Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Rhode Island Clam Chowder
Clear clam chowder originated along the southern coast of Rhode Island, where it is a local delicacy much to be preferred over the creamier version of Boston to the north and the (to them) criminally tomato-hued style served in Manhattan to the south and west. Eating it recalls the feeling of pulling into Block Island after a long day at sea, scented with salt spray, and sliding into a clean bunk to sleep.
Diner-Style Burgers
This is the traditional, griddled hamburger of diners and takeaway spots, smashed thin and cooked crisp on its edges. It is best to cook in a heavy, cast-iron skillet slicked with oil or fat, and not on a grill. For meat, ask a butcher for coarse-ground chuck steak, with at least a 20 percent fat content, or grind your own. Keep it in the refrigerator until you are ready to cook, and try not to handle it with your fingers — use an ice-cream scoop or spoon instead. Plop down a few ounces in the pan, smash it with a spatula, salt it, let it go crisp and flip. Add cheese and get your bun toasted. The process moves quickly.
Lamb Meatballs With Spiced Tomato Sauce
Here is a recipe from the Los Angeles chef Suzanne Goin that plays to children as well as to the most sophisticated of palates. It is for crisp lamb meatballs cooked through in a fragrant North African-inspired sauce of tomato sauce zipped up with orange juice and warm spices, then topped with feta and mint. Ms. Goin first served the dish at one of her Los Angeles restaurants, and put it into ‘‘The A.O.C. Cookbook’’ (Knopf, 2013), devoted to that restaurant’s food. A version of the dish was later introduced to the menu of her children’s school. It can be cooked in an hour’s time, not all of it busy, and served with pita or plain pasta, bulgur or couscous.
White Pizza
This is a pizza reimagining of the classic Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe, pasta served with only cheese and black pepper. It came to The Times from the kitchens of Roberta’s restaurant in Brooklyn, a pizzeria and lifestyle collective that occupies a number of buildings and lots in a far corner of the Bushwick neighborhood. Cream slicks the dough, and a mixture of mozzarella and tangy taleggio tops it. A shocking amount of freshly ground black pepper follows that application and, after the pizza is cooked, a shower of grated Parmesan. A drizzle of honey over the top would not be blasphemy.
Roberta’s Pizza Dough
This recipe, adapted from Roberta’s, the pizza and hipster haute-cuisine utopia in Bushwick, Brooklyn, provides a delicate, extraordinarily flavorful dough that will last in the refrigerator for up to a week. It rewards close attention to weight rather than volume in the matter of the ingredients, and asks for a mixture of finely ground Italian pizza flour (designated “00” on the bags and available in some supermarkets, many specialty groceries and always online) and regular all-purpose flour. As ever with breads, rise time will depend on the temperature and humidity of your kitchen and refrigerator. Our Greatest Pizza Recipes
Prime Rib Roast
This is a standard take on a beef rib roast, which is to say it is how my father made the dish when I was younger, and how I have mostly made it since. The clear, rich fat that runs into the pan below the meat is the perfect vehicle for Yorkshire pudding.
Roast Turkey
After a successful Thanksgiving meal, guests invariably wonder why we don’t roast turkeys more often. The following months give ample opportunity to do just that. Here is a herb-roasted holiday bird stuffed with citrus and onion to provide a little zing against the fat.
Banana Pudding
This is an old-school banana pudding down to its bed of Nilla wafers, topped with a quilt of meringue, above a pudding that owes some hold to cornstarch. It is not in any way fancy, though the meringue has its moments. The peaks may weep a little, if you let the dessert sit for a while to draw admiring glances from your guests, but no matter. It's fantastic inside, where it counts.
Stuffed Jalapeños
As a game-day snack, they cannot be beat. Stuffed jalapeños, filled with Cheddar and cream cheese and run through with cilantro, are roasted to sweet intensity in the oven and finished under the broiler or in the dying light of a grill's fire. Consume with beer in advance of a plate of chicken wings, or a nap.
Smoked Salmon Chowder
There is a recipe for lox chowder in Mark Russ Federman’s charming memoir of his family's appetizing business on the Lower East Side of Manhattan: “Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes From the House That Herring Built.” I put a version of it into The Times in 2013. The soup tastes best made with the store's smoked salmon trimmings, which offer a lot of fatty, flavorful bits from up around the fish’s collar (and cheap, too!), but a number of test runs using supermarket smoked salmon offered evidence that the soup is still terrific when made outside the five boroughs of New York City, with a fantastic smokiness tempered by the sweet flavors of potato and leek.
Roy Choi’s Pico de Gallo
This quick, easy recipe comes from Roy Choi, the Los Angeles chef behind the Kogi food trucks. Here, a heaping tablespoon of Chinese chili bean sauce (toban djan) or Korean chili bean paste (gochujang) adds a twist on a traditional pico de gallo. Serve alongside a carne asada taco, or pair with tortilla chips for a truly delicious weeknight meal.
Eleven Madison Park Granola
At the end of every meal at the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, in Manhattan, guests are presented with a small gift: a jar of granola for tomorrow’s breakfast. It is classic Alpine fare, taken straight from the chef Daniel Humm’s childhood in Zurich. The rolled oats are golden with brown sugar and a hint of maple, with salt and a wisp of olive oil for depth. Coconut chips and shelled pistachios provide a hint of whimsy, pumpkin seeds a leathery crunch. Dried sour cherries peek out from here and there, bits of softness to complete the whole. Best of all, the recipe is simple and bulletproof for anyone with a rimmed baking sheet and an oven, at least if you're careful with the kosher salt. Opinions vary greatly over the amount we call for: a whole tablespoon. For some, that is many teaspoons too many. (For many others it is absolutely perfect.) Season to taste.
Sam Sifton’s Vitello Tonnato
This unlikely pairing of veal and tuna is shockingly irresistible, as Sam Sifton discovered in bringing the recipe to The Times in 2011. As with all simple cooking, ingredients are key here. Don’t skimp on the veal, or the tuna, or the mayonnaise. They all mingle together to create something better than the sum of their parts.
Cake-Flour Biscuits
Cake flour, a low-protein flour that is available in supermarkets from Boston to Chicago, north to Seattle and down to Los Angeles, makes a fine biscuit with a delicate, silken texture that does well with syrups and runny fried eggs.
Chicken Adobo With Coconut Milk
It is the national dish of the Philippines, and the subject of intense and delicious debate across its 7,100 islands whether made with chicken, pork or fish. Whichever, the protein is braised in vinegar until pungent and rich, sweet and sour and salty at once, then sometimes crisped at the edges in high heat, and always served with the remaining sauce. Its excellence derives from the balance of its flavors, in the alchemy of the process. Cooking softens the acidity of the vinegar, which then combines with the flavor of the meat to enhance it. Whether consumed in Manila’s heat or on the edge of a New York winter, adobo holds the power to change moods and alter dining habits. It is a difficult dish to cook just once. The recipe that follows derives from one given to The Times in 2011 by Amy Besa, who runs, with her husband, Romy Dorotan, the excellent Purple Yam restaurant in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Sautéed Baby Bok Choy
A perfect side dish for chicken adobo, the national dish of the Philippines, or any other meat dish.
Fish Tacos
Fish tacos, that great meal of the Baja Peninsula, and a taste of summer. They are simple to make, no more complicated in fact than a hamburger or a mess of pancakes, and they are considerably more flavorful. Fried in strips and served onboard warm corn tortillas with a simple salsa, a pinch of fresh cabbage, plenty of lime and a cream sauce you might want to punch up with some chopped chipotle, these fish tacos can turn a cold night into bluebird summer, transporting you from chill into deep humidity and bliss. Why You Should Trust This Recipe Sam Sifton, the founding editor of New York Times Cooking and an avid fisherman, created this version of fish tacos after spending time with a chef who specializes in fish. Sam also took inspiration for this dish from the delicious version at El Siete Mares on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles before it closed in 2020.
Fergus Henderson’s Trotter Gear
Trotter gear? The British chef Fergus Henderson calls it that – an unctuous and shockingly delicious jellied broth made from pigs’ feet, vegetables and Madeira that imparts an intensely flavorful, lip-sticking quality to any stew or soup to which it is added. He gave The Times the recipe in 2009. It is project cooking at its most exciting and slightly ridiculous – a four- or five-hour process that yields 6 or so cups of glory to punch up any recipe for beans that you have on hand, elevate a beef-and-Guinness pie to extraordinary heights, make fantastic an otherwise benign casserole of baked chicken thighs. Friends and family will ask: What’s the secret ingredient? Say nothing until well after all the plates are cleared.
Faux Babbo Ravioli
One of the singular pleasures of eating out in New York City in the early years of the new century was the arrival of a plate of steaming beef-cheek ravioli at Babbo, Mario Batali's flagship restaurant on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. The delicate pasta triangles glistened beneath a velvety sauce made of crushed squab liver livened with capers and anchovies. So I set out to make the things myself, at home. To do so required a few adjustments, of course. The truth is, Italian food demands but does not require the best ingredients and the haughtiest treatment. No cuisine so rooted in poverty ever can. So substitute chicken liver for the squab in the sauce. Substitute brisket for beef cheeks in the filling. As Batali said one day over coffee, you could use anything braised, anything soft.
Cider-Cured Pork Chops
This is a home cook's take on a restaurant special, with shortcuts baked into the recipe. I learned the original at the elbow of Marc Murphy, the chef and an owner of Landmarc in Manhattan, and then adapted it for use in the home kitchen. (He grills. I pan-roast.) Brining gives the pork an incredible flavor, one amplified by the accompanying caramelized onions and apples. A drizzle of mock Bordelaise over the top elevates the whole enterprise: it's a meal for date nights and celebrations.
Caramelized Apples and Onions
A Cheat's Bordelaise Sauce
Classic bordelaise sauce, which can transform shoe leather into strip steak, is made with veal stock, demi-glace and time -- a lot of time. Here, though, you’ll use pan drippings from pork chops, simmering them with a red wine reduction until the two combine into an unctuous, rich sauce that flanks the old methods. Strain the whole thing, stir in a little butter and seasonings, and drizzle it over the pork chops. This takes most of a bottle of pinot noir, so choose the one you won’t mind finishing off in the kitchen yourself, alone with your heat and creativity.
Grilled Hamburgers
We cook a lot of burgers indoors on a fat-slicked iron skillet, and you can do that on a grill as well. (Here’s our burger guide for more information and inspiration.) But sometimes you want a smoky grilled burger. For that, a charcoal grill is best, but a gas grill can do the trick, too. Resist the temptation to press down on the burgers with a spatula, which only spews juice and fat on the fire, causing the flames to flare up and the burger to lose flavor. If you feel your burger is cooking too quickly, use the cooler sides of the grill to rest them. And remember: lowering the top on the grill helps cheese melt.
Japanese-Style Tuna Noodle Salad
Here’s a simple udon salad I picked up from the chef and entrepreneur Bart van Olphen, who elevates canned tuna to the heights of deliciousness. Van Olphen dresses the noodles in what he calls wafu dressing, which translates roughly as Japanese-style: a sweet-salty vinaigrette of soy, sesame oil, mirin and rice vinegar. I add a little sweet miso for texture and taste, and increase the amount of seaweed in the salad as well. Garnish with sesame seeds or furikake, the Japanese seasoning blend, and you have a superior tuna casserole. It is as good served cold as hot.