt-Baked Pears
The salt crust encasing these pears — a method most often used with whole fish and some poultry — does what salt always does: It amplifies. In this instance, the sweet, juicy peary-ness of the pear. Ideally, these should be slipped into the oven after pulling out another dish in order to minimize time in the kitchen. As a dinner party dessert, it’s a perfect punctuation mark.
Radishes With Sweet Butter and Kosher Salt
As is always the case with such a simple idea, success is in the quality of the ingredients. Cull any overgrown, cottony, spongy radishes, and keep the good ones fresh with ice and clean kitchen towels. Keep your butter at the perfect temperature, and be graceful on the plate, please.
Grilled Swiss-Chard Stems With Roasted Garlic Oil
Don’t throw all those Swiss-chard stems away. Not everyone is a fan of including them with sautéed greens, but here’s a plan for the rest of us who love their texture and flavor. Prepare to blanch, blister and then dress these stems in an intense garlic oil. With a little lemon and salt to perk the taste buds, you’ve got a new favorite side dish.
Bar Snack Brussels Sprouts Steeped in Olive Oil and Fish Sauce
This recipe does not include quantities for an excellent reason. At Prune, in New York, we started with a pound of brussels sprouts for dinner but ate them all while still prepping in the kitchen and then increased to two pounds and ate those as well, before we even sat down. Now we make them to be eaten standing up on purpose. Set out on the bar for parties, where you’d expect to find olives; they never last there either.
Roasted Garlic Oil
Infused oils are a common sight in specialty food shops, but they can’t rival the real deal coming out of your kitchen. Get your best olive oil out and start crushing garlic cloves. A short stint in the oven will produce a smooth and round garlic flavor that takes grilled vegetables and dressings somewhere refined. A healthy spoonful to finish pasta dishes works very well, too.
Big-Batch Ranchero Sauce
There is no other aroma coming from the kitchen — not truffle, not freshly peeled orange, not a chocolate cake baking — that will stop you in your tracks and make you inhale as deeply as this ranchero sauce simmering away. Here’s a large batch to use in many ways: Poach eggs in it for brunch, simmer shrimp in it for taco filling, or spoon it over shredded chicken with avocado slices inside a flour tortilla for lunch for the kiddos. Put it in tightly sealed Mason jars and bring it to friends as a host gift.
Peanut-Butter Wafer Cake
This towering trifecta of flavor and texture — crisp wafer, creamy peanut butter and glossy dark chocolate — comes together quickly and easily. The hidden star here is Katherine Yang’s utterly delicious peanut butter cream, which binds the layers. It’s savory and nutty, silken and not too sweet. Wafer sheets come in standard 8 1/2-inch rounds, so tempering the chocolate in a 10-inch-wide, shallow pan is the simple trick to easy dipping. You can use an offset spatula to spread the filling, or for a more impressive presentation, use a star tip, and pipe swirls, rosettes or scallops. The cake should be eaten soon after assembly, as the filling will eventually start to soften the wafer’s crispness.
Razor Clams With Smoked Paprika Butter And Hominy
Wet Black Walnuts
Like the wet walnuts you get at your summer soft-serve ice cream place, a pint of this sweet condiment kept in your home fridge will find many uses. Try them on plain Greek yogurt with fresh bananas for breakfast. Black walnuts have a distinct, particular flavor — somewhere between menthol and mold! That intensity is softened to simply pleasant and intriguing by vanilla, maple syrup and strong Earl Grey tea.
Ice-Cold Schav
Nothing revives and refreshes in a heat wave like this ice-cold schav, made with the exceptionally tart herb sorrel. The soup is seasoned at each stage: You salt the sweating shallots, the cooking potatoes, again when you add the sorrel and finally again when all is combined, which seems like a lot of salt. But once the mixture is chilled, the flavors are masked and dulled so it will taste just right. Using the stems of herbs is a habit I've formed in general, but in the case of sorrel I wish it were an herb all on its own — that you could just buy sorrel stems. I've seen Instagrammable versions of the soup with the egg cut into pristine wedges and bright green watercress substituted for drab muddy sorrel, but I think the way to go here is without vanity: Scatter well-chopped hard-boiled egg liberally over the drab soup, and follow with the minced stems, also liberally.
Braised Fresh Black-Eyed Peas With Baby Turnips
Fresh black-eyed peas, still in their pods, are a pretty pale green, with a gorgeous purple-black O-ring on each tiny pea. They’re tender and creamy and snappy — with an earthy flavor that goes well with the mint, pepper and turnips in this shallow braise — and they cook in just minutes unlike their wintered-over chalky, drab dried counterparts. I love them when they come in fresh at the market, and also love the so-called chore of shucking them. The chance to sit for a minute and watch the world go by while shelling a big pile of fresh peas will always leave you feeling glad you did.
Whole Roasted Rabbit With Guanciale, Wilted Greens and Pan Drippings
Rabbits are so lean on their own that they benefit from some added fat — in this case, a few strips of guanciale, the compellingly flavorful cured pork jowl from Italy. Once the pan juices from the roasted rabbit have commingled with the fat from the guanciale and the bitter water released from the Treviso, you have a perfect, craveable balance on the plate, in every forkful.
Le Grand Aioli
For those interactive group-gathering festive meals that first come to mind — fondue, say, or raclette — you either have to maintain a giant heated stone by an even larger roaring fire or a balance a pot of boiling oil, molten cheese or finicky chocolate over a live flame. Le grand aioli, by contrast, is a distinctly relaxing, convivial and participatory group meal that requires no dangerous apparatus: It’s just a vivid spread of vegetables, simply cooked, and a few pieces of steamed seafood to go with the large quantity of rather garlicky mayonnaise. Since the meal is served at room temperature – neither hot nor cold – it is one of those exceedingly-gentle-on-the-cook meals for which you can just sit down and stay down. The only exertion involved once you set it out is passing the cold wine.
Steak Tartare
The curative powers of raw meat are often cited and frequently lampooned — I’m thinking of the guy slumped back in his chair, after the brawl, with a fat raw steak on his mangled black eye. I can’t speak to that, but a hand-chopped mound of cold raw beef, seasoned perfectly, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, with a cold glass of the hair of the Champagne dog that bit you the night before, will make a new man out of you. The strong-flavored pumpernickel bread is a family nostalgia that has become a beloved preference. The butter and the Vegemite are personal eccentricities I happen to find exceptionally delicious.
Chicken-Skin Garnish
I can't speak enthusiastically enough about this garnish — without it, the stewed-chicken-and-rice recipe lies flat, amateur; good but juvenile. The grassy, bracing astringent parsley, the burn of the shallot, the spark of the lemon, combined with the warm, crispy, fatty, salty "chicharron" of chicken skin, is like the one killer piece of jewelry worn with a little black dress, the thing that makes it clear that this is a "main stage talent" and not the personal assistant with the clipboard checking guests into the event.
Chowder-Soaked Toast
This delicate and brothy clam chowder soaks into the toast — an elegant and light-handed way of adding tender — rather than floury, thick and pasty — body to the soup. Removing each clam as soon as it pops open during the steaming is a small effort with enormous yield: there's not one bite of pencil-eraser toughness throughout!
Rye Omelet With Duck Pastrami
Braised Tongue
Beef tongue has none of the characteristic challenges of other ‘‘off-cuts’’ — its taste is clean and beefy and its texture is firm and fleshy. Once braised, be sure to peel it while still warm and return it to its braising liquid to remain moist. The cooked tongue will keep in the refrigerator for a week and can be used as a sandwich meat, a warm main dinner course, a cold meat salad for lunch — in almost all the ways you might use a beef tenderloin.
