Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Serious Potato Skins
There’s no trick to these loaded potato skins, and making them is a breeze. Pile them high with toppings and broil until they look like something you may have eaten at an Irish bar in the bad part of town during college, the game playing on a big screen above the bathroom doors. That bar was pretty good, you know.
Bulgogi-Style Tofu
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredient list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Here's the prompt: bulgogi-style tofu. It’s simple. Press some firm tofu to extract as much liquid as you can. Make a marinade of soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, minced garlic, grated ginger, a spoonful of gochujang, a splash of neutral oil, some sliced scallions and toasted sesame seeds. Slice the tofu into bite-size cubes, and slide them into the marinade. Let that sit — a half-hour works; a few hours works better. Then roast them in a hot oven on an oiled foil-lined pan until they’re crisp. Serve with bibb lettuce cups to wrap them in, with rice, kimchi and a dipping sauce of ssamjang and a little bit more gochujang thinned out with neutral oil and sherry vinegar. (If not, go with sesame oil and ground white pepper.) That’s a fine dinner. For more recipe recommendations from Sam Sifton, Melissa Clark and New York Times Cooking, sign up to receive the Cooking newsletter. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Takeout-Style Sesame Noodles
Noodles dressed with sesame are popular in many parts of China, but this particular style, made with peanut butter and served cold, became a Chinese-American staple in the United States in the 1970s. The family of Shorty Tang — an ambitious restaurateur who emigrated from Sichuan to Taipei to New York — firmly believes that he invented the dish and still serve it at Hwa Yuan, the restaurant he opened in 1967 in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They have never divulged the exact recipe; this is our own lush but refreshing version.
Almond and Dried Fruit Pilaf With Rotisserie Chicken
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Here's a free-form rice pilaf, made with onions, dried fruit and slivered almonds. First, melt a knob of butter in a pot, then sauté a sliced onion in it until translucent. Add rice, as much as you want to cook, and stir it around, then add water in its usual ratio to the rice, and cook as you always do. At the end, add some chopped prunes, or currants, or raisins, or all three, along with a handful of slivered almonds and salt and pepper. Fluff the rice to mix everything together. Put the top back on the pot, and let the rice and mix-ins mellow out for a few minutes. Serve alongside a store-bought roast chicken, the legs and thighs separated and the breasts cut on the bias and fanned out for show. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Pan-Roasted Salmon With Jalapeño
Here is a simple, easy preparation for salmon that allows wild-caught fish, especially, to shine. The foaming butter amplifies the richness of the flesh, while the jalapeños keep it in check, as soy sauce does to the fattiest sushi. Some prefer to reverse the order of the cooking, so that the fish is served skin-side up, but I find that cooking it this way allows the butter to do its job more effectively and delivers a more beautiful plate of food as well. (Most of it is left in the pan when you’re done.) Top with chopped fresh herbs, and serve with roasted new potatoes.
Roasted Potato Hash
I had one of the great breakfasts of my life on San Juan Island, north of Seattle, in a dockside coffee shop The grated hash brown potatoes there were cooked in thin sheets and run under the broiler beneath a handful of grated cheese to create crisp pancakes that could be used as a platter on which to serve fried eggs, or as a hat to top them, depending on your mood. When I got home to New York I started making them for dinner, which was labor-intensive and eventually annoying because one of my children wanted them for dinner all the time. Together we worked out a hack. It is this recipe, and you can easily double, and serve with just about anything, especially fried eggs. Omit the bacon if it's not your game, and replace with a couple of tablespoons of butter. Omit the red peppers if you like. Add a drizzle of chipotle mayonnaise on top, if you don’t like sour cream, or swap out the chipotle for nothing if you don’t like spice. Make the recipe your own. The point is simply to aim for a thick, caramelized crust of potatoes. The interiors will be soft and sweet.
Buttermilk Fried Chicken
Here is a basic yet delicious recipe for buttermilk fried chicken, with a crisp crust and luscious interior. Learn this recipe and perfect your frying technique, and then expand your fried chicken repertoire. Try adding some paprika or cayenne to the dredge, or a bit of hot sauce to the brine. And don't forget to drizzle hot honey over it all before serving.
Simplest Grilled Shrimp
Here is the easiest way to grill shrimp. It can be done on a gas or charcoal grill, with skewers or a grill basket or without. Whichever method you use, remember that shrimp cook quickly, particularly when they’re peeled. Larger shrimp are better for the grill.
Simplest Grilled Salmon
For those who love seafood but don’t like to cook it, fearing that the scent will overpower their kitchens, the grill is among the greatest of gifts. And cooking salmon on the grill couldn't be easier. You can use a charcoal or a gas grill, and you only need olive oil, salt and pepper to bring out the salmon's rich flavor. A clean grill is crucial for cooking fish, which doesn’t have a lot of fat, meaning it’s more liable to stick to the grate. Scrape and oil, always.
Chicken Paprikash
Spices lose their flavor over time but few as quickly as paprika, which starts out tasting of pepper and sunshine but deteriorates in but a few months to sawdust and bitterness. For this recipe, get some new at the market: sweet or hot Hungarian paprika is best, but the generic article isn’t terrible and the smoky Spanish varieties known as pimentón de La Vera would not be out of place either, lending a deep, woodsy aroma reminiscent of cooking over an open fire. It’s a dish that pairs beautifully with butter-slicked egg noodles.
Jajangmyeon
This dish is a Koreanified take on the fried sauce noodles served in the Shandong province of China. It occupies a similar place in Korean cuisine to the one General Tso’s chicken has in American food: a birth-country meal translated to accommodate the too-tired-to-cook takeout tastes of a host nation. It is milder than the Chinese original, a little more porky, the sort of dish you’ll have people asking you to make once or twice a month. You’ll need thick white-wheat noodles, like udon, and some of the Korean black-bean paste known as chunjang, available at Korean markets and online. If you can’t find pickled daikon to serve as a garnish, some raw onions dressed in vinegar will make a fine alternative.
Caramelized Citrus
This is a modernized version of a dessert that was popular in Britain during the 1970s, a simple, stylish confection that was a standby of posh dinner parties: caramelized oranges. It was then and remains the sort of dish that is not particularly difficult to make, but still signals a home cook’s understanding of elegance. My recipe nods to, but is not of, that era. It calls for saffron, which infuses the sauce with its sweet-savory, haylike aroma, and for yogurt, which is a delicious partner to the fruit. On which subject, an important final note: Be careful to remove all the white pith beneath the skin of the citrus, as it is exceedingly bitter.
Gjelina’s Roasted Yams
These roasted yams are adapted from a recipe that Travis Lett, the chef and an owner of Gjelina in Venice, Calif., published in a 2015 cookbook devoted to the restaurant’s food. They are a marvelous accompaniment to a roast chicken, but they are maybe even better as a platter to accompany a salad of hearty greens, cheese and nuts. What makes them memorable is a technique Lett calls for during the cooking: tossing the tubers in honey before roasting them, which intensifies their caramelizing. The crisp, near-burned sweetness works beautifully against the heat of the pepper and the acidic creaminess of the yogurt you dab onto the dish at the end. It is a simple dish, but it results in fantastic eating.
Cod Cakes
Cod cakes are terrific with cod, but can be made with any white-fleshed fish. Poach the fillets in bay-leaf-scented water, then flake the cooled meat into a New Englandish mirepoix of sautéed onions and celery. Eggs and cracker crumbs will help bind everything together below a drift of spice. Make sure to leave some time to chill the resulting patties in the refrigerator – the cold will help them set up so they don’t fall apart in the sauté pan. A light smear of mayonnaise on the exterior of the cakes before you fry them will encourage the most glorious crust. Serve with a thatch of green salad, a bowl of chowder or a neat pile of slaw.
Three-Cup Chicken
Ask 30 people how to make this simple Taiwanese recipe, and you’ll receive 30 different responses. Some fry the chicken before braising it, use more oil, less wine, different blends of soy sauce. Debates rage over how thick the sauce should be, over which parts of the chicken to use. (Few follow the folk recipe that calls for making the sauce with a cup each of sesame oil, soy sauce and rice wine. “If you actually cook it that way,” says Eddie Huang, the Taiwanese-American chef who inspired the television program “Fresh Off the Boat,” “you’ll be in trouble.”) Our reporting and testing led us to the recipe below. Use it as a starting point, and then make it your own.
Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma
Here is a recipe for an oven-roasted version of the flavorful street-side classic usually cooked on a rotisserie. It is perfect for an evening with family and friends. Serve with pita and tahini, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes, some olives, chopped parsley, some feta, fried eggplant, hummus swirled with harissa, rice or rice pilaf. You can make the white sauce that traditionally accompanies it by cutting plain yogurt with mayonnaise and lemon juice, and flecking it with garlic. For a red to offset it, simmer ketchup with crushed red pepper and a hit of red-wine vinegar until it goes syrupy and thick, or just use your favorite hot sauce instead.
Meera Sodha’s Naan
The British cookbook author learned this recipe from her aunt Harsha, and included it in her “Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen” in 2015. It is simple to make, and results in crackly-soft flatbreads singed by heat and yielding to tenderness within, with a faint tang of yogurt. It is exactly the sort of thing you’d love to dip in a pool of curry again and again. Just set up an assembly line to roll out the dough and cook it in a hot pan. Once you make the recipe two or three times you’ll never buy naan again.
All-Purpose Biscuits
Homemade biscuits are what take us into the kitchen today to cook: fat, flaky mounds of quick bread, golden brown, with a significant crumb. Composed of flour, baking powder, fat and a liquid, then baked in a hot oven, they are an excellent sop for syrup, molasses or honey. They are marvelous layered with country ham or smothered in white sausage gravy, with eggs, with grits. They make a great Thanksgiving side. And if you've never made them before, you'll be delighted to know that biscuits are easy to make. Really.
Miso Chicken
Making a compound of unsalted butter and the salty, fungal deliciousness of Japanese miso paste is a surefire way of adding immense flavor to a simple weeknight meal. Here the mixture is spread over chicken thighs, which are then roasted to golden perfection. But you could easily use it on salmon or flounder, on corn or potatoes. The recipe calls for white miso, which is more mild than the aged version known as red miso. But you could certainly use red for a more intense result.
Perfect Peach Pie
Eat a perfect peach under the summer sun and you'll experience the fruit at its messy, dripping, sugar-bright best. Rinse your chin and understand that no melon, apricot or blackberry can compete. But how often does this happen? For most of us, a great and truly perfect peach is a rare event. We can expect but one or two a season, for all our trying. Enter the pie. A peach pie can elevate good peaches to excellence and great ones to the sublime. Even a peach pie made with frozen fruit is a terrific thing. The addition of sugar helps; so, too, do a dash of lemon juice and a light sprinkle of nutmeg, which offers a slight bitterness to offset the sweet. Add a crown of vanilla ice cream for a perfect diner-style à la mode effect.
Great South Bay Duck Ragù
This is a home cook's version of a wild-shot brant ragù cooked by Dave Pasternack of Esca in Manhattan. He served it thick and dark, a kind of tomato jam knit together with heavy shreds of meat, riding a polenta raft: poultry that looked like pork and tasted of fish, a combination to reel the mind. It was food of deep intensity and flavor, and it led to crazy, vivid dreams. Made with farmed duck amped up with anchovies, juniper, and vinegar it becomes a dish of domestic heritage, though with a feral streak, absolutely delicious.
Billi Bi
Craig Claiborne, who brought this amazing cream of mussels soup to The Times in the 1960s and refined it over the years with his longtime kitchen collaborator Pierre Franey, once called it "the most elegant and delicious soup ever created." It is also one of the easiest to make. Use wine to steam open some mussels beneath a blanket of aromatics and use the resulting stock as a base for cream. Add the mussels and perhaps a grind of pepper. "One of the sublime creations on Earth," Claiborne wrote. Find more Times classic recipes.
Roasted Salmon Glazed With Brown Sugar and Mustard
This is what we call around here a no-recipe recipe, the sort of meal you can cook once off a card and you'll know it by heart: salmon glazed with brown sugar and mustard. The preparation could not be simpler. Heat your oven to 400. Make a mixture of Dijon mustard and brown sugar to the degree of spicy-sweetness that pleases you. Salt and pepper the salmon fillets. Place them skin-side down on a lightly oiled, foil-lined baking sheet, slather the tops with the mustard and brown sugar glaze and slide them into the top half of your oven. They ought to be done in 12 minutes or so, and they pair beautifully with simple braised greens.
Craig Claiborne’s Smothered Chicken
Craig Claiborne was a child of Mississippi who started as food editor of The Times in 1957 and did as much as anyone to help bring home cooking into the spotlight. The dish “belongs in the ‘comfort’ category,” he wrote in 1983, “a food that gives solace to the spirit when you dine on it.” You could give your smothered chicken some European flair with mushrooms and small onions in the gravy, as Claiborne did in his experiments with Pierre Franey, then his kitchen co-pilot. Or you could send yourself south to the Creole tastes of the Delta, with a blend of tomatoes, chopped celery, onion and green peppers added to the sauce. But sometimes the easiest way is the best. Try it.