Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Grilled Bluefish With Chourico And Clams
Turkey Cutlets Marsala
Here is a recipe adapted from one written by Elizabeth David, the erudite British cookbook writer who died in 1992. Jill Norman beautifully reanimated it in her 2010 book “At Elizabeth David’s Table” and we took it along ever so slightly in the name of ease: lightly browned cutlets in a sauce of Marsala wine. The cooking is gentle, and takes little time. It pairs nicely with a mushroom risotto or a pile of rice.
Sautéed Scallops With Shredded Duck and Hollandaise Sauce
This is a hack of an old recipe from David McMillan and Fred Morin of the restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal, who match sea scallops with pulled pork and hollandaise sauce for a delicious dish. For reasons of habit, taste or happenstance, I started making it with duck instead. It seems like a lot of work — two species, a fancy sauce — but a lot of the cooking is unattended, and the sauce, you’ll see, is quite easy to pull off, at least the second time you try. The resulting meal is excessive and fantastic. It begs for a watercress salad with a bright, acidic dressing.
Pizza With Shrimp, Bacon and Artichoke Hearts
Homemade pizza is meant to be imperfect, Sam Sifton argued in 2009, in bringing this recipe to The Times. “Your pizza may look a little funny,” he wrote. “It may be ovoid, crackly in parts. It may have soft spots. But it will still be pizza, and it will still be delicious, and in these parlous times, it is cheap to boot.” But, still, it’s worth making — and topping as you please. Do as Chris Schlesinger, formerly of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass., does, and add shrimp and artichoke hearts to a flatbread. This recipe takes that idea one step further, studding the flatbreads with Asiago cheese for richness and depth. It may not be a perfect pie, but who needs perfection when you have deliciousness?
A Plain Pizza Pie
Don't ever listen to the deadbeats who tell you that it’s hard to cook pizza, that it can’t be done at home. They're wrong. Your pizza may look a little funny. It may be ovoid, crackly in parts. It may have soft spots. But it will still be pizza, and it will still be delicious, and it is cheap to boot. “You are cooking a flatbread,” the great home-cook pizzaiola Jeffrey Steingarten told me in 2009. “You are cooking a flatbread on a rock, part of a continuum that goes back thousands and thousands of years.”
Sourdough Pizza Dough
This is a varsity-level take on the classic pizza dough recipe from Roberta’s in Brooklyn, using sourdough starter to help the dough rise — and give it great taste. If you feed your starter regularly, you can use it in this recipe right out of the crock in which you store it. But if not, give the starter a feed of flour and water a few hours before you mix up the dough. (If you need to start a starter, add a week or so to the process.) “It’s a little more complicated” than a regular dough, said Anthony Falco, who runs the pizza operations at Roberta’s, “but, oh boy, the end result is worth it.”
Choucroute 'Porkette'
Big Country Salad
Here is a salad to evoke late-night meals at the restaurant Odeon, in downtown Manhattan, in the era of “Bright Lights, Big City.” There the country salad is somewhat smaller, and serves as a fine introduction to a plate of steak frites. But made larger, and piled high on a plate, it makes for a delicious dinner best accompanied by a glass of slightly chilled red wine. Need more protein? Put an egg on it!
Arugula Salad With Lime Vinaigrette
This tart, refreshing salad was originally proposed as a pairing for asado negro, a Venezuelan holiday roast beef that is simmered in dark caramel. However, go ahead and pair this with any hearty main course and you’ll enjoy a wonderfully balanced meal.
Smothered Shrimp in Crab-Meat Gravy
Alexander Smalls, the chef and an owner of two Harlem restaurants, the Cecil and Minton's, serves this dish over grits as an appetizer at Christmas, but it’s hearty enough for a meal at almost any time of year. It is a recipe rooted in the culinary traditions of the South Carolina coast and benefits mightily from the use of fresh shrimp and crab.
Hete Bliksem
Phillip Kirschen-Clark, the chef at Vandaag, brings a firm understanding of the intersection between sweet and savory to this side dish to lunchtime sandwiches and evening hen. “Hot lightning” is how the words translate from the Dutch: little fried fingerling potatoes combined with smoked bacon and a tiny dice of tart apples, all of it glossed in stroop, a velvety syrup made of sugar, butter, cream and molasses, then flavored with juniper, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon.
St. Lucia Buns
These saffron-hued sweet buns, called Lussebullar, are a staple of the Swedish tradition of St. Lucia's Day, a winter-solstice celebration. The recipe is from Jennifer Jansch, whose children serve their parents the buns every Dec. 13, when the holiday is observed.
Creamed-Mushroom Bruschetta With Caramelized Onions
Start by making the caramelized onions. These take a great deal of time. The onions here, barely slicked with neutral oil, surrounded by sweet wine, can take up to 30 minutes to achieve the excellence you are looking for. You stir and stir and stir.
Jalapeño Brown Butter
Mixing diced jalapeños into a classic brown butter makes for a delightfully bright accompaniment for steamed clams or lobster. The mixture can be used on corn bread to great effect as well. You can easily omit the peppers if you don’t like spice. Brown butter on its own is pretty great.
Chicken-Liver Pâté
You could serve this chicken pâté as an appetizer at a dinner party, or simply as a light (really!) supper or a sandwich spread. It takes less than a half-hour to prepare, and it will firm up in the refrigerator in a few hours. Simply pack the mixture into a bowl or glass jar, cover and refrigerate.
Stewed Chestnuts With Ricotta
Unstrung Harp
Jeffrey Tascarella, the general manager at the NoMad restaurant in the Manhattan hotel of the same name, used to serve this drink at his Midtown restaurant Tenpenny, to unbelievable effect. Named for Edward Gorey's 1953 novel, it combines dark rum with ginger syrup, lime and prosecco to deliver a cocktail that punches well above its weight in both flavor and potency. Back in 2011, some among us at The Times called it the drink of the summer.
Greenport Shuffle
This recipe is a modification of that great Caribbean libation the Painkiller, born at the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. The Painkiller features dark rum over shaved ice, frothed with orange and pineapple juice along with some sweetened coconut cream, topped with a shaving of nutmeg. It is rich stuff, a little complicated, a bit much for a long Saturday night of drinking under sea grape and palms. This version whittles down the ingredients for reasons of both thrift and flavor, and can be counted a minimalist take on the classic. It was developed on the east end of Long Island by Capt. David Berson of Glory, and is called the Greenport Shuffle, for its eventual effect on one’s gait.
Crab Newburg à la Cross Creek
Crab Newburg was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s most celebrated dish, the one on which the Florida author of "The Yearling" claimed laurels as a cook. It is a version of the famous 19th-century lobster recipe popularized at Delmonico’s in New York. Making it is an easy business, as much an assemblage as a recipe. You heat crabmeat in an enormous amount of butter, thicken it slightly with flour, thicken it a great deal with cream and eggs and cut the fat (slightly) with spices and booze. The resulting pinkish stew ought to be served with toast points or in a puff-pastry shell, perhaps with rice and absolutely with a green salad with a tart, lemony vinaigrette. Rawlings admits that you might use less cream, or less butter or fewer eggs. “The brandy may be omitted,” she cautions, “but never the sherry.” You’ll want to set everything up well before dinner so that you can work quickly and serve the dish directly from the pan.
Chickpeas in Star Anise and Date Masala
This recipe, adapted from Meeru Dhalwala of Vij’s Restaurant, in Vancouver, British Columbia, came to The Times in 2010, part of a Sam Sifton piece about vegetarian meals for meat-lovers. The dish, he writes, is a “simple chickpea curry that Dhalwala cooks with star anise and chopped dates, which combine into an autumnal darkness that lingers on the tongue.” Coming together quickly, it’s a great choice for a weeknight meal or a lazy winter weekend.
Pepper-and-Sausage Cornbread Dressing
This dressing combines corn bread, turkey broth, three kinds of pepper and a healthy scattering of fiery sausage for a Thanksgiving dish that is crunchy on top, moist within and alive with flavor. The copious use of that turkey broth, or a good chicken broth, is crucial here; also necessary is an understanding that the cooking should last long enough to crisp the exterior without burning it, while not going on so long as to dry out the dish. When in doubt, add a splash more broth. And know that this dish works well for any gluten-avoiders at your table; the related cornbread recipe does not use wheat flour.
Cauliflower Manchurian
This vegetarian version of chicken Manchurian was a menu highlight at Devi, Hemant Mathur and Suvir Saran's excellent Indian restaurant in Manhattan, which closed in 2007. The deep-fried florets were coated there in a mysterious and spicy red sauce that contained a secret ingredient: ketchup, a fact I learned from my colleague Mark Bittman. Caramelized in a wide pan and made fiery with cayenne, it cloaks the cauliflower in a blanket of deep, pungent flavor. Do not recoil at the thought of deep-frying the florets! Using a Dutch oven will reduce the amount of spatter, and a full head of cauliflower can be fried in as little as two batches.
Lobster Butter
This is a Yankee take on the classic French recipe for beurre de homard, which incorporates cooked lobster meat into a compound butter. It is thriftier, using the shells to bring flavor instead of the lobster meat, but is no less delicious for that. The process is akin to making a lobster stock, with butter in place of water. Use the lobster butter as a melted dip for shrimp or yet more lobster, or as a topping for sautéed scallops or fish.
Steamed Corn With Clams and Bacon
"The dish tastes exactly of August on a plate," Sam Sifton wrote in 2013 when bringing the recipe to The Times. "the saltiness of the clams amplifying what Pablo Neruda called the sweet, 'virginal' flavor of the corn." Adapted from ‘‘Seamus Mullen’s Hero Food," this fast summer recipe pairs sweet corn with briny clams and smoky bacon for a well-rounded, light dish.