Recipes By Mark Bittman
973 recipes found
Smoky Tea Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups. This one is a perfect broth for udon noodles.
Prosciutto-Parmesan Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups.
Tomato Jam
Good tomatoes and balance are crucial. You need sugar for the kind of gooey, sticky quality we associate with jam; otherwise, all you’re producing is a tomato sauce, no matter how different the flavor is from the classic. Once you add that sugar, however, you need acid, because even though tomatoes are plenty acidic, they can’t counter all that sugar. I tried lemon juice, vinegar and finally lime, deciding that I liked the last best.
Tempeh Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups. This is amazingly well balanced, meaty and full-flavored, especially for a vegan stock.
Miso Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups. This stock is so simple it almost feels like cheating.
Salmon and Tomatoes in Foil
Here is a simple recipe for salmon prepared en papillote (a fancy name for “in paper,” though like most everyone else these days, you will use aluminum foil). Layer salmon, tomato and basil on lightly oiled foil and wrap it all up — you can even do it a night before cooking. When the time for dinner comes, you can steam, grill, roast or pan-grill the packages — though our testing shows roasting is easiest. You can substitute almost anything comparable for each of the ingredients: salmon can be replaced by any fish steak or fillet, or by boneless, skinless chicken breast. The herb and vegetable can also be varied at will, as long as the vegetable will finish cooking at the same time as the protein: if you were cooking broccoli, for example, you would have to cut it into small pieces; if carrots, you'd have to parboil them.
Herb Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups.
Mark Bittman's Mushroom Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups.
Cornbread
This basic recipe is so easy and forgiving that you may find yourself making cornbread as often as your mother made mashed potatoes. Only a few ingredients are pretty much fixed: the salt, the baking powder, cornmeal and flour (you want a little flour for lightness). Other than that, feel free to experiment with bits of cooked bacon, sautéed onions or shallots, chili powder or cumin, chopped chilies or herbs, grated cheese, mashed or puréed beans or fresh, canned or frozen corn. The options are practically endless.
Make-Ahead Gravy
You need gravy on Thanksgiving to aid the turkey, moisten the potatoes, douse the stuffing. But traditionally it's made at the last minute, after the turkey has been removed from the roasting pan. Here’s a secret: There's no need to make gravy right before serving. You can make it up to five days ahead. Then, as you reheat it, whisk in the turkey pan drippings for extra flavor. The result is every bit as good as last-minute gravy — and far less crazy-making.
Italian-Style Rustic Tomato Stock
Here’s the problem with homemade stock: It’s so good that it doesn’t last long. What’s needed is something you can produce more or less on the spot. Although water is a suitable proxy in small quantities, when it comes to making the bubbling, chest-warming soups that we rely on in winter, water needs some help. Fortunately, there are almost certainly flavorful ingredients sitting in your fridge or pantry that can transform water into a good stock in a matter of minutes. This recipe is meant to be fast, so by ‘‘simmer,’’ I mean as little as five minutes and no more than 15. You can season these stocks at the end with salt and pepper to taste, or wait until you’re ready to turn them into full-fledged soups.
Curried Tofu With Soy Sauce
Tofu is light, so I wanted to make the sauce as substantial as possible. Use canned coconut milk with the caramelized onions. Like heavy cream, coconut milk will thicken a sauce, making it luxurious in almost no time. Then, to add contrasting texture, I decided to use nuts as well. Both walnuts and cashews do splendidly here. But the bottom line is the onions: they really must be browned carefully and thoroughly, without burning. (Sam Sifton)
Steak With Ginger Butter Sauce
An astonishingly good recipe for steak with butter, ginger and soy that Mark Bittman picked up from the New York chef Jean Georges Vongerichten and gave to The Times a few years later. It’s simple and takes no time to make after work.
Steak Salad With Fish Sauce and Mint
This salad, with Southeast Asian flair, takes mere minutes to make, even with cooking the beef. Its base is mesclun and a handful of flavorful, mild herbs, like parsley or mint. Because steak doesn't need any seasoning, cooking it takes only 10 minutes. You could substitute chicken, pork or shrimp. The vinaigrette that accompanies this salad is light but assertive, based not on olive oil but on a neutral-flavored oil like canola. I use relatively little oil, as its job is only to help the remaining dressing ingredients coat the greens. To this I add rice vinegar or lime juice, both of which are high in flavor but low in acidity. The vinaigrette is rounded off with mustard, shallots, and nam pla (Thai fish sauce) or soy sauce.
Mushroom-Barley Soup
Soup made without meat or meat broth can be insipid. That's why most people think pea soup needs ham and mushroom-barley soup needs beef. But it's possible to make a satisfying, even hearty, vegetarian soup if you choose your ingredients carefully and extract every bit of flavor from them. Enter this mushroom-barley soup, a vegetarian dish with real body, texture and depth of flavor. The key ingredient here is dried porcini, which can be reconstituted in hot water in less than 10 minutes, giving you the best-tasting mushrooms you can find outside the woods and an intensely flavored broth that rivals beef stock. Don’t forget to toast the barley while really browning the mushrooms and carrots — it lends a deep warmth.
Roast Chicken With Cumin, Honey and Orange
An easy way to give roast chicken some character is to baste it with flavorful liquid. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this does nothing to keep the bird moist. Even a very lean bird remains moist as long as it isn't overcooked. But the liquid adds flavor to the skin and creates a ready-made sauce that can be spooned over the chicken as you serve it. If you add some sugar or other sweetener to the basting liquid, the bird gains a mahogany color that you have to see to believe. As it heats, the sugar caramelizes, becoming thicker and stickier and turning the chicken's skin crisp and gorgeous. The result is not overly sweet, because caramelized sugars have a bitter, complex component. I prefer honey to sugar and like to combine it — as I do here — with orange juice and ground cumin, which together add acidity and even more complexity. This aromatic mix creates pan juices that can be spooned over rice or sopped up with bread.
Black Cod Broiled With Miso
Black cod with miso was not invented by Nobu Matsuhisa, the chef at Nobu in TriBeCa, but he certainly popularized it. His time-consuming recipe, which calls for soaking the fish in a sweet miso marinade for a couple of days, is a variation on a traditional Japanese process that uses sake lees, the sweet solids that remain after making sake, to marinate fish. If you broil black cod with nothing but salt, you already have a winning dish. If you broil it with miso – the intensely salty paste made from fermented soybeans – along with some mirin and quite a bit of sugar, you create something stunningly delicious. And no long marination is necessary.
Shrimp With Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Sun-dried tomatoes might scream 1980s nouveau cuisine to you, and that's a fair assessment considering their somewhat profligate use throughout the decade. Yet this dish may have you reconsidering their place in your pantry. Used sparingly, sun-dried tomatoes can impart a bold tomato-y taste that Mark Bittman argues is in some ways “better than ‘real’ tomato flavor.” In this 20-minute sauté, the intense tang of capers and tomatoes plays beautifully off the mild sweetness of shrimp. Serve it over pasta or rice, or alone with a big hunk of good bread.
Short Ribs With Coffee and Chiles
There is hardly a combination of flavors that does not work with short ribs, as long as you braise them. In Alsace, they use leftover coffee as a braising liquid. When you combine that with a couple of types of chiles and a little red wine, the result is an unfamiliar yet old-fashioned dish that seems to please everyone.
Hummus With Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Rick Easton’s Pizza With Peppers
In order to bring out all their flavor and sweetness, you must sauté bell peppers before putting them on this variation of the Pittsburgh-based baker and cook Rick Easton's pizza; but that’s hardly any work at all. (If you like, add a couple of semihot peppers to the mix.) The mozzarella is a nice touch, as is the rosemary, but almost any herb will work beautifully here. Don’t skimp on the olive oil, and don’t underbake the pie; it should be good and brown on the bottom.
Banana Paletas
Throughout Mexico, paletas are made with fresh fruit and not much sugar, pretty much the opposite of commercial sorbets and sherbets sold here. Like sorbet or sherbet, these frozen snacks are easily made at home; all you need is a set of plastic molds, sold in many supermarkets, toy stores and online. For a lower-tech solution, you can use small paper cups and insert wooden sticks in them once the mixture freezes hard enough to support them. The dairy is optional. Adding it produces a paleta de leche, which has a more distinctive texture than the dairy-free paleta de agua, which is icier.
Coq au Vin With Prunes
The standard coq au vin, even when it is made with shortcuts, is a hearty dish, what with its bacon, garlic, deep red wine and enrichment of butter. But the one I like best is made with prunes: it's darker, richer, fuller, the kind of recipe one adores and makes repeatedly. The prunes melt into the wine and become barely recognizable, bringing even more depth, not only of color but of flavor. Despite its relative ease of preparation, this becomes a serious dish, the kind that demands plenty of bread so that you can linger over the juices. Feel free to play with variations here: sauté some sliced button mushrooms, a dozen or more peeled pearl onions or whole cloves of garlic (but don't omit the chopped onions) in the skillet after you've cooked the bacon.
Rice and Red Beans With Coconut Milk, Chile and Garlic
Here's an incredibly easy one-pot vegan dish you can put together on a weeknight. For extra oomph, add more jalapeños and garlic, and don't forget to season with salt and pepper as you go. Black, or “forbidden”, rice was used in the photo, but you can also use brown.