Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Palm Sugar Pecan Pie
The chef Quealy Watson brought a version of this recipe to The Times in 2015. It is for a classic South Texas pecan pie, at least if you collect the nuts from a San Antonio driveway and the rest of the ingredients from the local Vietnamese market. Palm sugar gives the pie a slightly rounder and more earthy flavor than you’d get from white or even brown sugar.
Fesenjan
This rich, tangy Iranian chicken stew from Azita Houshiar is a highlight of the Persian holiday Shab-e Yalda, a winter-solstice tradition that predates Islam by thousands of years. The chicken is drenched in pomegranate molasses and cooked with a copious amount of ground walnuts, which results in a gravy that is sweet, tart and thick with flavor.
Parmesan-Crusted Rack of Lamb
Impressive in size, color and flavor, this take on an old Escoffier recipe brings salt-crunchiness to the exterior of sweet, roasted lamb. Served with Macaroni Milanaise, it makes for a show-off, dinner-party meal of little compare. (Tell no one how easy it is to pull off.)
Italianate Sunday-Salad Dressing
All vinaigrettes are based on a simple formula that uses roughly three parts oil to one part acid, a rule that achieves balance between the vivid sparkle of vinegar or lemon juice and the slick heaviness of olive oil. You can adjust for taste from there, adding a splash of oil if the dressing tastes too acidic, or a splash of acid if it’s overwhelmed.
Crab With Crisp Bitter Greens
This outstanding dinner salad came to The Times via the British chef and restaurateur April Bloomfield, whose John Dory Oyster Bar in New York sometimes serves a slightly spicy crab salad with arugula and the tender fall chicory known as puntarelle. I swapped out those greens for a mix of endive and chicory, and the Holland chili pepper she uses at the restaurant for a more accessible jalapeño pepper. The result accentuates the sweetness of the crab, and features a fiery slickness beneath it.
Jimmy Bradley’s Salad With Gruyère
“I’m a big proponent of what you might call stoner food,” the chef and restaurateur Jimmy Bradley told me in 2003, when he gave me this recipe for what amounts to fondue topped with a potato salad topped with a green one. “I think there should always be something on the menu at my restaurants, where someone can come in and see it and say, ‘Yeah, man, I want some of that right now, and then we’ll figure out the rest of the meal.” Well, yeah, man: a pool of warm Gruyère, topped with batons of bacon, wedges of potato, a bitter salad of greens, the cold against the warm, the salty against the faintly sweet and acidic? Pair that with a slightly chilled red wine and someone special and you can figure out the rest later.
Slightly Creamier Sunday-Salad Dressing
The best vinaigrettes are emulsified — that is, they are smooth and at least temporarily stable, the disparate ingredients suspended among one another. (The addition to your dressing of already emulsified mixtures — maybe mustard or a dollop of mayonnaise — can help in this regard.) Whatever the dressing, I serve the resulting meal with a baguette and some salted butter. And as long as we’re sharing, often a roast chicken too. Swiping bread through a small puddle of melted chicken fat and salad dressing, after all, is one of life’s great pleasures.
Butternut-Squash Bisque
Baked Potatoes With Crab, Jalapeño and Mint
Mark Ladner, when he was the chef at Del Posto in New York, used to serve a dish of pasta with crab, jalapeño and mint. Here the canvas is potato flesh instead, along with sour cream and butter and cheese. Pair with steak for an elegant take on the classic surf-and-turf dinner, or serve it on its own, with a green salad and a sharp white wine.
Torrisi Turkey
The roast turkey breast that Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone serve for lunch at their restaurant Parm in New York City is about the moistest, most luxuriously flavorful turkey available on the planet: rich and buttery, deep with rich turkey taste. They wrap a brined breast in plastic wrap and aluminum foil and place it in an intensely humid low-temperature oven that leaves the meat dense with moisture, heavy with flavor. Then they paint a glaze of honey and roasted garlic on the meat and place it in a hot, dry oven to create a crust. The result is turkey that tastes emphatically of turkey. And you can do it at home.
Yotam Ottolenghi’s Baba Ghanouj, Deconstructed
For this summery recipe, eggplant is charred on the stove – or, if the weather cooperates, on a grill – and fanned out onto a plate. Drape over it some olive oil and tahini, a deeply flavored tomato mixture and a sprinkle of good salt.
Chicken Livers Toscani
Rabbit Legs with Peas, Collards and Country Ham
Off-Oven Roast Beef
Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk
The British chef and cooking star Jamie Oliver once called this recipe, which is based on a classic Italian one for pork in milk, “a slightly odd but really fantastic combination that must be tried.” Years later he told me that that characterization made him laugh. “I was hardly upselling its virtues,” he said. The dish’s merits are, in fact, legion. You sear a whole chicken in butter and a little oil, then dump out most of the fat and add cinnamon and garlic to the pot, along with a ton of lemon peel, sage leaves and a few cups of milk, then slide it into a hot oven to create one of the great dinners of all time. The milk breaks apart in the acidity and heat to become a ropy and fascinating sauce, and the garlic goes soft and sweet within it, its fragrance filigreed with the cinnamon and sage. The lemon meanwhile brightens all around it, and there is even a little bit of crispness to the skin, a textural miracle. It is the sort of meal you might cook once a month for a good long while and reminisce about for years.
Fastest Roast Turkey
Here is a turkey for when time and oven space are at a premium. The bird is butchered before cooking, its backbone removed (a technique called spatchcocking) and its legs separated, increasing the amount of surface area exposed to the oven's heat and decreasing the amount of cooking time dramatically. The overall height of the turkey also comes down, so two turkeys may fit in the oven, or one turkey and a baking pan filled with dressing. As with a whole bird, you should tent the meat with foil when it has finished cooking, and allow it to rest for at least 30 minutes before serving.
Tempura-Fried Green Beans With Mustard Dipping Sauce
The recipe for these irresistible green beans came to The Times from Jimmy Bradley, the chef and owner of the Red Cat in Manhattan. He fries green beans in a tempura batter, then serves them — hot, crunchy, with plenty of salt — aside a sweet-and-spicy mustard sauce. You’ll find them on the bar, eaten as meals in themselves, and at most tables running back through the room as appetizers or side dishes. They are Buffalo chicken wings for people with good art on the wall and a capacity for avoiding, as A.J. Liebling wrote, the fatal trap of abstinence. You simply can’t eat just one.
Pasta Dough for Ravioli
Screaming Eagle Cheese-Steak Sub
Every college has one: some kind of nasty-fantastic amalgam of cheese and meat and grease and bread and salt and melting awesomeness. From freshman year to graduation, you can eat these things twice a week and it will hurt you, but not badly — that is the magic of youth and appetite and America combined. After that, such a sandwich must be counted a special treat, and adapted to adult use. For this cheese steak sandwich, a version of the Screaming Eagle served in the dining halls of Boston College, the Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, Mass., I made two essential changes: I used Cheddar in place of the usual white American the college uses; and I replaced the thin-shaved steak that is a hallmark of cheese steaks the world over with skirt steak. Doing so recalled Corinthians. When you are a child, American cheese and shaved steak can count as ambrosia. As an adult, it's kind of nasty. But skirt steak? Melting Cheddar? That is actually ambrosial. The fiery mayonnaise does the rest.
Bobby Short’s Carlyle Chicken Hash
This recipe takes a nursery-food staple of the sort that both high American WASPs and low British aristocrats popularized in the middle of the last century and outfits it with culinary pearls and diamonds: foie gras and truffles. (We’ll cheat and use foie gras mousse and a dash of fake truffle oil.) It must have pleased the man whose name sits above it on the menu at the Café Carlyle: Bobby Short, the elegant saloon singer and pianist who did more than 35 years in the room. You can imagine him eating a plate of it, wiping his lips carefully with a starched and heavy napkin, then heading off into the dark night to work. As the lyric tells us, it’s a make-believe ballroom, let’s dance.
Whole Wheat Spaghetti With Spicy Chickpeas, Rosemary and Bonito Flakes
Orange Beef
This recipe for takeout-style orange beef is a variation on one the Brooklyn chef Dale Talde included in his new cookbook, "Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes From the Philippines to Brooklyn," with a slightly more intensely flavored orange-flavored sauce. Mr. Talde's key insight is protected, however: Use very good steak, and cook it fast, so that below the lovely crust of its egg-white-and-cornstarch batter, the meat remains rare and luscious. Serve with steamed broccoli and white rice. And make it a few times. What appears difficult the first time through — the coating of the beef, the making of the sauce, the stir-frying of the aromatics, the stir-frying of the beef — is in fact fast and easy work, and much, much better than takeout.
Vichy Carrots
Vichy carrots are a dish in which the vegetables are cooked through in water with a little sugar on them to create a glaze. Historically, the excellence of this preparation derived from the quality of the spring water in Vichy, a resort town in central France. Jody Williams, the chef at Buvette in Greenwich Village, from whom this recipe is adapted, adds sherry vinegar to the water, along with, eventually, some honey, shallots and a pinch or two of fresh thyme. Who knows if the Vichyssoise would recognize the result. But served hot, room temperature or cold, they are some fantastic carrots.
Pork Ragù al Maialino
This is true restaurant cooking for the home: a recipe born of a professional kitchen’s need to use up leftovers, then cheated upon to strike away extravagances like suckling pigs, fresh-made pasta and veal stock. A common and inexpensive pork shoulder and a few extra pats of butter will do the trick nicely.