Recipes By Mark Bittman
974 recipes found
Dipped Chocolate Anything
Tempering chocolate is not hard, but it’s a little bit tricky. You definitely need a candy thermometer (old-fashioned or digital) to measure three or four temperatures: roughly 115 degrees Fahrenheit and 91 and 88 degrees. Melt the chocolate slowly in a double boiler to about 115 degrees. Then to bring the temperature to dipping perfection (91 degrees), add more unmelted chocolate to the pot until the temperature is 91. At that point you can start dipping — fruit, graham crackers, cookies — whatever. When the chocolate reaches 88 degrees, if it lasts that long, the dipping must stop. But don’t worry, you can reheat the chocolate.
Strawberries With Swedish Cream
Here’s a perfect summer recipe from “How to Cook Everything” for berries with Swedish cream — a mixture of sour and fresh cream, is akin to crème fraîche, but quicker to make (and certainly with easier-to-find ingredients). Make this with any berries you like.
Real Sour Cream Onion Dip
Why make this classic dip with dried onion soup mix when it's almost as easy, and far more delicious, to make it from scratch?
Blue Butter
Blue butter – obviously fat on fat – is blue cheese for people who think they don’t like blue cheese: The butter tames the sharpness, and the cheese makes the butter lively and intense. Serve this sauce alongside a grilled rib-eye for a contemporary take on a classic steakhouse cut.
Caramelized Onion Dip With Frizzled Leeks
Though onion-powder dip does give me a teenage memory buzz, I remember equally well the time I first slow-cooked a batch of onions, watching them easily turn from white to pale yellow to walnut (at which point you have to start minding them with care). These caramelized babies form the basis of scores of top-notch dishes, from onion soup to real Indian stews and sauces, but nowhere are they better used than as the basis for a dip: stir them, along with some lemon juice and thyme leaves, into yogurt or sour cream, and you’re on your way to dip nirvana. And just as your mother — or at least mine — made onion-sour-cream dip better with (French’s) canned fried onions, you can also take that idea back a hundred years and improve it: fry some leeks or shallots until they’re crisp. If you can manage to not eat those as you remove them from the pan, they enhance the dip even more.
Parmesan Cream Crackers
Crackers can be made with just flour and water (as in water crackers, or matzo), but like almost everything else, they’re better with richer ingredients. These are typically made with butter, oil, and milk or cheese, or both, along with flavorings like seeds, herbs and spices. I like a simple, flakey, buttery cracker, often with cheese. This could stem from my childhood addiction to Cheez-Its. Once you get the hang of it, which will take exactly one try, play around. You might skip the cheese and add freshly chopped rosemary or thyme to the dough. Swapping pepper for salt as a topping makes a difference. Or top with minced garlic or onion, sesame or poppy seeds, or whatever is on your favorite commercial cracker. In every case, you are going to make it better.
Prosciutto, Fig and Parmesan Rolls
This quick and easy appetizer is also incredibly elegant. Just wrap a ribbon of prosciutto around a wafer of Parmesan cheese nestled against a sliver of dried fig, and drizzle with olive or truffle oil.
Grilled Corn, Mexican Style
Not only is this recipe very easy, it results in the kind of deep flavor associated with the crunchy street corn of Mexico. In many parts of Mexico, though, that crunchiness is highlighted with a creamy chile-lime sauce. This is more unusual than the tried, true and unbeatable butter-salt-and-pepper combination, and only slightly more complicated. Just mix together mayonnaise, freshly squeezed lime juice, chile powder, salt and pepper. It’s pretty authentic, and a combination that brings out the grilled flavor, and balances the sweetness of fresh corn perfectly.
Buffalo Chicken Wings
Americans are a wing-loving people. The Buffalo variety, by most accounts “invented” at the Anchor Bar in, yes, Buffalo, is the official food of our most sacred event of the year: the Super Bowl. These can be made on the grill or in the oven.
Chicken Negimaki
The simplest way to keep white-meat chicken moist and make it flavorful is to put fat and flavor inside — to stuff it. Here is a chicken-cutlet take on negimaki, the Japanese dish of thinly sliced beef rolled around scallions. You need only briefly cook the scallions in soy sauce and mirin before wrapping some pounded-out chicken cutlets around them. Then baste the chicken with more sauce while it’s cooking, either on the grill or in a broiler, so the salty-sweet glaze permeates the chicken from both inside and out. It takes a little time to pound and roll up chicken cutlets, but not nearly as much time as marinating, and the results are not only more functional but also far more interesting.
Figs Stuffed With Goat Cheese
Here's a super-simple appetizer. Fresh figs are halved and stuffed with any creamy, flavorful cheese. A good blue works, but creamy goat cheese, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, is even more crowd-pleasing.
Peanut Chicken Wings
Here's a lively twist on the traditional chicken wing. Just grill or broil the wings until they're cooked through, then toss with a simple sauce of coconut milk, peanut butter, soy sauce, fish sauce and lime juice. Return to the grill or oven until they're crisp. You might never go back to Buffalo.
Quick ‘Preserved’ Lemons
Cucumber and Tomato Salad With Cilantro and Mint
Greater Los Angeles is a collection smaller cities, including Glendale, a center of the Armenian diaspora and home to one of the world’s largest Armenian populations outside Armenia. Fleeing religious violence in the late 19th century, genocide in the early 20th or the Soviet Union after that, Armenian Californians became integral in the development of the fig, raisin and bulgur businesses. They also opened restaurants. This salad comes from one of them, Adana. The chef and owner, Edward Khechemyan, gave me the recipe in 2013.
Roasted Sweet Potato Salad With Black Beans and Chile Dressing
Start with sweet potatoes, which are in season, beautiful and cheap, and roast them with red onion and olive oil. Roasting instead of boiling makes a huge difference: not only do you get a rich, smoky flavor, but the peeled exterior is toughened a bit so that the potatoes stay intact when tossed with the other ingredients. You can serve this sweet potato salad warm or at room temperature; it’s great both ways.
Lemony Brussels Sprout Slaw
Like cabbage, raw brussels sprouts do well when shredded and mixed with a tart apple, lemon juice and zest, and a dressing of Dijon mustard and mayonnaise. It’s not a traditional slaw, but the concept is the same. Serve this immediately, or give it some time in the fridge to let the flavors meld. (You may want to drain it before serving if it has released a lot of liquid.)
Popovers
Popovers begin with essentially the same batter as Yorkshire pudding. Purists will tell you that what makes Yorkshire pudding so great is that it’s cooked in beef drippings. But butter isn’t a bad stand-in, and popovers are pretty easy. You can buy special popover pans, with deeper, narrower cups which force the tops up in a more pronounced fashion, but I wouldn’t bother. Any muffin pan will produce a perfect popover if the butter is hot, the batter is rich and smooth and the baker is patient. But the patience ends when the popovers are done: they must be eaten right away.
Brussels Sprouts with Kimchi
Brussels Sprouts With Bacon and Figs
Glazed Carrots With Orange and Ginger
When carrots are cooked, it’s often a sad affair. They are boiled to death and presented almost as an apology. Yet when they’re treated with the respect they deserve, even ordinary supermarket carrots can be among the most reliable and enjoyable of vegetables, especially from fall through spring. This braise-and-glaze technique can be varied at will and can also be used with other roots, like beets, turnips and radishes. Once you have the hang of the technique, changing the flavorings is a snap. Try substituting a mixture of half balsamic vinegar, half water or soy sauce similarly diluted for the orange juice, adding a few cloves of peeled garlic with the carrots. Or add a half cup or so of chopped onions, shallots, scallions or leeks, or of chopped pitted dates or raisins, dried currants or even dried tomatoes.
Brussels Sprouts
Many vegan dishes (like fruit salad and peanut butter and jelly) are already beloved, but the problem faced by many of us is in imagining less-traditional dishes that are interesting and not challenging. Here is a creative way to do brussels sprouts with garlic and walnuts.
Bourbon: Manhattan
A Manhattan is generally made with rye whiskey. Here we’re using its sweeter cousin, bourbon, with a splash of sweet vermouth. You’ll see precise measurements. But use this recipe as a guideline, and customize according to your preference.
Churros
In the world of fresh pastry, few things are quicker than churros – those crullerlike strips of crisp fried dough that are street-corner snacks in Spain, Mexico and some New York City subway stations. In fact, there are few breakfast dishes or last-minute late-night snacks that can match a batch of churros. If there is a recipe ideal for learning deep frying, this is it. The dough is extremely forgiving, and will brown nicely at any temperature in the neighborhood of 350; with a frying thermometer, you can hit the temperature right on the money. The only trick, as with all deep frying, is to not crowd the dough strips. Work in batches. Once the strips are gloriously brown, turn them in a sugar-cinnamon mixture and serve hot, or at least warm. Cold churros are certainly edible, but they're a far cry from hot ones.
Bourbon: Old-Fashioned
This simply made and elegant cocktail focuses on the flavor of the bourbon, so keep that in mind when shopping for booze because bad-tasting liquor makes a lousy drink. Still, that doesn’t mean that you have to break the bank.