Recipes By Tejal Rao
135 recipes found
Holiday Gingerbread Cake With Molasses Whipped Cream
This recipe for hot-water gingerbread — using an old but reliable technique for a moist, tender cake that starts with a base of molasses and boiled water — comes from the cookbook author and culinary historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris, who included it in “A Kwanzaa Keepsake and Cookbook” (Scribner), updated in 2024 after its first 1995 edition. Here, the dessert is part of a six-course menu celebrating Nia, or purpose, the fifth principle of the holiday, though Dr. Harris bakes the simple cake throughout the season. The gingerbread, as well as the barely sweetened cream you should dollop generously on top, are both simple to make, and rich with the smoky, complex flavor of molasses.
Cioppino
The cioppino at Anchor Oyster Bar in San Francisco is a showstopper — a beautiful, long-simmered tomato sauce thinned with clam juice and packed with a mix of excellent seafood. Work with whatever seafood is best where you are, though Dungeness crab in the shell is nonnegotiable for the Anchor’s owner and chef, Roseann Grimm, the granddaughter of an Italian crab fisherman. Replicating her dish at home involves a lot of work, but the results are beyond delicious. To get ahead, you can make the marinara base and roasted garlic butter up to a couple days before. A half hour or so before you’re ready to sit down and eat, bake the garlic bread and cook the seafood. Don’t forget crab crackers — you’ll need them at the table to get to the crab meat — and plenty of napkins!
Roti
Roti is a basic, everyday bread, but making it takes a lot of skill. The dough is kneaded with just enough water to bring it together and keep it soft and pliable. And though it’s not yeasted, a ball of well-mixed and -rested dough will be supple and almost spongy, as if it were. Cooks who are used to making roti at home can roll out thin, round disks that puff up as if by magic. But the real magic of roti is how a few of them can turn anything — a little kheema, or a few spoonfuls of aloo masala — into a satisfying meal.
Vegan ‘Queso’
This recipe is for “queso,” and yes, the dish name is in quotation marks. That’s because it’s a dairy-free version of the familiar bright-orange cheesy dip. The recipe is adapted from the cookbook “Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen” by the chef Josef Centeno, whose Los Angeles restaurant serves Tex-Mex classics and modern variations. Though the texture of processed cheese is impossible to replicate, this cashew dip is delightfully creamy with layers of complex flavor. For best results, make sure to thoroughly toast the cashews, char the vegetables and blend until the dip is completely smooth.
Scarlett’s Tuna Salad
For when it’s too hot to cook, there's the chef Scarlett Lindeman’s tuna salad — the same one she serves at her Mexico City restaurant, Cicatriz. Made with high-quality, oil-packed tuna, the salad is fresh, juicy, bright and summery, composed with cucumbers, avocado, pickled onion and lots of herbs. Don’t be afraid to season the cucumbers generously with salt at the start, and to season more as you build the layers of the salad. The dish is so simple that seasoning it well is key.
Eggs Kejriwal
This spicy egg-and-cheese on toast has its roots in the social-club circuit of Mumbai, though chefs in London, New York and Oakland have riffed on it recently, too. The dish is quick and simple, ideal for breakfast or a hearty snack between meals, and can be customized with a variety of cheeses and toppings. To make this updated Eggs Kejriwal, toast good bread and smear it with mustard, then pile on some grated cheese mixed up with chopped up green chiles, red onion and cilantro leaves. Once the cheese is bubbling under the broiler, just slide on a fried egg.
Aligot (Mashed Potatoes With Cheese)
Somewhere between buttery mashed potatoes and pure melted cheese lies aligot, the comforting, cheese-enhanced mashed-potato dish from central France. The key to getting a smooth, airy texture is to rice the potatoes while they're still hot, then incorporate cold butter, hot milk and grated cheese over low heat. To build up the stringiness of that melting cheese, Ham El-Waylly, a chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Hail Mary, suggests whipping it with confidence, speed and vigor. This is what will create aligot's characteristic cheese strings: long and sheer, with some elasticity. "They should fight with you," Waylly says. While fresh tomme or Cantal is traditional, Gruyère or Comté work well, too.
Bariis (Somali-Style Rice)
Somali-style rice, when prepared for festive occasions, can be a satisfying meal on its own: The rice is cooked in a rich stock and often jeweled with pieces of meat and vegetables. This version of the dish comes from Ayaan and Idyl Mohallim, twin sisters who make their own xawaash, an aromatic spice mixture that is layered with fenugreek and turmeric. The finished rice is also generously seasoned with saffron, as well as softened peppers and raisins. At Thanksgiving, the rice is a versatile side with roast turkey and vegetables, and the day after, it's a great base for leftovers. You could easily use a vegetable stock in place of a meat stock for a vegetarian version, and add more vegetables to the topping. The Mohallim sisters, on occasion, add blanched green beans to the mix.
One-Pot Spaghetti With Cherry Tomatoes and Kale
In this simple recipe, raw pasta and cherry tomatoes are simmered together in a single pan, cooking the pasta and forming a thick, starchy sauce at the same time. The efficient technique is internet famous, but this is the British cookbook author Anna Jones’s vegetarian take on the phenomenon, adapted from her book “A Modern Way to Cook.” The technique is easy to master and endlessly adaptable: When you add the kale, you could also toss in a couple of anchovies and a generous pinch of red-pepper flakes. When you season and top with cheese, you could add a pile of fresh chopped herbs, like mint, basil or oregano.
Sweet Mochi With Red Bean Filling
Nothing compares to the texture of fresh mochi, the sweet, delightfully chewy Japanese rice dough. And when you make it yourself (which takes about 10 minutes), you can really enjoy it fresh, at the peak of its textural pleasures. Chop up the cooled mochi and toss it in roasted soybean flour, and it's ready to go as a sweet snack or ice cream topping. Or, as in this recipe, put in some extra time and wrap the sticky dough around a simple red bean filling to make daifuku. The pastry chef Tomoko Kato uses shiratamako flour processed in Japan, but mochiko flour can be easier to find, and the results are similar.
Namoura (Syrup-Soaked Semolina Cake)
Amanda Saab, a social worker and home cook who lives near Detroit, riffs on her Lebanese grandmother's recipe for namoura, a cake made from semolina flour, soaked in syrup while it's still warm. When she serves it at iftar dinners during Ramadan, Ms. Saab often doses the syrup with a little bit of lavender extract. You could follow her lead, or use another floral note like vanilla or rose. The cake has no eggs, but this version gets its rich flavor and texture from aerated yogurt, which goes bubbly within minutes of being mixed with a little baking soda.
Basic Stovetop Rice
Here’s how to make plain rice in the simplest way, and once you get the hang of all the steps (rinsing, simmering, fluffing and resting) you can make infinite, delicious variations by adapting one or more of these steps.
Watermelon Chaat
This recipe for watermelon chaat, a savory fruit salad dressed in toasted cumin and dried mango powder, comes from Malika Ameen, a cookbook author whose Pakistani-American family in Chicago makes infinite variations on fruit chaat in the summer. You could swap out the watermelon for a mix of what's in season, whether it's stone fruit, berries or cubed apple and pear. It's an ideal dish to break the fast during Ramadan, full of flavor and hydrating, and quick to put together.
Cauliflower Chaat for One
This recipe for a single portion of cauliflower chaat comes from the chef Anita Lo. It gets its flavor from store-bought chaat masala, a South Asian seasoning tangy with dried mango and black salt. The recipe doubles easily, but if you’re cooking for one, pick a small head of cauliflower and use about half of it. Use the rest to make pickled cauliflower, or sauté it in the same way and then take the seasoning in a different direction.
Kale Sauce Pasta
This recipe for a vivid, vegetarian pasta sauce, made from blanched kale leaves and loaded with good olive oil and grated cheese, comes from Joshua McFadden, the chef at Ava Gene’s in Portland, Ore., and was inspired by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of The River Café in London. The technique is absurdly simple and quick from start to finish, but the result is luxurious and near-creamy. Feel free to play with the pasta shape, but no matter what you choose, be sure to let the blender run for a while at a powerful setting: You want the kale to completely break down into a smooth, bright, airy green puree.
Jackfruit Sabzi
This recipe for a simple jackfruit sabzi comes from the British chef Romy Gill, who adapted much of her Punjabi family’s vegetarian home cooking for her book “Zaika: Vegan Recipe from India.” In Burnpur, where Ms. Gill grew up, jackfruit grew wild on the trees around her home, and her mother worked with an oiled knife to take apart the heavy, unwieldy fruit. But in England, where she lives now, Ms. Gill reaches for canned jackfruit. Make sure to pick vegetal, unripe jackfruit in brine — rather than sweet, ripe jackfruit in syrup — then drain the pieces, breaking up any large ones until bite-size, and add them to the pan. Serve the sabzi with rice, roti, or, as Ms. Gill often does for her daughters, rolled up in a big, tender wrap.
Toor Dal (Split Yellow Pigeon Peas)
Dal can be made with all kinds of lentils and cooking methods. These vary not just from region to region, but also from day to day, mood to mood. Some cooks like dal soupy, others chunky. There are dals for special occasions, seasoned with charcoal smoke and butter or padded out luxuriously with cream, as well as lighter, leaner dals that can restore you when you’re not feeling well.The flavor of this everyday, Gujarati-style dal comes from the pure nuttiness of split pigeon peas, boiled until tender and bolstered with spices bloomed in hot ghee. This fat-tempering technique, called vaghar in Gujarati, has many names and many uses across the country. In this case, the tempering is a great introduction to the resourcefulness and finesse of Indian home cooks: Just a few tablespoons of carefully seasoned fat, tipped in at the very last moment, transform an entire pot.
Keema (Spiced Ground Meat)
Though elite, upper-caste Hindus tend to be vegetarian, most Indians eat meat, and many millions of Muslim Indians eat beef. This saucy keema, which can be made with chicken, lamb, beef or a combination of meat, is simple, comforting home cooking — the meat stretched out and made luxurious in a reduction of spiced tomato. It can be dinner with a couple of soft, shiny bread rolls, or a chapati and a dollop of yogurt. A friend of mine even mixes it with spaghetti and a moderate squirt of ketchup. (Don’t judge!) The secret to this version is to take your time: Caramelize the onions properly for a strong foundation, and once you’ve added the beef, simmer it patiently until the sauce is dark and silky, and the fat has split away, risen to the top, and pooled in every nook.
Sweet Potato Tea Cake With Meringue
This beautiful tea cake from the San Francisco chef Elisabeth Prueitt has all the fall flavors of pumpkin spice channeled into a moist, spicy loaf with a base of sweet potato purée. It also has a delicious unusual addition: meringue, baked right into the top of the cake. Ms. Prueitt’s head of pastry at Tartine Manufactory, Michelle Lee, came up with the idea of swirling it over the top of the cake before baking. Use a spoon or toothpick to reach down into the cake batter and pull it up, creating beautiful peaks of batter-streaked meringue that bake up golden brown and crisp on the edges.
Coconut Rice
Coconut milk lends rice both fat and sweetness, making it a richer, more mellow side than plain rice. To make it, simply replace half of the cooking water with coconut milk. It becomes a meal if you serve it with a fried egg, finely sliced pickled chiles with a little of their pickling liquid and some crushed peanuts. And if you wanted to turn it into dessert, serving it with ripe fruit like cut mango on top, you could stick to the recipe below, but bump the sugar up to 2 tablespoons.
Green Rice (Arroz Verde)
There are many ways to make arroz verde, but most have something in common: a brightness and depth from the addition of plenty of fresh green ingredients, such as chiles and herbs. This recipe toasts the rice in oil first, then seasons it with a purée of onion, poblano, jalapeños and herbs. For a more complex dish, replace the cooking water with chicken stock or vegetable stock, and serve it with a side of soupy black beans.
Chocolate-Cherry Sourdough Bread
This recipe for sourdough bread comes from Francisco Migoya and Nathan Myhrvold, who wrote "Modernist Bread" (The Cooking Lab, 2017). It requires an active sourdough starter and plenty of time (about 20 hours) to allow the dough to develop and proof, though very little of that time is hands-on. Rich with tart dried cherries and dark chocolate chips, and gently bitter from the coffee and cocoa powder, the complex, tangy bread is somewhere between sweet and savory, ideal as is or spread with a little salted butter. Since the dough is dark to begin with, use a thermometer to test if it's done, and make sure you allow it to cool completely before slicing it open.
Choco Pan de Coco
Bryan Ford grew up in New Orleans, eating delicious, dense little pan de coco buns from the Honduran bodegas around town. But as a professional baker, he revisited the bread, using a sourdough starter to add dimension and texture, and even adding cocoa and chocolate chips to sweeten it up. In his cookbook, “New World Sourdough” (Quarry Books, 2020), he calls this version choco pan de coco. The key, according to Mr. Ford, is to bake with love and to celebrate the bread you make — not to compare your own bread to the one in the picture.
Salt-Rising Bread
Salt-rising bread is an American technique with deep roots: Home bakers who developed the bread in Appalachia didn’t have access to yeast, but found a way to bake without it when they noticed that their milk starters bubbled up overnight. It’s much easier and far more consistent to get a good rise with yeast — even bakers who make salt-rising bread regularly have failures with the finicky technique. But those who continue the tradition are rewarded with light, tender, airy crumbed bread that makes a particularly delicious toast. Be sure to maintain the starter at an even temperature, as directed, or it won’t take.