Recipes By Mark Bittman
973 recipes found
Southeast Asian Shrimp And Grapefruit Salad
Spring Veal Stew
This is a wonderful springtime stew loaded with spring onions or shallots, fresh tarragon and peas. Much of the flavor comes from browning the veal cubes, but be careful: veal is pretty lean, so it doesn’t take long to dry out. Stewing it for 15 to 20 minutes (sometimes even less) with a little splash of white wine is all it takes. Add the peas at the end, and cook until they’re tender and warm — you don’t want to cook all the flavor out of them, especially if they’re fresh.
Spicy Grilled Shrimp
This Mark Bittman recipe from 1999 is big on flavor, but not too much effort. The hardest part is preparing the grill. It calls for just a few spices — garlic, lemon, paprika and cayenne — to yield an intense flavor. Feel free to adjust the cayenne to taste, and pay close attention to your paprika: For best results, make sure it’s fresh. If it doesn’t taste vibrant and smoky, it’s time to buy more.
Easy Chicken and Rice
You can make a big deal out of chicken with rice -- at its zenith, it becomes paella -- but it is a dish that takes well to short cuts. And even at its simplest, it's a crowd-pleaser. For fast weeknight meals, I strip chicken and rice to its essentials: oil, onion, chicken and rice. Stock makes the best cooking liquid, but water works almost as well, because as it simmers with the chicken they combine to produce a flavorful broth. To reduce greasiness, I remove the skin from the chicken before cooking it. (In a moist dish like this one, the skin is not especially appetizing anyway.) You can easily vary this dish by using any stock instead of water; by substituting another grain, like pearled barley, for the rice; by sautéing or roasting the chicken separately and combining it with the rice at the last minute; by adding sausage or shellfish, like shrimp, along with the chicken, or, most excitingly, by adding strips of red pepper, pitted olives, capers, chopped tomatoes or shelled peas to the initial onion mix.
Citrus Chicken
This take on the humble chicken breast yields a dish that is at once crisp and moist, tangy and sweet. You can use bone-in chicken breasts, but you'll need to adjust your cooking time by a few minutes.
Fast Tandoori Chicken
Here’s a dead-simple weeknight meal that Mark Bittman came up with at the dawn of the century for fast tandoori chicken – chicken quickly marinated in yogurt and spices, then run under the broiler for less than 10 minutes. The whole process takes about an hour, but the active cooking time is around 20 minutes in total, and it makes for a delicious family meal when served with Basmati rice and some sautéed spinach.
Chicken Breast With Eggplant, Shallots And Ginger
Spanish Tortilla
The Spanish tortilla has nothing in common with the Mexican variety except its shape and its name. One is just a bread. The other can be an appetizer, a snack, or even a light meal. But the Spanish tortilla has another advantage: because it is better at room temperature than it is hot, it should be made in advance, anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours. In its most basic form, the tortilla is a potato and egg open-faced omelet that derives most of its flavor from olive oil. Onions or scallions can replace the potato in part or entirely, as can cooked greens like chard. The only hard part is turning the partly formed tortilla, so do it swiftly and carefully (using a nonstick skillet makes it much easier). The worst that will happen is that a little potato and egg will be left behind when you return the cake to the skillet. If you can't bring yourself to risk the flip, just slide the pan into a 375-degree oven until the eggs are completely set, but not overcooked.
Roasted Cod and Potatoes
When one of my daughters, Emma, was young, there was a time when her main passion in life was potatoes, especially crispy ones. For one special occasion, I produced a classic French dish, potatoes Anna, in which potatoes are thin-sliced, drenched in butter, carefully layered and roasted until golden. This was an error, of course; potatoes Anna is a pain to make. Naturally, the demand was unrelenting thereafter. So, in an attempt to make the effort more rational, I cut down on the butter, cut short the preparation time by enlisting the aid of the broiler during the last few minutes of cooking, and decided to turn this one dish into something approaching an entire meal. In the last few minutes, before the potatoes were cooked through, I placed a thick fillet of fish on top of the potatoes. The result is a simple weeknight dish that I now make routinely, and one that even seems to impress the occasional guest.
Creamy One-Pot Pasta With Chicken and Mushrooms
Cooking pasta the way you would make risotto may sound new and hip. But it’s at least old enough to have been demonstrated to me in Rome in 1976, and I imagine as old as pasta itself. In this method, the liquid is minimized: there’s no need for a gallon per pound of pasta. The liquid is added gradually to the pasta, which absorbs it completely and thereby retains its starch. This makes the pasta creamy and rich; it also gains the flavor of the stock. You can use pretty much any pasta shape you like, but timing will vary depending on size. This approach may seem like more work than making pasta in the ordinary way. But as the making of the “sauce” is integrated into the pasta-cooking, it really becomes a one-dish meal — as interesting as risotto, and even a bit quicker. Here is a combination of gemelli with mushrooms and chicken to get you started.
Chickpea and Fennel Ratatouille
This ratatouille with chickpeas and fennel is among the best I’ve ever made. It’s a recipe for what you might call A Vegan Day. Being a vegan is not my point, and anyway, it’s as easy to create an unhealthy full-time vegan diet as it is to eat brilliantly as a part-time vegan. When fruits and vegetables are at their best, they give you insight into how the vegan thing can work for you, if only for a day. And given a moderate degree of freshness, most conventional vegetables from ordinary supermarkets can be made to taste good when gardens go dormant.
Soba Salad
For most people, even experienced cooks, weeknight dinners are not so much a result of careful planning but of what’s on hand — and what can be accomplished fairly quickly. Noodles of all kinds are easy and beloved. But soba noodles, a Japanese staple, are special: they usually take no more than 3 to 4 minutes to cook and, because they’re made from buckwheat, have a slightly firm texture and a nutty flavor. Traditionally, soba are served hot and cold, making them a flexible partner for almost any fresh ingredients you have in the kitchen. In this case, they are paired with shelled frozen edamame, carrots and spinach and a light dressing.
Pan-Baked Lemon-Almond Tart
This flourless, crustless tart is rich, moist, sweet and and prepared almost entirely on the stovetop (with the exception of a few minutes spent under the broiler to crisp the top). It is the ideal decadent breakfast, a new twist on the classic coffeecake or last-minute dessert.
No-Knead Bread
Here is one of the most popular recipes The Times has ever published, courtesy of Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery. It requires no kneading. It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. And it takes very little effort — only time. You will need 24 hours to create the bread, but much of this is unattended waiting, a slow fermentation of the dough that results in a perfect loaf. (We've updated the recipe to reflect changes Mark Bittman made to the recipe in 2006 after publishing and receiving reader feedback. The original recipe called for 3 cups flour; we've adjusted it to call for 3 1/3 cups/430 grams flour.) In 2021, J. Kenji López-Alt revisited the recipe and shared his own tweaked version.
Strawberry Fool
This Minimalist recipe is as basic as dessert gets, and especially in strawberry season it’s just perfect. It is essentially fresh strawberries and whipped cream (substitute heavy cream, sour cream or yogurt). It can be eaten right away or refrigerated. Only a fool would pass this up.
Cold Sesame Noodles With Crunchy Vegetables
The ingredients for this cold noodle dish can be prepared ahead of time, leaving nothing more to do in the morning before work than to assemble the noodles and vegetables and dress them with sesame oil, soy, tahini, ginger and a few other things. Prepare for lunchtime deliciousness.
Pressure Cooker Porcini Risotto
This recipe, adapted from the slow-cooking maven Lorna Sass, proves that pressure cookers shouldn’t be associated with overcooked food. The rice turns out perfectly in the end, and you save a lot of time and effort. It’s finished off with peas for a bit of color, and the usual cheese, salt and pepper. It’s a meal that will justify buying that pressurized pot.
Asparagus Pesto
Making asparagus pesto lets you use the peel, which contains a ton of flavor even though it’s sometimes too tough and stringy to eat. Puréeing lets you sidestep this issue: you keep the peel, and the flavor, but your food processor pulverizes the fibers, even if you use thick spears.
Pasta With Mint and Parmesan
The pairing of pasta with mint and Parmesan is a good one. There is something about the lightly assaultive yet somehow sweet nature of mint that is unlike any other herb. Older cuisines use it occasionally, but it is rarely seen as a major player. In this dish, however, softened by butter and cheese, mint converts a basic but undeniably heavy combination into an easy yet complex pasta dish best described as refreshing. To the inevitable question, Can I use olive oil instead of butter? my answer is that you can, but you will completely change the nature of the dish; it won't be bad, but it won't be as good. Better, I think, to cut the butter back to two tablespoons. But because this sauce is cut with the pasta cooking water, the butter is spread nicely throughout, and it really isn't a huge amount per person.
Hummus
Hummus is an ideal dip for picnics, parties and everyday snacking. Serve it with pita, chips, crackers or cut vegetables. In this hummus recipe, adapted from "How to Cook Everything," tahini is essential, as are garlic and lemon. But this dip is also flexible: cumin and pimentón are optional, as are herbs or blends like za’atar. Hummus can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to one week.
The Best Scrambled Eggs
For silky, outrageously good scrambled eggs, cook them low and slow. This method, which Mark Bittman learned from James Beard, is very low and very slow: you place the eggs over very low heat, stirring frequently, breaking up the curds as they form. The results are without compare. Make them for breakfast on the weekend, while the coffee brews and the bacon fries.
Scrambled Peppers and Eggs
As in many Mark Bittman recipes, the idea here is more vegetables -- in this case, peppers -- than protein. It works because except for the jalapeño, none of the peppers is hot.
Roasted Asparagus Frittata
Asparagus begs to be roasted; this recipe was developed after roasting a couple pounds and using them in a bunch of different dishes over a few days. This was the favorite, and frankly, the uber-favorite was this in a sandwich.
More-Vegetable-Than-Egg Frittata
This simple frittata — just eggs, vegetables, fresh herbs and a little Parmesan if you're feeling luxurious — is proof that eating well doesn't have to be deprivational. It can also be delicious.