Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Taco Seasoning
Skip the powdered, packaged stuff and make your own taco seasoning, adjusting the spices to your family's taste. The recipe below makes enough to season one pound of browned ground beef or chicken (it even works with crumbled tofu), but you can easily double or triple it and store it in airtight container so it's ready to go on a busy weeknight.
Seared Lamb Chops With Lemon and Butter-Braised Potatoes
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Cut some yellow potatoes into chunks and put them in a deep skillet set over medium-high heat, along with some chopped onions and a few tablespoons of butter. Season with salt and pepper. Cook for around 10 minutes, stirring often, then add enough chicken stock, water or wine so that the potatoes are almost covered. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes until the potatoes are tender. Meanwhile, massage as many lamb chops as you need with minced garlic, salt, pepper and a little oil, then sear them in a hot cast-iron pan, finishing them in a 425-degree oven with rosemary and some thinly sliced lemons until the lamb is just pink inside, about 10 minutes, maybe fewer. Garnish with thyme or rosemary if you have it and serve alongside the potatoes. A fine midweek meal! 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.
Pan-Roasted Chicken With Chiles de Árbol
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Here is a riff on a recipe from the Los Angeles chef Suzanne Goin, whose book “Sunday Suppers at Lucques” is an exacting and delicious guide to restaurant cooking at home. Simply brown some chicken thighs in olive oil and butter over medium heat in an oven-safe skillet, adding lots of fresh thyme leaves and a couple of crumbled chiles de árbol. Then apply a thin smear of mustard to each thigh, shower with buttered bread crumbs and transfer the pan to the broiler to crisp the chicken into succulence. Serve alongside or on top of a pile of baby greens lightly dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, with some bread to mop up the juices. That’s fine. 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.
Speedy Fish Chowder
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. This one calls for something in the neighborhood of a quarter- to half-pound of fish fillets per person and works as well in the heat of South Florida as it does on the frozen Northern Plains. Dice a strip or two of bacon if you’re a meat eater, or grab some butter if you are not (or use both if you are reckless). Add it to a Dutch oven set over medium-high heat and sauté with a few handfuls of diced onions, carrots and potatoes until the onions have gone translucent. Hit the mixture with some salt and pepper and a flash of smoked paprika if you have it. If you can find good corn on the cob, that would be a fine addition. So would a cup of frozen corn. Do you have any fish stock? No? White wine? Surely you have water. Add enough liquid (of any combination of the above) so that the potatoes are almost swimming, then add a bay leaf and reduce the heat to a simmer. Allow the chowder to bubble along until the liquid has reduced by a third and the potatoes are tender. Add a splash or two of milk or cream and allow it to heat and thicken slightly. Now cut the fillets into chunks and stir them in gently. Five minutes later: chowder. Serve with crusty bread. 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.
Kombucha
To make this effervescent fermented tea, you will need a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that is known by its acronym, Scoby. Also some already-brewed kombucha that you will most likely receive from the same source as the Scoby — a friend or the Internet. You'll need very clean glass jars in which to brew your sweetened tea and ferment it with your Scoby, and very clean clamp-top bottles into which to funnel it when you’re done. You’ll need flavoring agents for that second fermentation. Start with apple juice, perhaps, and ginger. With later batches you can try turmeric, pomegranate, cayenne, orange, whatever you like. Welcome to the kombucha lifestyle.
Steamed Mussels With Tomatoes and Chorizo
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Simplicity itself, if you can find a bag of mussels at the store. Scrub and debeard them as necessary. Then grab a big pot, and use it to sauté some cubed chorizo in olive oil over medium-high heat. When it starts to crisp, add a few handfuls of halved cherry tomatoes and a clove or two of chopped garlic. Let the tomatoes blister in the fat, then add the mussels and a glass of white wine. Cover the pot and allow the mussels to steam open. (If at the end you have mussels that haven’t opened, ditch them: They’re dead.) Garnish with chopped parsley and serve with plenty of toast for the sopping. 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.
Baked Beans
Proper Boston baked beans would have salt pork instead of the bacon. James Beard cooked them with ribs. The key is to use the little white pea beans known as navy beans, and to allow time to do most of the work. (Or to cheat: Canned white beans make fantastic baked beans in about an hour. If you use them, you'll need four 15-ounce cans. Drain and then follow the directions from step 2 on to the end. Please understand that you’ll need much less water and much less time to get them where you want them to be.) The combination of molasses and dry mustard is a taste as old as America itself, and takes well to both ham and soft brown bread.
Grilled Romaine
Lettuces do nicely on the grill, softening slightly at their centers and charring beautifully at their tips. Their bitterness is a fine counterpart to the sweet spiciness of a lot of grilled foods. In this recipe, the dressing is Caesar-like. Mustard and mayonnaise serve as emulsifiers, while anchovies, garlic and vinegar provide a welcome kick. Make sure to paint the dressing into the crevices between the leaves, so that while the lettuce caramelizes slightly on the exterior, there is still warm creaminess within.
Pork Chops With Onion Gravy
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredient list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Start with the pork chops, as many as you need, on the bone if possible. Dredge them in flour that you’ve mixed with chile powder, salt, black pepper, smoked paprika and red-pepper flakes, or with Lawry’s seasoned salt or Old Bay seasoning or any spice you like, really. (Save what’s left of the flour; you’ll use it later.) Then sear the chops, in batches if you have to, in an oil-slicked Dutch oven or heavy cast-iron pan, over fairly high heat. You want a big, flavorful crust on the meat before you braise it with the onions, to enhance the taste of the sauce and provide a little texture. Set the seared chops on a platter. Throw away what oil is left in the pot, and wipe out the pot. Return it to the stove, and set over medium heat. Add some butter, and when it melts and foams, use it to sauté an enormous number of sliced onions, allowing them to wilt and soften and almost start to go brown. Sprinkle a scant handful of the leftover dredging flour over the onions, then keep stirring for a few minutes to dampen the rawness of the flour. Add about half an inch of chicken stock (or water) to the pot, along with a bay leaf, perhaps, then stir to thicken. If the sauce is too thick for your liking, add a little more liquid. Nestle the pork chops into the sauce, remove from heat, cover the pot and put it into a 350-degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour. While the pork cooks, make the mashed potatoes, with hot milk, melted butter, plenty of salt and enough lemon zest to give them a real brightness. So: pork, gravy, potatoes. I like some hearty sautéed greens moistened with chicken stock. Maybe a drizzle of red-wine vinegar too? You’ll know what to do when you get there. This is not a recipe. It’s your dinner. Make it however you like. 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.
Marinated Venison Steaks
“Thanksgiving here is about hunting rather than football,” said Errol Rice of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. The season for hunting big game comes to a close in the last, best place on the Thanksgiving weekend, and those who have not yet bagged a buck are known, said Dennis Konopatzke, the proprietor of Great Northern Brewing Company in Whitefish, to rush their holiday dinners in order to get out to the woods to hunt. You’ll find huckleberries on Thanksgiving tables in Montana, Mr. Konopatzke added, or the Norwegian cured fish known as lutefisk, or pork pies and stuffed pasties, all nods to the state’s history of settlers from afar. But game is the game. What follows is a recipe honed over the years by the members of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for a marinade that works on wild venison perfectly and most other proteins as well. Broil some steaks and pair the result with traditional Thanksgiving side dishes.
Chicken Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Don’t let the one-hour prep time on these enchiladas scare you. Use some leftover roast chicken, or buy a roast chicken at the market on the way home, and you’ll save at least 20 minutes, making the dish a terrific weeknight feed, alongside a green salad. (At El Real Tex-Mex restaurant, in Houston, the great Tex-Mex scholar and restaurateur Robb Walsh serves his version with lightly smoked chicken, which if you can find or make is superb.) The salsa verde is dead simple to make and the rest is assembly — a task that grows markedly easier each time you do it.
Tuna Poke
This is a dish that comes from Long Island, New York, not the Big Island of Hawaii, a Northeastern take on a Pacific classic. I’ve made it with Atlantic bonito caught offshore and yellowfin tuna bought at the market, the meat trimmed, cubed and mixed with sesame oil and soy sauce, a little chile-garlic sauce and lot of chopped scallions. I top the salad with roasted macadamia nuts and a few vigorous shakes of furikake, a Japanese seasoning that is made of sesame seeds, dried fish and seaweed, salt and sugar. It makes for about the most delicious eating in the world.
Han Oak Galbijjim
This is a home cook’s take on the short-rib stew the chef Peter Cho serves at Han Oak, the beautiful homestyle Korean restaurant in Portland, Ore., that he runs with his wife, Sun Young Park. It is fragrant and sweet, with deep caramelized flavors that come in part from roasting the meat and vegetables separately before combining them in the braising liquid. Cho fries rice cakes before adding them to the stew, but you can just slide them in plain, if you prefer. Either way, the addition of greens at the end gives the dish an exciting brightness, a zip that many galbijjims lack.
Fluke au Gratin
This is a very old recipe, taken from the kitchen of Henri’s in Lynbrook, N.Y., opened by an extravagant French restaurateur named Henri Charpentier in 1910. It asks for flounder, known on Long Island as fluke, but you could make it with cod or haddock or halibut, with freshwater trout or catfish, with any mild-flavored fish. It’s an elegant and really quite simple preparation, the fish fillets baked on top of and beneath a butter sauce cooked with chopped shallots, garlic, chives, parsley and minced mushrooms, brightened with lemon juice and white wine, and with bread crumbs, sliced mushrooms and dots of butter strewn across the top. You can make the sauce in the morning, if you like, and assemble the dish for the oven just before dinner, making it a breeze for weeknight entertaining. But it’s no stretch to do it all, as Charpentier might have said, “à la minute.”
Sloppy Joes
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Put a Dutch oven over medium-high heat on your stove, then add a glug of olive oil and sauté in it a handful of chopped onions, a couple diced ribs of celery, a diced jalapeño and a small diced red pepper. When the mixture is supersoft, add a few cloves of minced garlic and cook for a couple more minutes, then dump a pound and a half of ground beef into the pot — ideally the sort that is 20 percent fat — and stir and sizzle until it is well browned, about 10 minutes. Bring the heat down a bit and add a lot of tomato paste — say 3 tablespoons, maybe 4 — and let it get a little toasty before adding a cup or more of puréed canned tomatoes. Cook that down for a few minutes, then add quite a few glugs of Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce to taste, and continue cooking until the mixture is quite thick, another 15 or 20 minutes. Season to taste and serve on toasted potato buns. I like steamed broccoli on the side, a walk for the dog and bed. 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.
Mushroom Toast With Pea Purée
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Take a bag of frozen organic peas and heat them in a little bit of boiling water for a couple of minutes to get them warm and cooked through, then drain them off and whiz them in a food processor with a hit of olive oil, some lemon juice and, if you have any, some tarragon leaves, until it resembles a thickish purée. Next, sauté a bunch of thick-sliced portobellos (count on about two mushrooms per person) in a lot of butter with a little bit of garlic. Really cook those down. Finally, make toast from hefty slices of your favorite bread, spread them with the pea purée, top with the mushrooms and — dinner! 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.
Fettuccine With Ricotta and a Fistful of Mint
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Set a pot of nicely salted water over high heat to boil. When it does, add the fettuccine, then get the rest of your dinner ready as it cooks to al dente. Chop up a fistful of mint and a small shallot if you have one (half a small onion if you don’t), mixing them into a cup or two of fresh ricotta, then loosening the mixture with a healthy drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. Add some salt and pepper to taste, perhaps a shake of red pepper. When the pasta’s done, which’ll be about the same time as you’re done with the sauce, drain it in a colander and add it to a big warm bowl, then fold the cheese into it, mixing gently. Serve to adoration. 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.
Maangchi’s Cheese Buldak (Fire Chicken)
Cheese buldak is a Korean dish that is incredibly easy to prepare: a marinade of red-pepper paste and red-pepper flakes that becomes a fiery sauce for braised chicken, which is then served beneath a cloak of broiler-melted mozzarella. A child could do it, or an adult who often acts like one. Mine is an adaptation of a recipe that owes its deepest debt to Emily Kim, the Korean web star known as Maangchi, whose video for cheese buldak has been viewed on YouTube more than seven million times. (Omit the rice cakes if you can’t find them easily!) Thanks to subtitling by her fans, the video can be read in 24 languages. There are thousands and thousands of comments below it, mostly positive. One reads, “Can you be my mom?”
Grilled Corn on the Cob
You can grill corn on the cob with the husks on. You can strip the husks partly off, remove the silks and re-wrap the ears, then grill. You can soak the corn in cool water before grilling. Or blanch it in hot. I blanch, occasionally following the lead of the celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who adds one cup of milk to his blanching liquid. “I have no idea why I do it,” he said. “It’s like adding corks to the liquid when you’re poaching octopus. Who knows if it works?” Serve with butter, as in this recipe, or dab with mayonnaise and sprinkle with cotija cheese.
Lobster Mac and Cheese
This recipe for lobster mac and cheese, a variation on a classic plain recipe that Julia Moskin published in The Times, is a rich and shockingly flavorful addition to any feast, and requires only a single lobster to serve six or eight. Or try serving it as a main course for a weeknight dinner.
Baked Potatoes
Recipes for baked potatoes exist across the archives of The Times. This is the battle-tested best. Adorn the result with toppings: sour cream, minced chives, crumbled bacon, chopped jalapeño, cauliflower florets, crab meat dressed in lemon juice. The potatoes are a blank canvas, though delicious on their own.
East Coast Grill’s Cornbread
This cornbread, adapted from the one developed by Chris Schlesinger and served at his East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass., is lofty and sweet, crusty and cakelike, moist and ethereal. As Sam Sifton said in the 2012 article that accompanied the recipe, it is "the cornbread to become a child’s favorite, to become the only cornbread that matters. All else is not cornbread."
Béarnaise Sauce
Béarnaise sauce is a piquant child of hollandaise, one of the so-called mother sauces of French cuisine. It is simply an emulsification — egg yolks and butter cut through with vinegar flavored with tarragon and shallots, with a bite of black pepper. Think of it as a loose mayonnaise, requiring only plenty of whisking and a careful hand with the heat to master. You don’t need the clarified butter many recipes call for — a good unsalted butter, melted, works just fine. Apply the sauce to steaks or burgers, asparagus or salmon. The sauce’s richness improves virtually everything it touches.
Firehouse Chili Gumbo
This recipe is adapted from the one that a Louisiana firefighter named Jeremy Chauvin entered into a national cook-off run by Hormel Foods in 2017, and that took home the prize for America’s Best Firehouse Chili. It is not really a chili in the Texas sense of the word. There is a roux at its base — it’s more like a chili gumbo, a bayou take on the original red. Serve with grated cheese and corn chips. Chauvin told me he was moved to enter the chili contest as a way to honor his brother Spencer, also a firefighter, who was killed in the line of duty in 2016. “I just want people to remember his sacrifice,” he said.