Recipes By Tejal Rao
135 recipes found
Teff Carrot Cake
This deeply spiced carrot cake is studded with toasted walnuts and coconut, and sandwiched with a tangy mix of cream cheese and butter. It's also gluten-free, and festive enough to prepare for a special occasion. The cake comes from the San Francisco pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt, whose interest in baking with alternative flours has led to many exceptional wheat-free creations. Made with teff flour and sweetened with a mix of coconut sugar and granulated sugar, it results in a tender, moist crumb and irresistible texture.
Shaker Lemon Pie
Thanksgiving often coincides with the arrival of all kinds of great citrus, which is why the chef Elisabeth Prueitt, of Tartine in San Francisco, offered this take on a classic Shaker lemon pie. Traditionally made from whole lemons, this version also incorporates blood oranges and cardamom, and it’s a bright, welcome addition to the pecan and pumpkin desserts this time of year. Start it the day before by slicing the fruit and leaving it to sit in sugar overnight, then mix it with beaten eggs the next day. At home, Ms. Prueitt uses her tangy all-purpose cream cheese dough, which also happens to be gluten-free, but you could use regular pie dough if you prefer. Baking the pan directly on the oven floor (or on a baking stone placed on the oven floor) helps ensure that it browns evenly.
Turkey and Noodles
This comforting family recipe belongs to Whitney Reynolds, a New Yorker with roots in Tennessee. The Reynolds family traditionally serves the dish of thickened turkey broth and noodle-shaped dumplings as a side at Thanksgiving dinner, next to the roasted bird and mashed potatoes. The yolk-rich noodles, rolled and cut with a knife, are dried out for some hours at room temperature. That way, they become strong enough to withstand a long boil during which they soak up the flavors of the roasted turkey stock, going tender and sticky-edged. The stock reduces, until it's somewhere between soup and a thick, shining gravy. Noodle purists would never put turkey meat in the dish, but the day after Thanksgiving, when there's often a little left over, it's hard to imagine a better place for it to end up. Consider it optional.
Citrus Salad With Peanuts and Avocado
There’s really no need for leafy greens in a big, meaty citrus salad. The first step is to acquire a range of fruit — citrus of different colors, sizes and shapes, with varied levels of acidity and sweetness. Cutting the fruit so you don’t lose too much juice is key: Cut the pith and peel with a knife, then slice the fruit horizontally with a sharp knife that doesn’t crush and squeeze. A simple dressing of fish sauce, sweetened with a little brown sugar, works well, especially when it’s offset with some fatty pieces of avocado and some fresh herbs.
Date-and-Walnut Bars
This recipe for golden, chewy, date-and-walnut-packed bars comes from the Los Angeles pastry chef Margarita Manzke, who grew up in the Philippines and now runs the sweet side of the kitchen at République. When she was in high school, Manzke came across the classic recipe for “food for the gods” in a thin pamphlet of Filipino desserts, and she made the bars again and again, learning how to produce a consistently tender, chewy batch: Don’t overcream the butter, and don’t use a light hand with the dates. Manzke sells fresh bars at République, but know that at home the cooled, cut bars store well in the freezer, ready to pop out and defrost at a moment's notice.
Thin and Crisp Apple Tart
This French-style apple tart is topped with nothing but fruit and a squeeze of lemon juice. Make it with homemade rough puff pastry, or a store-bought sheet of puff pastry, and use a mandolin or a sharp knife to slice the apples finely, so they're almost see-through, then crowd the slices on the tart as closely as you can. Don't skip buttering and sugaring the parchment paper in the beginning, which gives the crust a touch of smoky caramel all along the bottom.
Beans and Garlic Toast in Broth
A simple dish of creamy, thin-skinned beans and broth on toast is easy to make, and a comfort to eat alone or feed a crowd. If you make the beans ahead of time, they can keep in the fridge for 3 days, but may need a splash of water added when you heat them up. The broth is a great way to make use of parmigiano rinds, if you happen to be saving those, but if you don’t have any lying around, you can still make it rich with umami: Whisk a heaped tablespoon of white miso with a little of the bean broth to make it smooth and lump-free, then add it back to the pot. It will add a similar, savory depth. The dish seems plain, but it won’t be if you season the broth well, and garnish each bowl generously with olive oil, grated cheese and herbs, just before you eat it.
Frangipane-Prune Tart
Prunes, or dried plums, are a delicious, often underrated baking ingredient in the United States. In France, the fruit is used in sweet and savory recipes, including this one for a popular dessert filled with frangipane, or buttery almond cream, and plenty of plumped fruit, baked together until the filling turns a golden brown on top and the prunes are as sweet and tender as caramels. You could use a store-bought pie or tart shell, slightly parbaked before filling it up, or follow a recipe for an all-butter pie crust.
Homemade Red Wine Vinegar
This simple recipe for homemade vinegar comes from Harry Rosenblum, a founder of the Brooklyn Kitchen and the author of “Vinegar Revival.” To make it, you’ll need a little raw, live, unpasteurized vinegar, or a vinegar mother (which you can buy online, or pick up from a vinegar-making friend). Be sure to aerate the wine before you start, which helps get it ready to ferment, and remember that the timeline in the recipe is a only a guide: The best way to get a sense what’s happening as your alcohol transforms into vinegar is to observe it and taste it frequently. Instead of red wine, you can also try the recipe with a rosé, sake, hard cider or your favorite beer. Just keep in mind that if the beverage has an alcohol content of 8 percent or lower, there’s no need to add water at the beginning.
Rice Noodles With Spicy Pork and Herbs
This cold rice-noodle dish, dressed in vinegar and chile oil and topped with spicy pork, herbs and peanuts, has roots in Yunnan, a southwestern Chinese province, where the garnish may vary according to the kitchen and season. The dish is quick to put together but can be served at a leisurely pace: Plate it, or set all of the components on the table and let people put together their own bowls the way they like, to their taste. The chef Simone Tong, who runs a Yunnan-inspired noodle restaurant in Manhattan, makes her version with ground pork, peanuts and a mix of fresh herbs but adds raw breakfast radishes and lacto-fermented pickles as well, for extra crunch and flavor. Feel free to do the same, or not; it’s in the spirit of the dish to improvise with what’s in season and what’s on hand.
Lamb-Shoulder Mafe With Fonio
The Senegalese-born chef Pierre Thiam makes this lamb mafe with meat from the shoulder, on or off the bone, which goes tender after a stretch of unattended, gentle simmering. Adapting the dish in New York, Thiam thickened it with jarred peanut butter, which lends the sauce its characteristic creaminess, and Vietnamese fish sauce, for salty depth. Though he leaves the Scotch bonnet whole, if you want a more intense taste of it, crush it apart with a wooden spoon, and you'll tap right into its bright, floral heat. You could serve the stew with rice, or a number of other grains, but Thiam serves his on a heap of warm fonio, a tiny, tender, ancient grain that can be found partly cooked and dehydrated in many West African grocery stores, as well as specialty food stores and health food markets.
Tembleque (Coconut Pudding)
The journalist and cookbook author Von Diaz cooked her way through the classic Puerto Rican cookbook, Cocina Criolla, about six years ago, eventually using the experience as a jumping off point for her own cookbook, "Coconuts and Collards." Her recipe for tembleque, the delicious coconut-milk pudding set with cornstarch and chilled in the fridge, is simple, but it does involve one laborious task: making coconut milk from scratch. As Diaz notes in her book, the effort is greatly rewarded — fresh coconut milk is infinitely more complex, floral and delicious than the kind that comes in a can. Mature coconuts, the ones ideal for making coconut milk, should be brown, hairy and very heavy. If you shake them around, you should be able to hear the water inside. (That said, you can absolutely use canned if you like; just cut the sugar back to a half cup.)
Syrian Walnut Baklava
Marhaf Homsi learned to make this Syrian-style walnut baklava from his family in Hama. The baklava he and his wife, Nawal Wardeh, now bake in Brooklyn and sell at their online store, Syrian Sweet Refuge, is less intensely sweet than the sticky confection familiar to many Americans. Cut into large squares, as is traditional in Hama, where the couple ran a bakery for 30 years, the baklava is lightly soaked in a lemon sugar syrup, rather than honey. Use the best quality walnuts available and chop them by hand; Mr. Homsi finds that walnuts chopped in a food processor get bruised and overly pulverized, creating a powdery texture. Be sure to leave time to defrost frozen phyllo dough, which takes 2 hours to thaw on the counter.
Tart Crust
This recipe for the buttery dough, known in French as pâte brisée, comes via the pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz. It makes enough for two 10-inch tarts; divide the dough into two equal-size balls, flatten into discs, wrap well in plastic wrap and keep in the freezer to defrost whenever you need it. It can be used for sweet or savory recipes, like this potato-and-radicchio tart.
Cream Cheese Dough
The chef and baker Elisabeth Prueitt’s favorite all-purpose dough was inspired by classic rugelach. That dough traditionally combines cream cheese with butter to create a pliable, tangy and tender pastry. Ms. Prueitt, the baking genius behind the sweets at Tartine Manufactory in San Francisco, adapted it to make a versatile, all-purpose, gluten-free pastry. She now uses it for pies, galettes, bars and even savory pastries and tarts. Use it to make her Shaker lemon pie. Got scraps? Bake those, too. Dusted with powdered sugar, they make great little cookies.