Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
How to Make Chili
Protein, heat, liquid: It doesn’t take much to make a good chili, but quality is key. Let Sam Sifton walk you through.
Sautéed Kale
This is a technique that elevates basic sauteed greens into something even more savory and tender.
Ludo Lefebvre’s Roasted-Carrot Salad
At Petit Trois, the tiny restaurant in Los Angeles where the chef Ludo Lefebvre serves bistro classics to the film industry and food-obsessed, this salad serves as an appetizer. But it works just as well spread across a platter as a light dinner or lunch, and pairs well with a fresh baguette and a glass of chilled red wine. Toasting the cumin for the carrots and the crème fraîche is very important, but don’t worry if you can’t find all the herbs for the garnish. Just one or two will bring pleasure.
Grilled Broccoli With Soy Sauce, Maple Syrup and Balsamic Vinegar
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. This is good one to have in your back pocket when you’re cooking burgers and dogs on the grill; it’s a no-recipe version of a dish that I first learned of from the Brooklyn restaurateur Joe Carroll. Toss broccoli florets in equal parts soy sauce and balsamic vinegar, a generous dash of maple syrup and a splash of neutral oil, then grill (or broil) until they’re soft and crunchy. Serve them under a scattering of red-pepper flakes and sesame seeds, or use furikake, a Japanese seasoning blend that contains, in addition to sesame, chopped seaweed, sugar, salt and, occasionally, monosodium glutamate. Never mind hot dogs or anything else, actually. I could go for that broccoli on white rice and call it dinner, full stop. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Chicken With Caramelized Onions and Croutons
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. This idea came to me from the great New York Times food reporter Julia Moskin. Scatter a bunch of sliced onions and shallots across the oiled bottom of a large pan, then put a bunch of chicken thighs on top, skin-side up. Season the thighs with salt and pepper, then slide the pan into a 425-degree oven to roast until the chicken is crisp on top and cooked through, about 35 minutes. Shake the pan every so often, and add wine or stock if the onions are browning too fast. Meanwhile, make some croutons from good, chewy olive-oil-tossed bread, toasting them until golden in a pan or in the oven alongside the chicken. They can be cut or torn up — no matter. Put the croutons on a warm platter, dump the contents of the roasting pan over the top and arrange the chicken on top of that, mixed with bitter greens. Boy howdy. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Italian Subs With Sausage and Peppers
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. For these subs, you'll start with the onions, slicing two big sweet ones and setting them in a hot pan with a couple of gurgles of olive oil. Season with salt, black pepper and a shake of red-pepper flakes, then cook over medium heat, stirring and tossing occasionally so that they go golden and soft. This’ll take a while. Add a couple of sliced bell peppers to the pan, and continue cooking, still stirring and tossing, until they begin to wilt. Set the vegetables aside. About halfway through, set some sweet Italian sausages in another hot, oil-slicked pan, and cook them through until crisp and brown on the exterior, turning often. Split your sub rolls (I like the sesame-seeded variety here) and scrape out a little of the interior from each. Load one side of each roll with some of the onions and peppers, the other with a sausage. Top with mozzarella, put the open sandwiches on a sheet pan and slide them all into a hot oven for five minutes or so, until the cheese is melted and the bread is lightly toasted. Fold together and serve. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Mississippi Roast
An Internet darling of a pot roast recipe, a favorite of mom bloggers and Pinterest, Mississippi Roast is traditionally made by placing a chuck roast in a slow cooker and simmering it beneath a stick of butter, a package of ranch dressing mix, another of “au jus” gravy mix and a handful of pepperoncini. And you can certainly cook it that way. The raves are justified. But replacing the packaged mixes is no real chore, and it results in a luscious tangle of deliciously tangy beef that goes beautifully with mashed or roasted potatoes or egg noodles, or as a hot-sandwich filling. Cooking time will vary depending on the size of your roast and the effectiveness of your slow cooker. But six to eight hours generally does the trick. (If you're in the market for a slow-cooker, our colleagues at The Wirecutter have spent a great deal of time testing them. Check out their guide to the best on the market.)
Rotisserie Chicken Salad With Greens and Herbs
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Pick up a heat-lamp roast chicken at the market on the way home — it’s O.K.! — and tear it apart to feed four, or half of it for two, shredding the meat with your fingers. Mix the chicken with a few handfuls of baby arugula, a large handful of sliced scallions and a lot of chopped cilantro. Cut an avocado or two into the mix if you have them on hand. Then make a dressing out of lime juice — one juicy squeezed lime will do — a pressed garlic clove and a few glugs of olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Drizzle that over the top and serve. Dinner in 15 minutes, tops. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Grilled Cheese With Jalapeño, Tomato and Fried Egg
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Sometimes I get it into my head to make a fancy grilled cheese sandwich. I don’t have a recipe because you don’t really need a recipe to make grilled cheese sandwiches. You just need desire, and a triangle in your head: salt; crunch; melting ooze. So I’ll slice some mild Cheddar. Get some decent bread, a sliced jalapeño, the tail end of a beefsteak tomato. Then, sizzle-sizzle-flip-flip in some unsalted butter, and top with a sunny-side-up egg. It’s the simplest kind of cooking, and on a weeknight that’s exactly what most of us need. Make grilled cheese! Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Ham and Radicchio Toast
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Take a quick trip to the supermarket on the way home: bread and a small head of radicchio, as well as a half-pound of thin-sliced ham at the deli counter and some good mustard. When you’re ready to eat, cut the ham and radicchio into ribbons, then sauté the radicchio in a medium-hot sauté pan with a few glugs of olive oil and some chopped garlic until softened. Take the pan off the stove, add the ham and toss to combine. Meanwhile, slice the bread — you want two slices per person — and toast it if you like. Either way, slash some mustard onto the slices. Pile the warm radicchio and ham on top and consume with good wine. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Salmon With BBQ Sauce and Hot Peppers
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. There are generally a few kinds of barbecue sauce in my refrigerator, leftovers from various experiments. That may be true for you as well? I bet there’s a half-bottle of store-bought sauce, anyway, or a dusty unopened one in the pantry. Check: There probably is. Let’s make dinner with it, and some salmon fillets. Put the barbecue sauce in a small pot on the stove over medium heat, then turn the oven to 400. Roughly chop a few jarred pickled hot peppers into the sauce, and add a couple of pats of butter to silkify the situation. Warm that through while the oven heats, then salt and pepper the salmon fillets and roast them skin-side down, on a lightly oiled sheet pan, for 10 or 12 minutes, or until they are just barely cooked through. Spoon the pepper-studded barbecue sauce over the top, and go to! Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Fried Rice
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Start with some cooked rice, white or brown, a cup or so per person, made fresh or pulled from the freezer where you keep some in a plastic bag against the promise of just such an exercise. (The chill helps separate the grains.) Also helpful, also in the freezer: bags of diced organic vegetables you can get at the market (the mixed corn, carrots and peas number, for instance). For the rest: meat if you eat meat, a couple eggs, lots of chopped garlic and ginger, some scallions. You can make a sauce from soy sauce and sesame oil (about a 3:1 ratio) and fire it up with a teaspoon or two of gochujang. You’ll need a little less than a quarter cup of sauce to feed four. To the wok! Crank the heat, add a little neutral oil, then toss in your meat. I like chopped brisket from the barbecue joint, or pastrami from the deli, or ground pork, or bacon, or leftover roast chicken — whatever you decide on, you’ll need far less than you think. After the meat crisps, fish it from the pan and add about a tablespoon each of minced garlic and ginger, a handful of chopped scallions. Stir-fry for 30 seconds or so, then add those frozen vegetables. More stir-frying. Return the meat to the wok. Stir-fry. Clear a space in the center of the wok and add the eggs, cooking them quickly to softness. Throw in the sauce, then the rice, and mix it all together until it’s steaming hot. Finish with more chopped scallions. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Peanut Butter Sandwich With Sriracha and Pickles
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Here’s a spin on a great old sandwich of the American South: peanut butter and pickle sandwiches with a spray of sriracha or sambal oelek, and a tiny drizzle of soy sauce. Toasting the bread before spreading it with peanut butter adds crunch and warmth, and the result is a sandwich of remarkable intensity, sweet and salty, sour and soft and crisp. Trust me on this one! Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
Fried Egg Quesadilla
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. This simple fried egg quesadilla makes as fine a light supper as it does a breakfast repast. Easy work: Melt some butter in a pan and gently cook a corn tortilla in it. Top the tortilla with grated Cheddar, a slice of deli ham or some cooked bacon if you want them, a little chopped cilantro or salsa or hot sauce, and another tortilla. Cook, flipping the quesadilla a few times, until it is crisp and golden and the cheese has melted into lace at the sides. Use a spatula to pull it out of the pan, and place it onto a cutting board to rest. Fry an egg in the now-empty pan with a little more butter, then cut the quesadilla into quarters, placing the egg on top. Top with cilantro and hot sauce or salsa. Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Cook newsletter. Sign up to receive it. You can find more no-recipe recipes here.
The Store’s Green Dip
Bert Greene was one of the owners of the Store in Amagansett, a gourmet shop and catering outfit on the eastern end of Long Island, N.Y., that was in the early 1970s a kind of lodestar of casual-elegant cooking and entertaining — expensive and, to those with the money to spend it, worth it. (He was like a cross between Ina Garten and Anna Pump, of Loaves & Fishes in Sagaponack.) This is his recipe for a tart, abrasive and wildly delicious dip to serve, garnished with watercress, with an enormous quantity of iced, slivered vegetables. (It’s also great on fish, sandwiches, or even as a dip for slices of delivery pizza.)
Apple Pie
In 2013, one of the great pie makers in New York City was Kierin Baldwin, the pastry chef at The Dutch in the SoHo neighborhood. This recipe is adapted from hers, for a plain apple pie. It benefits from heeding her advice to pre-cook the filling before baking. “Apple pies that have crunchy, raw apples in them are a pet peeve of mine,” Ms. Baldwin said. Peel and core the fruit, cut it into slices, then macerate them in a plume of sugar. Cook these soft with a splash of acid (like lemon juice or cider vinegar) and a hint of cinnamon and allspice, then add some starch to thicken the whole. Allow the mixture to cool completely before using it in the pie. (For everything you need to know to make the perfect pie crust, visit our pie guide.)
San Antonio Margarita
Josie Davidson is one of the great hostesses of South Texas and learned to make margaritas from her father, Chris Gill, who received the recipe in the 1970s from Mario Cantu, owner of Mario's, an old-line Mexican restaurant in San Antonio. She passed her knowledge along to The Times in 2015: Combine equal parts tequila, orange liqueur and fresh lime juice in a pitcher, using a measuring glass if you have one to get it to 26 ounces exactly (deploy a splash or so more than a cup per liquid if you don’t), then add 6 ounces of water to the mix and set it in the refrigerator to chill. Serve over ice in glasses with salted rims. She doesn’t use triple sec — she says it’s too cloying. Her father advocates Cointreau. For Davidson, only Paula’s Texas Orange liqueur will do.
Christina Tosi’s Crockpot Cake
Christina Tosi, the pastry chef and an owner of Momofuku Milk Bar, sits near the beating heart of David Chang’s eclectic and innovative Momofuku restaurant empire. Off the clock, though, her cooking runs to inspired simplicity, as in this simple, tangy, slightly-caramelized at the edges slow-cooker cake, a version of which appears in her cookbook from Clarkson Potter, “Milk Bar Life.” Slow-cooker recipes invariably tell you to make something at night and enjoy them in the morning, or to make them in the morning and eat them after work. That only works if you don’t sleep much, or have a part-time job. This is a recipe for a weekend afternoon, or for cooking from the moment you get home until the very near end of a dinner party. It is a four-to-six hour affair.
Slow Cooker Pork Tacos With Hoisin and Ginger
This recipe uses a mixture of hoisin and fish sauces as braising liquid, and is a riff on an old Corinne Trang recipe for wok-fried rib tips. It results in a tangle of pulled pork that is best accompanied by a bright and crunchy slaw, and served on warm flour tortillas that recall the soft pliancy of Chinese bao. Cooking time will vary depending on the slow cooker you’re using, but generally the meat begins to fall apart nicely in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 hours. And of course you don't need a slow cooker. To make the dish in a covered dutch oven, cook in a 325-350 degree oven for 4 or 5 hours, or until the meat shreds easily from the bone.
BBQ Chicken
Barbecued chicken isn’t, really: It’s grilled rather than smoke-roasted at low temperature. But it requires a similar attention to technique. You’ll want to move the pieces around on the grill to keep them from burning, and flip them often as well. Cooking barbecued chicken benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and outdoor cooking maven Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.
Spicy Coleslaw
This easy, crisp slaw can be made a few hours ahead of time. It goes well with ribs and a cold beer, fried chicken or whatever summer feast sparks your fancy.
Hot Slaw, Mexican-Style
Put a couple of whole cabbages over a hot fire on a grill, and leave them there, turning every few minutes when you get a chance, until they look like something tragic and ruined. You don’t need to season them, or oil them, or remove the thick outer leaves the way you’d do if you were cooking them lightly or shredding them raw. You just need to burn them, slowly and deeply, so that they soften within and take on the flavor of fire. When you’ve got the cabbages good and blistered, put them on a cutting board, remove the charred exteriors and cut out the cores, then slice the remaining cabbage into shreds. Dress with crema, store-bought or home-made, along with chopped cilantro, some chipotle en adobo and lime juice. It makes for a slaw that goes with almost anything grilled.
Pickleback Slaw
Those artisanal pickles from the farmers’ market sure are expensive, so don’t throw out the juice in which they’re pickled. You can serve the stuff as a shot to accompany a glass of whiskey and a cold beer, as the New York chef Zakary Pelaccio has done, or you can whisk it into the dressing used for coleslaw, as is done here. Don’t have any? Never fear: a few tablespoons of relish from the market will offer a similar effect.
Tofu and Green Beans With Chile Crisp
I love to cook with chile crisp, a fiery hot-pepper condiment born in the Sichuan Province of China that generally relies on fried shallots and garlic for texture, and on any number of umami-rich special ingredients for distinction and oomph. It’s magical: a boon to noodle soups and kitchen-sink stir-fries, to eggs and cucumbers, to plain steamed fish. Here, I use it as the base of a marinade and topping for baked tofu and green beans, with black vinegar, a little sesame oil, a wisp of honey, minced garlic and ginger, along with scallions and cilantro. But you could use the mixture on a mitten and have a very nice meal.