Recipes By Sam Sifton
385 recipes found
Irish Tacos
You can certainly eat corned beef with boiled cabbage and carrots, but it can be a great deal more exciting to pile the shredded meat — ruddy pink, salty, fatty and meltingly sweet — into warm flour tortillas, then top it with a bright, crunchy, slightly fiery cabbage slaw. The contrast between the soft and the crisp, the salt and the sweet, is fantastic — particularly if you adorn each taco with a few pickled jalapeños and, perhaps, an additional swipe of mayonnaise. It’s not fusion cooking, nor appropriation. It’s just the fact that everything tastes good on a warm tortilla.
Pan Pizza Dough
This is dough to recall the pillowy, golden, butter-crisp pies served at Pizza Hut in the 1990s, a favorite of the chef and pizza consultant Anthony Falco. He gave me his recipe for it in 2018, part of his recipe for pan pizza, but it’s terrific under your favorite pizza sauce and whatever toppings you desire. You might like sausage and peppers, or sausage and anchovies, or plain with extra cheese. But give black olives, provolone and thinly sliced red onion a shot sometime. Plan ahead, though. The recipe may recall corporate delivery pizza dough. But its preparation takes time to proof and to develop flavor. That’s why it’s better.
Pan Pizza
The pizza authority Anthony Falco, once czar of the oven at Roberta’s in Brooklyn and now (literally!) an international pizza consultant, grew up in Austin, Tex., eating his great-grandmother’s Sicilian grandma pies, which he liked a great deal, and personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut, which he loved unreservedly. This recipe, he told me in 2018, pays homage to that buttery, high-lofted pie, with a crisp bottom crust, a slightly sweet sauce and an enormous amount of cheese. Slices of pepperoni make a beautiful topping, cupping in the heat of the oven and drizzling crimson oil across the edges of the pie. The dough takes a long time to proof and the recipe delivers a lot of it, so making the recipe is a great excuse for planning a pizza party. Cast-iron pans are best for the baking, but square or rectangular baking pans with high sides will do nicely in a pinch.
Freestyle Roasted Chicken Parm
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. You don’t need much for this easy dinner: bone-in chicken thighs, canned crushed tomatoes, mozzarella, a little Parmesan or pecorino, zest from a lemon, olive oil and red-pepper flakes, maybe a few snips of basil if you can find any. (If you can’t, don’t worry, it will still kill.) Toss the chicken in salt, pepper, zest, red-pepper flakes and a few glugs of olive oil, then get them on a greased sheet pan or two in a 425-degree oven, skin-side up, spreading them out as much as you can manage. While the chicken roasts, warm the tomatoes on the stove with a splash of olive oil and a little black pepper. Watch the chicken get well and truly crisped — it’ll take around 35 or 40 minutes — and then place a nice slice of mozzarella on each one to melt. (Activate the broiler, if you like, but I prefer the gentle style.) Spoon warm tomato sauce onto each plate, then top with a cheese-covered chicken thigh, some sprinkled Parmesan and a few torn pieces of basil. Sautéed greens would go nicely on the side. 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.
Hasselback Kielbasa
This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Get a sheet pan ripping hot in a 425-degree oven while you cut up a small onion and a bell pepper, whatever color you prefer. Toss the vegetables in a splash of neutral oil, salt and pepper them, and tip them into a single layer on the hot pan. Allow these to roast in the oven while you cut the kielbasa into thin slices, stopping short of cutting all the way through the meat. You want to end up with a long accordion, basically, or an attenuated pill bug. Now remove the vegetables from the oven, give them a stir, and put the kielbasa on top. Return the sheet pan to the oven and allow everything to roast into crisp softness, 20 to 25 minutes, basting heavily two or three times with a mixture of equal parts apricot preserves and mustard, about 2 tablespoons each. Serve with steamed greens or a fresh baguette. It’ll go fast. 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.
Shredded Roast Duck
Some say roasting a duck is difficult work. It is not. It can be messy, though, so make sure you have a roasting pan that can accommodate the enormous amount that renders out of the bird during its roughly four and a half hours in the oven. (Save it for roasting potatoes!) When the meat has cooked, use a couple of forks to shred it, then moisten it with your favorite barbecue sauce, hoisin sauce, gochujang sauce or gravy, and serve with rice or noodles, on potato rolls or Chinese wheat-flour pancakes, or as the final topping of this maniacal recipe for scallops with hollandaise sauce and shredded duck.
Open-Faced Hot Turkey Sandwiches
Sometimes life requires an open-faced turkey sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes, alongside a glop of cranberry sauce. It is neither a Thanksgiving meal nor a Christmas one, but simply a low-fi American reminder of diners and TV dinners and blankets and comfort itself: soft meat and rich, salty gravy over tight-crumbed bread, with buttery mash and a tang of cranberry. My recipe calls for roasting buttered turkey thighs in the oven while the potatoes were cooking, skin-side down to crisp the skin and allow the fat to render into the pan, creating sticky bits of fond you’ll use to build a base for gravy. Pile the sliced meat onto lightly toasted bread, drench it with gravy and serve alongside the potatoes and peas. Adding canned cranberry sauce, in this application, is no sin.
Amatriciana on the Fly
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 half-hour challenge that’s no challenge at all. Set a large pot of salted water on the stove, over high heat. In a pan, sauté chopped bacon — slab bacon, if you can get it — in a glug or two of olive oil until it’s crisp. Remove the bacon and add chopped onion to the fat, cooking until it’s soft and fragrant. Figure the equivalent of a slice of bacon and half an onion per person. Meanwhile, boil water for enough pasta to feed your crowd, and cook it until it is just shy of tender. While it cooks, add some canned chopped tomatoes and the cooked bacon to the onions, and stir it to make a sauce. Drain the pasta, then toss it with a knob of butter, and add the pasta to the sauce. Slide all that into a warm serving bowl, then top with grated pecorino. A scattering of chopped parsley is never going to be a bad idea here, but you can omit it if the clock’s ticking. Serve with red-pepper flakes and extra cheese on the side. 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.
Bobby Flay’s Double-Chocolate Pancakes
Few adults would want this meal for breakfast, but it is an excellent recipe for parents to make the morning after a sleepover that had the children and their friends up late watching horror films and unfathomable YouTube comedy. I adapted it slightly from Bobby Flay’s “Brunch at Bobby’s” cookbook, released in 2015. Watching the effect of the sugar and chocolate on a sleepy child is its own sort of joy – and you can hustle the guests home before the inevitable crash. Serve with raspberries for reasons of taste and elegance (though strawberries or bananas would do in a pinch), and salted caramel sauce. Yes, you could insist on eating muesli and almond milk instead. But in Mr. Flay’s words, “If you’re going to cave, you might as well go all out.”
Sourdough Pancake or Waffle Batter
If you have a sourdough starter, you will need to feed it to keep it alive. Many recipes call for doing so after discarding a cup or so of the starter you have, so as to maintain its equilibrium and prevent it from growing too large. This recipe takes advantage of that excess starter, using it as the base of a pancake or waffle batter that ferments overnight and yields a remarkably flavorful breakfast the next day, with minimal effort.
Seafood Chowder
This chowder of root-cellar vegetables, clams and fish is one of the easiest and best things to cook for a weekend dinner with family and friends. Use a mixture of butter and the powdered dried seaweed called dulse as the flavored fat in which you sauté the vegetables before deglazing them, and each individual flavor in the resulting stew will pop — from carrot to leek, parsnip to potato, bacon to clam to scallop to fish. The seaweed is a powerful flavor enhancer. You can omit it if you want, but really, you shouldn't.
Scrambled Eggs With Trout Roe
French Toast Amandine
My children came up with this recipe on the morning after we worked together on a dinner of weakfish amandine, the fillets sautéed in brown butter and scattered with almonds. They asked: “Couldn’t we do something similar with French toast? And make it, like, sweet?” We certainly could, and we did: a simple breakfast fry-up made elegant and well groomed. Fry the slices up in good butter, and serve them with maple syrup or a slash of jam. Pile everything in the sink afterward and boogie; you can clean up later. Breakfast in America.
Sausage Gravy
It may not win any beauty contests, but white sausage gravy is glorious stuff. Ladled over a homemade biscuit, it is classic Southern breakfast fare that will sustain you well past lunchtime.
Lemon Poundcake
This recipe came to The Times in 2001 in an article by the chef Bill Yosses, who would go on to become the executive pastry chef for the Obama White House. He learned it, he wrote, in France, from a pastry chef named Jacques Mahou at Au Vieux Four in Tours. "He had a special technique," Yosses wrote. "Instead of brushing the cake with a sweet syrup, Jacques immersed his in a lemon syrup bath. Then he gently squeezed the cake like a sponge. It was a tricky maneuver since the warm loaf was apt to fall apart -- you have to cradle it gently, and apply just a little bit of pressure -- but it's worth the extra care. The cake absorbs a lot more liquid, which moistens the interior and intensifies the citrus flavor." In addition, Yosses added lemon segments to the batter. "The fruit evaporates, leaving behind powerful little pockets of lemon," he wrote. "It makes a major difference. The lemon segments, combined with the syrup, also help preserve the cake. Well wrapped and stored in the refrigerator, it keeps for 7 to 10 days"
Blueberry Pie
Perfection is a fool’s mission when it comes to blueberry pie. Sometimes the filling is a little runny. Other times, slightly thick, depending on the blueberries themselves. But this recipe helps even the odds, with the use of arrowroot starch in place of the more typical flour or cornstarch, and an awesome pre-thickening technique picked up from the pastry chef Kierin Baldwin. You could use a different pie crust, but I like the all-butter version below, at least with a pre-baked bottom and an artfully cut top that allows steam to escape.
All-Purpose Pie Dough
Steamed Clams
The recipe that follows is for a mess of clams, which on the eastern end of Long Island translates as a cool 100 littleneck hard-shell clams. You can certainly cook fewer of them, particularly if all you can find is the larger cherrystone clam, but a reasonable human can eat two dozen clams at a sitting, mopping up the broth with crusty bread. You can add herbs or other aromatics to the steaming liquid (thyme or garlic, say, or cilantro, parsley, tarragon). You can add chorizo or bacon. The point is just to create steam, and to allow the clams to open within it. Eat the clams with the liquid from the interior of their shells, and perhaps some melted butter. A fiery jalapeño brown butter is currently a favorite dip.
Yotam Ottolenghi’s Tomato and Pomegranate Salad
Here is a dish that melds the best flavors of summer into a robust salad. Yotam Ottolenghi calls for cherry tomatoes, but summer’s best tomatoes would also be right at home among the feta, mint and za’atar, the Middle Eastern spice blend. Serve it alongside grilled meat, preferably in the back yard, summer nipping at the heels.
Quealy’s Queso
Chili con queso is a standard party dip in South Texas, where the chef Quealy Watson lives and works: melted cheese with chopped green chiles, generally, to be served with chips. Watson gives the dish an Asian spin, using the Southeast Asian chile paste known as sambal oelek in place of the green chiles. The Velveeta cheese he calls for is not for everyone, but it is powerfully easy to work with — you couldn’t break it if you tried. Heavy cream helps thin out the queso a little, and the chile paste gives it a fascinating fire.
Clam Dip
Here now a taste of New England game days circa the time when televisions had dials instead of remotes and, if you couldn’t get fresh clams to steam and chop, a can or two from the supermarket would do just fine. (That’s still true!) The recipe comes from Brendan McCarthy, a saltwater fishing guide whose charters range from Brooklyn to Montauk, and south to Florida, the Bahamas and the azure waters off Panama, but whose tastes and kitchen skills were first developed in New England and see an apogee in the simplicity of this recipe. The dip benefits from some curing time in the refrigerator and, for some, a heavy hand on the cayenne.
Grilled Fingerling-Potato Salad With Chipotle Bacon Vinaigrette
A vinegary potato salad with bacon is one of the great Germanish summertime traditions. Here I’ve added a Mexican accent in the form of the canned, smoked jalapeño known as chipotle chile en adobo. (A small can, well covered, will keep for months in the refrigerator.)
Fatty ’Cue Brussels Sprouts
Adapted from the Fatty ’Cue restaurant in Brooklyn, this is a recipe that matches the flavors of southeast Asia to ones of New England. Sweet, smoky, fiery, crisp, soft — it’s a dish that could become a new Thanksgiving tradition, or just spice up a meal on a blustery evening.
Lefse
Lefse, thin potato-dough flatbreads like Scandinavian tortillas, or Oslo injera, can be found on holiday tables throughout the upper Midwest, wherever Norwegian families settled to farm. The recipe is adapted from Ethel Ramstad, 90, who learned it from one Ollie Amundson in North Dakota decades ago. We picked it up when she was teaching it to Molly Yeh, 25, a Chicago-raised food blogger marrying Ms. Ramstad's great-nephew, on a farm in the Red River Valley, right before Thanksgiving. The riced potato mixture that forms the basis of the dough should be very, very cold when it is rolled out, to prevent stickiness. And although you do not need a lefse griddle to make great lefse, a lefse stick — essentially a long, thin, wooden spatula — is an admirable investment in success.