Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Roy Choi’s Braised Short-Rib Stew
Here is an adaptation of the Korean braised-short-rib stew known as galbijjim, a staple of neighborhood potlucks and church suppers and, in the words of the Los Angeles chef Roy Choi, “that meal from home that every Korean kid says his or her mom does best.” His recipe (well, my version of his recipe, which is his version of his mom’s) is rich and deeply flavored, thickly sauced and pungent with sugar, spice, soy and garlic. It is the sort of meal you could put together on a weekend afternoon and serve for nights to come. It is the best sort of family food.
Chipotle Kewpie
A cross-cultural special sauce that came to The Times in 2015, from the San Antonio chef Quealy Watson, who served it with barbecued goat and duck. It is delicious spread on tortillas for tacos, or on buns for hamburgers, or as a chicken-wing or vegetable dip. Kewpie mayonnaise is a Japanese brand that contains some monosodium glutamate and is flavored with apple-cider and malt vinegars. It has a distinctive taste but can be swapped out in a pinch for whatever mayonnaise you have on hand, including, as always, homemade.
Mission Chinese Food’s Cabbage Salad
Danny Bowien, the chef and an owner of Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco and sometimes New York, wanted to have a Chinese version of Caesar salad on his menu. The dish that he and Angela Dimayuga, his executive chef, came up with is not Chinese in the least. Nor does it owe anything to Caesar save for a tin of anchovies. It is instead a Japanese ode to umami, the mysterious fifth flavor beyond sweet and salty, bitter and sour. Miso, tahini, soy sauce and dried seaweed provide a riot of flavors, and fried kasha and the raw vegetables provide copious crunch. Serve the dish alongside simple grilled chicken or pork, with a bowl of white rice. These don't even have to be all that good. You could serve this recipe alongside a teriyaki-glazed laptop case and receive plaudits for the meal. Don't have one of the ingredients? Omit! ‘‘If you don’t have it, leave it out,’’ Bowien said in an interview. ‘‘It still works.’’
Pear Kuchen
Emily Elsen and Melissa Elsen, sisters who run the Four & Twenty Blackbirds bakery in Brooklyn, hail from South Dakota, where their family ran a small restaurant. Kuchen, a German cake topped with fruit that is a staple of the state’s Thanksgiving tables, is central to their childhood memories of the holiday. Their recipe, topped with pears, “looks a little different than those traditionally found in local South Dakota church and community cookbooks,” Melissa Elsen wrote in an email, “but it tastes like it does in my memory (with the addition of cardamom).” That cardamom, it turns out, is key to the dish’s success, with citrus and savory notes that are as pleasant as they are unexpected.
Clam and Chouriço Dressing
Massachusetts is the birthplace of the iconic Thanksgiving tableau, the home to Norman Rockwell, whose 1943 painting “Freedom From Want” gives Americans its most enduring vision of the holiday table. It is also home to one of the largest Portuguese-American communities in the United States and the source of one of the nation’s most flavorful hyphenated cuisines. Matthew Jennings, the chef and an owner of the forthcoming Townsman restaurant in Boston, pays homage to that cooking with a New Bedford-style Thanksgiving dressing made with local Massachusetts quahog clams and the Portuguese sausage known as chouriço. Fresh chorizo is an acceptable substitution, but canned clams are not.
Caramelized Beets With Orange-Saffron Yogurt
This astonishingly pretty platter is equally delicious, a signature of the British chef Yotam Ottolenghi, who provided the recipe: soft, sweet beets against the tart astringency of the orange-tinctured yogurt, its coolness threaded with saffron. It is also an ace make-ahead dish: You can prepare the yogurt and the beets the night before serving, or in the morning. Look for a good variety of beets if you can, for reasons of color and taste alike: golden ones to offset the red, say, with a mixture of candy canes between the two.
Star Anise Brine
Back in 2012, Sam Sifton spent some time with Jesse Griffiths, a hunter, and the author of who wrote “Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish.” Mr. Griffiths brined the chops he hunted and gathered chops in an anise-flavored brine. “The result,” Sifton wrote at the time, “is like overproof American whiskey touched by a splash of water, its flavor enhanced rather than diluted by the process.” But home cooks should take note that this same brine is not just for feral boar. Use it on the very chops you’d buy at the supermarket. Simply make up the brine the night before (or even the morning of), and soak your chops. Try it in our recipe for smothered pork chops, or in your own recipe for chops, but do try it.
Cilantro-and-Mint Salad
It’s not just cilantro-and-mint salad, of course. There is parsley as well, and also arugula and baby lettuce: a jumble of herbs and soft greens lightly dressed with lime juice and oil. It’s a terrific salad to serve as a foil to spicy food, or to sprinkle on a taco as kind of green-ish version of pico de gallo.
Chris Schlesinger’s Pulled Pork
Mr. Schlesinger is the chef and an owner of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass., which he opened in 1985. He is also the author, with John Willoughby, of six cookbooks that relate somehow to the pleasures of fire. This is an adaptation of his recipe that calls for slowly cooking the pork over coals for almost 14 hours, but that's largely unattended, and your patience will be rewarded.
Vegetable Risotto
Dried mushrooms are reconstituted in hot water. Lettuce and fennel are sweated down in some hot butter in a big, heavy-bottomed pot, then set aside. Onion takes their place, followed by short-grained arborio rice, followed by hot water. Then the cook stirs and stirs, performing the old dance of risotto. (I tried the dish using the stock left by the mushrooms but found it too muddy and dank.) The mushrooms, diced small, go into the pot along with some more water and stirring. Then, at the end, the lettuce and fennel, some Parmesan, a heavy dusting of nutmeg and whatever butter is left. The result is remarkable, particularly in the matter of the lettuce, a mineral thread of flavor above the soft forest floor of the rice.
Warm Kale, Coconut and Tomato Salad
This stylish recipe for a warm kale salad comes from Anna Jones, a British food stylist who worked for Jamie Oliver before striking out on her own. It appears in her 2015 cookbook, “A Modern Way to Eat,” a collection of recipes that anyone who spends as much time as I do snooping around home kitchens can tell you is shaping up as a kind of new-era “Silver Palate Cookbook.” (This salad could be Jones’s chicken Marbella.) It calls for oven-roasted tomatoes slicked with olive oil and fragrant with lime, as well as kale cooked soft in parts and crunchy in others, the pure mineral intensity of the greens bracketed by soy sauce and shavings of coconut. The dressing – ginger, miso, tahini, honey, olive oil, lime juice and chopped hot pepper – is a far thicker mixture than vinaigrette, one that lends itself better to drizzling over the bowl.
Loaded Nachos
Nachos are among the most ubiquitous of America’s pastime foods. At ballgames, carnivals or bowling alleys you can expect a pile of limp tortilla chips, drowned in warm yellow cheese product. But nachos should, and can, be better than this. Try them showered in good shredded cheese and accompanied by a fragrant meat sauce, the fire of jalapeños, the chill and silkiness of sour cream, the tart excellence of a good tomato, with shredded lettuce and thin-sliced radishes. Here is avocado; there, the awesome funk of chopped cilantro. Want some bacon on there as well, or a slash of hot sauce? Go to! Some will add beans. Others black olives, chopped raw onion. Please do. But take care to layer well. Layering is the key to loaded nacho perfection.
Restaurant-Style Pork Chops
A '90s-restaurant-style dish that came to The Times from Matthew Kenney, a chef whose career soared in that decade, these pork chops make for a dinner that is as steady and simple as it is elegant and rich. The chops are broiled beneath a glaze of maple syrup and balsamic vinegar, then served with soft apple slices and a dusting of Clinton-era nostalgia: chopped pecans and candied ginger. (Polenta is the perfect accompaniment -- stir in some goat cheese and rosemary instead of the more typical butter and Parmesan.)
Pan-Roasted Pork Chops With Apple Fritters
The recipe takes a little planning. You want to brine the pork chops for a day or two before you set out to cook. This gives them a juiciness and depth of flavor you are otherwise unlikely to get from a commercially raised hog. (If you have access to a pig raised on acorns and herbs, feel free to cut corners.) Chef Josh Cohen toasts the spices he uses in his brining liquid before incorporating them. This is very much to the good of the chops and is worth the few extra moments it requires.
Soy-Sauce-Pickled Eggs
Yusuke Shimoki runs Engawa, a tiny bar in Japan. To accompany his sakes, he occasionally serves soy-sauce-pickled egg yolks, which he cures in a mixture of mirin-sweetened soy sauce and a strip of the dried kelp known as kombu. A recipe for it appeared in The Times in 2015, after Shimoki visited the United States. You can marinate the yolks for as little as 6 hours and as long as a couple of days, but they are perhaps best after 8 or 9 hours, when the yolks become creamy, with a slightly firm skin.
Poundcake and Strawberries
A hard man I know made this dessert once out of supermarket cake and industrial strawberries, to serve small children who were maybe slightly afraid of him. They gurgled with delight when he slid bowls of it before them: the cake cut into large cubes and served beneath the macerated strawberries, with fresh whipped cream. This formed a bond between them all. In the crowd in which I run, poundcake and strawberries has since become a spring and summer standard, the cake home-made and, when we're lucky, the strawberries gathered from fields nearby. But not always. A supermarket version is a worthy substitute.
Charred Tomatillo Jaew
This is a Mexi-Thai salsa with a powerful scent and incredible flavor and came to The Times from the chef Quealy Watson, who serves it at his San Antonio restaurant, Hot Joy. ‘‘I usually like to make it pretty obnoxious when it comes to the fish sauce,’’ Watson told us. So we add it to taste, a tablespoon or so at a time. If you don’t have access to a grill, you can use your broiler or even a stovetop flame to char the tomatillos and jalapeños. It is excellent as an accompaniment to barbecued or grilled meats and folds into a taco nicely.
Herb Oil
Chicken Tetrazzini
Chicken tetrazzini takes its name from the Italian opera star Luisa Tetrazzini, and was a mainstay of upscale restaurant menus of the early 20th century. Today, though, it is hardly fancy. (And definitely not Italian.) The recipe that follows is built on the frame of what might be called a Mississippi-style tetrazzini, made with canned tomatoes and chiles and processed cheese. The chef Brad McDonald, who grew up in Yazoo City, at the top of the Delta, used to cook a bespoke version for his tasting menu at the Lockhart, a restaurant in London, using washed-rind Irish cheese and a mixture of roasted green bell peppers and jalapeños to flavor his shredded chicken, along with porcini mushrooms and guajillo chiles. I made a few changes of my own, and discovered a weeknight casserole of great distinction.
Pork Chops in Pipian
This is a recipe built on my memory of a dish I ate in a sticky-tabled Mexican restaurant in pregentrification Park Slope, Brooklyn: fried pork chops served over a thick, spicy sauce of seeds and nuts and chiles — what the cookbooks and histories of Mexican food call pipian, for the pepitas, or pumpkin seeds, used in its creation. It is hardly authentic, but it is simple to make and hugely delicious. Make sure to get a good hard sear on the pork chops before nestling them into the sauce, then serve with tortillas.
Mapo Ragù
This is my simple, everyday take on a dish developed at Momofuku Ssam Bar in Manhattan many years ago by the chefs David Chang and Tien Ho and their band of collaborators. It is almost literally a mashup: a meal that is kind of Korean, kind of Chinese, kind of Italian. If you don’t like spicy food, use miso instead of the gochujang and don’t use Sichuan peppercorns, which add a numbing, tingly pop to the fire. (If you like really spicy food, add dried chiles or hot pepper flakes to the recipe at the point you add the gochujang.) And if you want to make it even more luxe than it is already, follow the lead of Chang’s crew and stir 6 ounces of silken tofu into the sauce at the end.
Meera Sodha’s Chicken Curry
This simple curry serves as a fine introduction to the Indian home cooking of Meera Sodha, a British cookbook author whose “Made in India: Recipes From an Indian Family Kitchen” was released in 2015. The recipe for this curry, her "ultimate comfort food,'' derives from the one her Indian-born mother cooked for Sodha when she was growing up in Lincolnshire and for which she pined for during her college years in London. It provides a thick, gingery, garlic-flecked tomato sauce with deep notes of cinnamon and cumin, and a low flame of chile heat, surrounding small chunks of skinless chicken thigh, with slivered almonds scattered over the top at the end.
Serious Turkey Stock
You won’t regret having this turkey stock at hand, for dressings, stuffings, soups and more during the holiday season. A stint in a 400-degree oven draws out flavor from the turkey parts, and a long simmer concentrates them. Plan ahead: Make it when you have time, as the temperature starts to drop, and keep it in the freezer.
Hollandaise Sauce
For the longest time I made a classic French hollandaise sauce with two or three egg yolks, until I tasted what happens when you use seven, in keeping with the teachings of the chefs David McMillan and Fred Morin, of the restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal. Their advice carries over to the use of a blender instead of a double boiler to make the sauce. It’s a terrific sauce for asparagus, for broccoli, for steaks, for scallops, for eggs Benedict or for my homage to a Joe Beef dish: scallops with hollandaise sauce and shredded duck.