Recipes By Mark Bittman
981 recipes found
Warm Pickled Peppers
Mark Bittman’s Bouillabaisse
You can make any soup with water instead of stock, but the soups that drive you wild usually have a beautiful stock as their base. This is doubly true of bouillabaisse, which should start with a stock so delicious that you can barely imagine improving on it. There are a few ways to do this: Grab fish bones when you see them, and make the stock incrementally. Another is to use shrimp shells. A third is to accumulate lobster bodies, which make fantastic stock. In any case, you combine whatever you have with some aromatics (thyme branches, onion, celery, carrot, garlic, peppercorns) add water and simmer for 15 to 30 minutes. Cool, strain and freeze if you like. When you're ready to make the soup, procure your seafood – pretty much any combination of fish and shellfish will do, but avoid dark-fleshed fish – and go forth. From there, it's no more difficult than making a pot of vegetable soup.
Soba Noodle Soup
A bowl of soba is a beautiful, exotic and delicious centerpiece for a Japanese meal: the not-too-soft, nutty buckwheat noodles sitting in a mahogany broth — dashi — that’s as clear and glossy as beef consommé, not only salty and umami-complex but sweet as well. My favorite variety, tamago toji, is egg-topped. When it’s made right, the egg is almost foamy, soft-scrambled and tender, deliciously flavored by the dashi, a bit of which it absorbs.
Provençal Fish Stew
This dish turns the proportion of fish to vegetables on its head -- more vegetables, less fish. There's enough shrimp and squid to let you know you're eating a fish stew, but enough chickpeas and spinach to let you know it is something different. A puttanesca-like seasoning of garlic, olives, capers, anchovies and tomato paste flavors the braise.
Shortcut Choucroute
This pork and vegetable braise requires about 3 hours of time and 5 minutes of work. Spend a few minutes making broad strokes with a sharp knife and layer the ingredients in a deep roasting pan. Then walk away for more than 2 hours. Pass through the kitchen again to uncover the pan and turn the oven up, then go back to your business. You’ve just spent a productive 3 or so hours cooking and doing something else.
Rösti
Grated potatoes packed into a cake and fried in butter, this Swiss dish is a superb side dish to a medium-rare steak or even some fried eggs. You can peel the potatoes here, or save time and skip that step altogether. (Just make sure to use thin-skinned potatoes that have been scrubbed well.)
Pork and Portobello Burgers
This is a new-age version of a veggie burger (as in half and half, not a burger made from vegetables and grain), which you might also think of as a stuffed mushroom. It’s terrific, hearty, unusual and really cool: a portobello filled with sausage meat and grilled. In this instance, a broiler will work, as will a skillet.
Real Popcorn
Leg of Lamb With Moroccan Spices
There’s nothing like the combination of cinnamon, cumin and coriander to give your kitchen an inviting aroma — and the finished lamb will have a beautifully dark and redolent exterior. Don't know how to carve a lamb? Mark Bittman shows you how in this video.
Cold Shrimp With Warm Cocktail Sauce
Egg Noodles With Soy Broth
This is a tasty, fast, cheap, infinitely variable broth-and-noodle combination. Its preparation is slowed down only by waiting for the water to boil. A key ingredient is ketchup; if you can’t bear that thought, you can use tomato paste instead. There’s also Sriracha, soy sauce, vinegar and sesame oil, all of which add character. The noodles I use are fresh egg pasta, but just about any kind of noodle can be used. Once you’ve made this once, you’ll probably want to take it to a showier place. Cook thinly sliced shallot, ginger or garlic in a little peanut oil before adding the water for the “broth,” or add sliced celery, bean sprouts, snow peas or sliced carrots to it. Switch to rice noodles, soba, ordinary dried pasta or mung bean threads if you like.
Baby-Back-Rib Kebabs
Garlicky Pork Burger
If you are cautious, you can cook a little meat and then taste it. Though there are virtually no reported cases of trichinosis from commercial pork in the United States, few people will sample raw pork — or lamb, with which the danger is even less. So the thing to do is season the meat, then cook up a spoonful in a skillet, taste and season as necessary. Remember that the burger is the cousin not only of the steak — which often takes no seasoning beyond salt and pepper — but also of the meatloaf and the meatball, both of which are highly seasoned. Think about adding minced garlic in small quantities, chopped onion, herbs (especially parsley), grated Parmesan, minced ginger, the old reliable Worcestershire, hot sauce, good chili powder and so on. It’s hard to go wrong here.
Romaine and Stilton
Broiled Soft-Shell Crabs
Cold Cherry Soup with Mango
Millet With Corn, Mango and Shrimp
Lamb and Rice Stuffed Cabbage With Tomato Sauce
Roast Chicken With Herbs And Butter
Classic Glazed Doughnuts
Homemade doughnuts are a bit of a project, but they’re less work than you might think, and the result is a truly great, hot, crisp doughnut. Once you’ve mastered this basic recipe for a fluffy, yeasted doughnut, you can do pretty much anything you like in terms of glazes, toppings and fillings.
Greek-Style Nachos
Nachos can be fun as a bar food, but they’re usually not much more than that. Here, I'm substituting like mad to create what you might call Greek-style nachos. Mine go like this: pita triangles toasted with olive oil; a sauce of feta and yogurt, spiked with mint and lemon; a topping of ground lamb with onion and cumin; and a garnish of tomatoes, cucumbers and olives. The whole thing takes maybe a half-hour, and it’s all familiar except for the arrangement.
Navy Beans With Poppy Seed Tarka
Doughnuts
Homemade doughnuts are a bit of a project, but they’re less work than you might think, and the result is a truly great, hot, crisp doughnut. Once you’ve mastered this basic recipe for a fluffy, yeasted doughnut, you can do pretty much anything you like in terms of glazes, toppings and fillings.
Indian Lamb Curry With Basmati Rice
This wonderfully spiced dish is halfway completed before you start cooking. I’ve slowly begun to realize that my most successful lamb dishes were made from what was left over from a meal of lamb shanks. When braising season began, I cooked two sizable lamb shanks and, of course, enjoyed them. But I really got into it over the following couple of nights, when I wound up using them to create marvelous meals.