Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Portobello Patty Melts
This is a traditional patty melt in all ways save the fact that the beef has been swapped out for roasted portobello-mushroom caps. It otherwise hews closely to the recipe served at Tiny Naylor’s drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and to the ones used in coffee shops and diners across the country. But those mushrooms! Roasted in the oven in a marinade of oil, balsamic vinegar, soy and garlic, they take on immense flavor and density, and provide a terrific foil to the caramelized onions, Swiss cheese and butter-griddled rye bread.
Chorizo Sloppy Joes With Kale and Provolone
Matthew Hyland, a chef and an owner of the Emily and Emmy Squared restaurants in New York and Nashville, is known for making exemplary pizza and hamburgers. But his sandwich game is strong as well. This one recalls the flavors that he first experienced as a college student in Bristol, R.I., which has supported a sizable Portuguese community since at least the late 19th century. It is a sloppy Joe of sorts, built on a base of crumbled Mexican-style chorizo, which Hyland uses in place of chourico, a Portuguese sausage also spiced with paprika and garlic. He uses chorizo because he can’t regularly find chourico in his neighborhood stores. I can, sometimes. Other times, not, and I can’t find Mexican chorizo either. Then I use Guatemalan chorizo instead. It’s a great sandwich whichever member of the chorizo family you use. Do not stint on the olives, banana peppers or celery seeds. The celery seeds especially, a nod to one of the toppings scattered on a Rhode Island “New York System” hot dog, are a perfect touch.
Creamed Rice With English Peas and Country Ham
Steven Satterfield, the chef at Miller Union in Atlanta, published a version of this recipe for a kind of Lowcountry risotto in his cookbook, "Root to Leaf." He uses Carolina Gold rice, a heritage long-grain variety, but any good long-grain rice will do. Likewise, feel free to substitute other hams for the country ham called for in the recipe. But use the very best peas you can find or, failing that, asparagus tips or tiny radishes. Not rich enough for you? Add a poached egg.
Baked Rice
This recipe, from the chef Yotam Ottolenghi, is richly spiced and flavorful, a dish that would pair with almost any grilled or roasted meat. Try it sometime with a Sunday roast chicken and a pile of greens, a comforting spread as the weekend slides away.
Corn Bread
Corn bread goes with chili and in dressing during the holidays. This recipe isn’t dressed up with cheese or chilies (though you could add some or either or both). It’s a basic recipe, made in a cast-iron pan to create a crunchy crust. Keep this recipe on file and make it whenever you need a good sturdy corn bread.
Henry Bain Sauce
Asado Negro
Here, we have a raggedy number out of Venezuela called asado negro. It requires a fat roast of beef that is simmered for a long time in dark caramel, its sweetness tempered by vinegar. The result is sticky and unctuous beneath a cloak of peppers, onions and leeks. It looks mysterious and bold on the plate and at the start of a New York winter can conjure some degree of Latin American humidity and joy. Asado negro has its primary home in Caracas, where it is often served during the holidays, alongside fried sweet plantains and white rice, with perhaps a tart green salad for contrast. The meat is napped in blackness that comes not from fire or smoke but from the absorption of all colors into one, a color as deep as space itself. It is beef the color of a velvet dinner jacket seen across a dark lawn at midnight. It makes mockery of pot roast. And, as we shall see, it is exceedingly simple to make.
Italian Marinade
Spiedies, grilled skewers of meat marinated in what amounts to Italian dressing, are a culinary mainstay of bars and roadhouses in and around Binghamton, N.Y. What follows is a recipe for the marinade used to prepare them for the fire. I have used fresh herbs, though dried ones are more traditional, and have upped the flavor slightly with the use of lemon zest. Once you’ve got the marinade made, simply cut the meat — chicken or beef, lamb or pork — into 1- or 2-inch cubes, and submerge it in the liquid for a couple of days (10 to 12 hours for chicken), covered, in the refrigerator. All that lemon and vinegar does some work on the meat, and the result, when grilled over charcoal for four or five minutes a side, is a fantastical taste of upstate New York, and a very simple and excellent dinner besides. (Here are instructions for cooking them.) Serve with torn mint and an additional drizzle of lemon juice and olive oil, on top of Italian bread or alongside rice.
Patty Melts
As great dinner sandwiches go, it is hard to beat patty melts: ground beef, Swiss cheese and caramelized onions griddled on rye bread until they become crisp, oozing packages of salty-sweet delight. This recipe for them, which riffs on the ones served at Tiny Naylor’s drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles in the 1950s, is about as traditional as you can get – luscious enough that they don’t require condiments. Between the butter and the onions and the cheese, the sandwiches makes their own. Undercook the burger patties slightly before assembly, so they finish while you’re griddling the sandwiches at the end.
Three Sisters Stew
Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, recalls being taken out by his grandfather on the family ranch to shoot his first duck for Thanksgiving at age 9, when he was so small that his grandfather had to brace him from behind to help absorb the kick from the shotgun. Game is found on many Thanksgiving tables in the state, but other traditions predate the hunt. The trinity of corn, beans and squash was central to the agriculture of the Plains Indians in what would later become Wyoming, and some cooks honor that history each Thanksgiving with a dish called Three Sisters stew. The writer Pamela Sinclair’s version is a highlight of her 2008 cookbook, “A Taste of Wyoming: Favorite Recipes From the Cowboy State.” The stew works nicely as a rich side dish for turkey, and can easily be adapted to vegetarian tastes by omitting the pork and adding a pound of cubed butternut squash instead.
Queso Gravy
This is a slightly looser version of a traditional Tex-Mex chile-cheese dip, appropriate for use on chicken-fried steak (or plain old fried chicken), as a topping for enchiladas or simply as something into which to dip chips or crisp vegetables. It scales up nicely if you'd like to double it for use at a party -- just keep it warm in a low slow cooker, set up on a sideboard. Increase the number of jalapeños to taste.
Grilled Sausages, Onions and Peppers
There is no more reliable guest at a cookout than sausage, roasted over the open fire. But before you grill the meat, get some peppers and onions soft and dark and fragrant in the heat, and use these as a bed on which to serve the links. Italian sausage works beautifully here, as do hot links and bratwurst. If cooking brats, think about simmering them first in beer and onions, then finishing them on the fire.
Roy Choi's Carne Asada
Roy Choi is the dharma bum of the Los Angeles food scene, a Zen lunatic bard of the city’s immigrant streets. He is a founder of Kogi BBQ, which used food trucks to introduce the city to Mexican mash-up cuisine, and the creative force behind a handful of Los Angeles restaurants that celebrate various iterations of big-flavor cooking at the intersection of skater, stoner, lowrider and Korean college-kid desire. He cooks poems, and they taste of Los Angeles. Choi's carne asada — grilled meat — might raise eyebrows in Puebla and Laredo alike. There is mirin in the marinade and a lot of garlic. But there is purity to its expression of urban Southern California. This is a recipe to expand minds, a delicious take on a venerable classic.
Turkey à la King
This is nursery food absolutely, soft and creamy, salty-sweet. It sits happily atop toast or biscuits, rice or waffles or noodles; in some households, it is wrapped within crepes: leftover turkey in gravy, essentially, with mushrooms and peas for heft. And as such it is comforting to eat, in much the same way that burrowing into a nest on the couch to watch football or a three-hankie movie is comforting. But it is also threadbare elegant with its whisper of sherry, vaguely French. You could of course make it with chicken instead of turkey, add diced ham or minced clams, shucked oysters or a handful of slivered pimiento. It's a very forgiving recipe. Make of it what you will.
Jim Harrison’s Caribbean Stew
Jim Harrison, the poet and epicure, hunter and fisherman, novelist, essayist and enthusiastic cook, published a version of this recipe in the literary magazine Smoke Signals in 1981. I adapted it more than three decades later, after Harrison's death in 2016. The key ingredients: a lot of tomato paste and a good, floral hot sauce, ideally made with Scotch bonnet peppers, which combine in marvelous ways. Parboiling the ribs allows the recipe to come together relatively quickly, and the cooking otherwise is totally serial: one step after another until you slide the pot into the oven and allow the heat to do its work. Substitute different meats, or fewer, if you like, depending on availability.
Steamed Clams With Jalapeño Butter
Recipes do not come easier, though you will want to make sure that you take the time to scrub the shells before steaming. There’s nothing worse than sand in your clams. The bacon is optional, but I like the smokiness it adds to the broth. As for the jalapeño butter, it provides a zip against the brine and sweetness. You can heat it to make a brown butter, adding nuttiness to the mix, but it's not necessary.
Guacamole con Frutas
Toloache is one of the great treats of the theater district, up there with bumping into Laura Benanti in front of Joe Allen: the chunky guacamole with apple, pear and jalapeño that the chef Julian Medina serves at his marvelous little Mexican joint on 50th Street. Just add margaritas.
Steamed Blue Crabs
For steamed crabs, that beach-town summer standby, the Chesapeake catechism teaches plenty: buy more crabs than you think you need, use more spice, a larger pot. Get wooden mallets. Prepare to eat for a while. If you don’t have a crab pot, and most of us don’t, fiddle with the largest stockpot or pasta boiler you have. Set a few clean, empty metal cans upside down on the bottom or invert a colander in there, anything that allows you to have a boiling liquid at the bottom and crabs above it, with none of them swimming around in the soup.
Compound Butter
A mixture of butter and other ingredients makes a compound butter, which can be used as a kind of insta-sauce on top of cooked meat, vegetables or fish. A classic variety is maître d’hotel butter, which uses thyme and lemon juice as flavoring agents. But a cilantro-and-lime-juice compound butter is a marvelous thing to apply to fish, and you could even think of adding a tiny dice of jalapeño pepper to the mix. Lemon-basil is terrific as well — you could add some garlic to that and omit the shallots. Some cooks take maître d’hotel butter and add Roquefort cheese to it as a topping for steak. Compound butter is a theme on which to improvise. The following recipe provides the basic instructions.
Okonomi-Latke
This hybrid of the Japanese okonomiyaki pancake and the traditional Jewish latke is from Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel, the chefs and owners of Shalom Japan in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It works beautifully in any setting where you might ordinarily serve latkes and is a fine base for caviars of any hue.
Green-Peppercorn Guacamole
Guacamoles come in myriad forms and occasionally draw controversy when they veer from the standard mix of avocados, jalapeños and lime. For an article in The Times in 2015, the San Antonio chef Quealy Watson steered the dish in a vaguely Asian direction, adding pickled green peppercorns to the mix. You can generally find pickled green peppercorns in the pickle section of your supermarket, near the capers. A younger, softer cousin to the black peppercorn, they add a marvelous bite to the dish.
Strawberry-Banana Compote
Fruit and butter with a little bit of brown sugar. Heat until it smells magical. That’s it. You can add bourbon as well, for a hit of smokiness (the alcohol will cook off) that pairs well with French-toast brunches. Or let the mixture cool, then store in the refrigerator, and combine it later with thick Greek yogurt. One note: If you don’t like the color of the compote, for the heating will pull some from the fruit, add a spoonful of strawberry preserves as a kind of blusher.
Cheese Enchiladas With Chili Gravy
Here is a recipe adapted from one that the great Tex-Mex scholar and restaurateur Robb Walsh serves at his El Real Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston. You can find similar ones served all over South Texas, often served with rice and refried beans. I think it’s an excellent side dish for a cookout of grilled chicken or pork, but you could also slide a few fried eggs over the top and call it breakfast, or don't and use vegetable stock or water, and call it a vegetarian supper. Make sure to leave some bare tortilla peeking out on each side of the gravy and cheese so it grows crackly and awesome.
Steamed Lobsters
For this recipe, you’re going to have to kill a lobster. Do yourself a favor in this regard. Don’t think about it. Don’t consider the lobster, as David Foster Wallace once did. Don’t take a position, ethically speaking. Just act. It will be easier for all involved. And once you do it, the rewards are deep: the sweet, tender meat, for dipping in melted butter and piling onto your plate with potatoes and corn, and the shells, to sauté and simmer into a luxurious stock.