Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Chorizo Dressing With Leeks
The better the bread you use here (a thick-crusted country loaf, sliced and toasted quite dry in the oven works well), the better the end result. It acts as a kind of canvas for the sweetness of the leeks and the dry, fragrant heat of the chorizo. You can make it well in advance of serving it alongside turkey, chicken or pork, at least as long as you leave time to reheat it in the oven, covered, with a few splashes of stock to moisten it. Just pull off the foil for the last few minutes to allow the top to crisp.
Butternut Squash, Pecans and Currants
This recipe, from the restaurant Balaboosta in New York, came to The Times in 2010 as part of a roundup of restaurant Thanksgiving dinners, but it can be served any time, even as a weeknight main alongside a hearty salad or starch. The currants and candied pecans play off the butternut squash’s sweetness, while a vinaigrette stops it all from being too cloying. It’s a delightful vegetarian main for when you want the essence of the restaurant meal, without too much work.
Henrietta’s Hash Browns
The secret to perfect hash browns, the chef Peter Davis of Henrietta's Table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told The Times in 2010, is to take a few moments at night to clarify the butter you will use to make the dish in the morning, removing the milk solids that would otherwise burn as you cook. As a corollary, something to do as the butter melts and you strain out the solids, boil off some potatoes, then let them dry in the refrigerator over night. Grate them in the morning, and cook in the clarified butter. When you've got a good crust going, place a plate over the pan, put your hand on it and quickly invert the whole. Then slide the new bottom, until recently the unfinished top, back into the pan to continue cooking. Serve with eggs, naturally.
Smoked Bluefish Pâté
Bluefish is not a famous table fish; it is inexpensive and widely available, but you don’t see it in restaurants often, even in this ravaged-ocean, sell-anything era. (Some states have issued advisories limiting its consumption, citing high levels of PCBs in the meat.) The knock on it is it’s oily, it’s “fishy.” Its dark, compact meat is for cats, not fine, upstanding people like us. How untrue — and demonstrably so, as the following recipe will show! A fresh-caught bluefish of moderate weight, quickly cleaned and kept on ice, is as fine an eating fish as American waters produce. Alan Davidson, the British seafood don, says much the same in his indispensable “North Atlantic Seafood,” albeit in a different accent: “It does not keep very well,” reads Davidson’s entry for Pomatomus saltatrix, “but, if bought and cooked with dispatch, offers firm flesh of an excellent taste.” Bluefish, in short, is an excellent protein. Some words about what you’re dealing with: dense meat with an off-white, almost gray hue, the pork shoulder of seafood. Bluefish lends itself to tough treatment: smoking, for instance, or slow-poaching in oil.
Crown Roast of Pork
Craig Claiborne declared this dish to be wholly American back in 1976, saying that if there were a European antecedent for a crown roast, ‘‘we have yet to discover it.’’ It is a stunning centerpiece for a holiday meal, the rare roast you will want to carve at the table and not in the kitchen. You can serve a dressing inside the finished roast, but cook it separately. As with stuffing a turkey, the process only slows and complicates the cooking process.
Roast Goose
Here is a bird that throws off a lot of beautiful fat in the oven. You will use some of it to cook the potatoes that go in the roasting pan for the final hour of cooking, but you will have taken off quite a bit before that as well. You can save that goose fat, covered, in the refrigerator for a few weeks, until the next time you want incredible roast potatoes. The British serve roast goose with a sauce of onions sauteed in goose fat, then stewed in milk and cream and thickened with old bread. But I prefer something tart rather than rich — a cranberry relish, for instance, sweetened but not overly so.
Mahony’s Beef Po’ Boys
Benjamin Wicks, proprietor of Mahony’s Po-Boy Shop on Magazine Street in New Orleans, which opened in the summer of 2008, is a raver and ranter with the heart of an old-timer. “Why don’t people care about making great po’ boys?” he asked The Times, rhetorically, a year later. And then he gave us a terrific recipe that will take a little time to pull off, but results in a beef Po' Boy sandwich of uncommon excellence. Think of it as project food for a festive weekend lunch, and your guests will thank you. Add cheese and French fries for added pow.
Roasted Grapefruit
In 2010, Sam Sifton, who was then The New York Times restaurant critic, made a list of the 15 best things he ate in New York City that year. For breakfast, he chose a dish from Pulino’s in SoHo, which is now closed. This quick-cooked grapefruit is not so much a dish as a magic trick, the fruit covered with a caramel of muscovado sugar and mint that transforms it into ambrosia.
Sautéed Scallops
Sea scallops and bay scallops differ in size and sweetness. They also cook a little differently. I love a good hard sear on a sea scallop, a little crust and a splash of wine in the butter at the end to provide a silky acidity against the sweet of the meat. For the tiny, sweet bay scallop, though, I prefer a gentle butter bath. Whichever you cook, be very careful not to overcook. Indeed, there is almost no such thing as an undercooked scallop.
Radish Sandwiches With Butter and Salt
Steven Satterfield, the chef at Miller Union in Atlanta, included this very French picnic recipe in his cookbook, "Root to Leaf." As he points out, the key is to use a lot of butter, a lot of radishes and plenty of salt. The recipe yields four sturdy desk- or school-lunch sandwiches, or you can divide them further, into a dozen little bites for hors d’oeuvres.
New England Roast Turkey
This adaptation of an old Yankee Magazine recipe for classic New England roast turkey is solid and unfancy, the sort that has adorned tables from Portsmouth north for generations. Old-line New Englanders may be tempted to soak an old cotton button-down dress shirt in butter and drape it over the bird for the first two hours. But this is not necessary.
Creamy Polenta With Mushrooms
Who knows who first mixed soy sauce and butter and discovered the pleasures the combination provides. Try the mixture on warm white rice, a steaming pile of greens or an old sneaker – regardless, the taste is a sublime velvet of sweet and salty, along with a kind of pop we call umami, a fifth taste beyond sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Soy butter provides warmth and luxury, elegance without pomp. For this recipe, we’ve adapted a dish that was on the menu at the chef Chris Jaeckle’s All’onda, in Manhattan: a mixture of soy and butter with mushroom stock to pour over polenta and sautéed mushrooms. The result is a dinner of comfort and joy.
Clam Fritters
This is a recipe for classic New England clam fritters prepared as conch fritters are in the Bahamas, with a low zip of jalapeno heat and a high one of lime juice. I serve them with my version of the ubiquitous mayo-ketchup sauce of the Lucayan archipelago. These fritters are terrific when prepared with freshly shucked clams, but if you don’t want to open clams by hand, they are still excellent with lightly steamed ones. A deep cast-iron skillet placed over a gas grill allows you to fry the fritters outdoors if you like, reducing kitchen mess. Or if you don’t wish to fry, you can treat the batter as if it were for pancakes. The flavor abides, if not the full crispiness.
Trini-Chinese Chicken
Chinese-style chicken is a dish you can find all over Trinidad and within the diaspora that has followed the nation’s emergence from British rule. The skin is fried into a lacquered mahogany. The meat beneath it tastes of five-spice, ginger and soy and is generally accompanied by a hum of oyster sauce mixed with the zing of the pickled Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce that is seemingly omnipresent on the island’s tables.
Fancy Meatloaf
“I was invited to cook dinner for Nora Ephron.” As was wont to happen at one point in New York. Back in 2009, Sam Sifton was invited to a potluck in which “guests were meant to bring food inspired by Ephron’s career or by the woman herself.” He drew meatloaf, a dish she was known for. Here, in this recipe adapted from Gourmet, he pairs beef, veal, pancetta and Parmesan. The end result, he described, as “luxurious.” And what did Ms. Ephron think? She called it “remarkable.”
Tamales Verdes
These chicken tamales, drenched in tomatillo salsa, are a staple of the Christmas tamale season of Argelia Vergara, a Staten Island resident who makes them to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The recipe is labor-intensive, so enlist helpers in the kitchen to wrap the tamales in corn husks. The result is well worth the effort.
Fatty ’Cue Spareribs
Costa Rican Coleslaw
Here is a version of a recipe I learned from Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, in their indispensable guide to beachfront cooking, ‘‘Let the Flames Begin.’’ It has been central in my summer cooking repertory for more than a decade. Opinions may vary on the idea of hearts of palm and avocado in a coleslaw, but only until this dish is eaten.
Sunday Beans
This recipe is authentic to the Caribbean larder: beans, garlic, cumin, citrus and meat, bubbling together on the stove. Of course, rice and beans are served across Latin America, in different variations, with different beans, for different reasons. Adding a further delight to the plate would not be in error: some fried pork chops, say, or a dish of fast and flavorful roast chicken, dusted liberally with cumin and served beneath a shower of lime juice, fresh chopped cilantro and garlic.
Smoky Braised Kale With Tomato
This is a hack of a preparation the chef Travis Lett used at his restaurant Gjelina in Venice, Calif., as a pairing for a half-roasted chicken. With its deeply caramelized base of tomato paste and smoked paprika, the kale melts into velvety excellence that can stand on its own with a pile of rice or a baked potato. But it really shines brightly as a supporting player in a feast of poultry, pork or beef. Do two onions seem too many for you? Use one. This is a recipe really to make your own.
Fluke in Lemon Brodetto With Scallops and Squash
“The Babbo Cookbook,” by Mario Batali, was published in 2002. Within two years I had made every recipe in it at least once, and by 2005 or so I was adapting the dishes to the ingredients I found at the market, instead of the other way around. Take the restaurant’s black bass served in a lemony capon stock with Hubbard squash and delicate shell-on bay scallops from Taylor Shellfish Farms, in Washington State. There is no need to make the dish with black bass, Hubbard squash or Taylor bay scallops, much less capon broth. I use use fluke but any firm-fleshed white fish will do. Hubbard squash is a dream, but butternut squash works beautifully in its stead. As does chicken stock instead of the capon. And swapping out the farmed bay scallops for the deeper salinity of wild ones, or for small ocean scallops, is no crime. The most important thing is to locate thin-skinned lemons for the brodetto, since the thick ones impart a bitterness to the sauce that is not magical. If all you have is thick-skinned lemons, take a moment to cut out the white pith beneath the skin, which is the bitter culprit.
BBQ Porkette With Fried Potatoes and Scallion Hash
Porkette is shoulder meat injected with brine, inserted into netting and "smoked" with burned-hickory mist. It is an industrial food product (and so's your hanger steak, pal), but it's a more than decent one. And at $4.99 a pound, dinner for four costs less than $20. But it also makes an excellent breakfast. At the Hope & Anchor restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Dianna Munz served a barbecued ham and scallion hash with two fried eggs, but sometimes hash is better consumed at home. Made with Porkette, Munz's dish takes on a slightly gruffer flavor that is matched perfectly by the sweet of the barbecue sauce and the thick run of an easy-cooked egg yolk. Members of the smart set will cut their potatoes thin the night before. This makes the final preparation of the dish on a weekend morning a snap. Just add hot coffee.
Shrimp and Grits With Roasted Tomato, Fennel and Sausage
Game Day Nachos
Here is a heavily-loaded platter of shredded pork inflected with the flavors of cumin, coriander and lime, layered with tortilla chips and sliced radishes, flecks of scallion and leaves of cilantro, drifts of shredded cheddar and lime-scented sour cream, to be accompanied by hot sauce, napkins and beer. It is football-watching food, but doubles nicely as dinner for teens, young adults, anyone interested in the inhaling of the delicious. The pork is an all-day affair, requiring five to seven hours of roasting in a low oven so that the meat achieves a collapsing sweetness beneath a burnished crust. But the rest of the recipe is easy work indeed: bowls of the condiments may be combined on a platter with the shredded meat and diced skin in any manner you deem appetizing.