American Recipes
2885 recipes found
Crispy Smoked Shiitakes
Most vegetable charcuterie involves several days of curing and smoking, but these crispy smoked shiitakes — mushroom bacon, if you will — can be made from start to finish in less than a half hour. The recipe comes from a terrific vegan restaurant in Washington D.C., called Fancy Radish, by way of the chef and co-owner Rich Landau. It involves a two-step process: First you fry thinly sliced shiitakes to make them crisp, then you smoke them to make them taste like bacon. You can do the smoking in your smoker or a charcoal grill, or indoors with a handheld or stovetop smoker. You’ll love the crisp crunch and rich, baconlike mouthfeel, with a smoky flavor that’s similar to bacon’s but with distinct mushroom overtones. Make shiitake crispy smoked shiitakes for a vegan snack or BLT, or serve it with eggs if you eat them.
Reverse-Seared Steak
Reverse-searing is a grilling technique for steak that ensures a dark, sizzling crust and a rosy center that is perfectly cooked to your desired degree of doneness. This brilliant grilling method combines the low and slow cooking of traditional barbecue with the high heat charring practiced at steakhouses. Though it works well with any thick steak, from picanha to porterhouse, this recipe calls for a cut of steak popularized in Santa Maria, Calif., and is today known and loved across the U.S. as tri-tip. As the name suggests, it’s a triangular or boomerang-shaped steak cut from the tip of the sirloin, blessed with a robust beefy flavor.
Ham-Cured, Smoked Pork With Cognac-Orange Glaze
Think of this cured, smoked pork loin as ham you can make in a hurry, with 2 days’ curing time and an hour or so of smoking, as opposed to the weeks or even months that a traditional ham takes. Plus, the loin has no bones, so it’s a snap to carve. For the best results, use a heritage pork loin, like Berkshire or Duroc. Depending on your grill, the pork and the weather, smoking time may be as short as 1 hour or as long as 1 1/2 hours. The orange juice in this Cognac-citrus glaze cuts the saltiness of the cure, while the Cognac makes a nice counterpoint to the wood smoke. Besides, brown sugar and orange marmalade go great with salty ham.
Copper Country Pasties
Lowcountry Pickled Coleslaw
Ben Moïse, a retired game warden in South Carolina, has been serving a version of this coleslaw at his Frogmore stew parties for years. The hot, boiled dressing softens the cabbage and pickles it slightly. The result is a salad that stays delicious even when it sits outside on a picnic table for a few hours. The amount of vegetables can vary, and a finely chopped jalapeño can be added for a little extra heat.
Tres Leches Bread Pudding
Pastel de tres leches, a traditional Latin American dessert, consists of a basic sponge cake doused in three types of milk: condensed, evaporated and whole milk or cream. Inspired by the classic cake, this bread pudding transforms those three milks into a rich custard that gets absorbed by buttery cubes of brioche. As it bakes in a water bath, it becomes golden and toasty on the top and soft and pillowy on the bottom. Serve it at any temperature with a dollop of whipped cream and a drizzle of condensed milk. If you have any leftovers, eat them for breakfast topped with a little Greek yogurt and some fresh fruit.
Larder’s Smoked Carrots With Roasted Yeast
Jeremy Umansky is a master meat curer from Cleveland, where he runs a new wave deli called Larder. New wave? The guy serves smoked carrots and burdock root “meat sticks” alongside house-cured pancetta, pastrami and bresaola. His passion for — and obsession with — koji, the miracle spore used by the Japanese to turn soybeans into soy sauce and miso, runs so deep, he not only gave a TED Talk on the topic, he wrote a whole book about it, “Koji Alchemy” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020). Most of his vegetable charcuterie involves a complex curing, smoking and aging process, plus fermentation with koji, but these carrots can be smoked from start to finish in about an hour. The roasted yeast rub gives them an otherworldly flavor that’s smoky, malty and absolutely unique.
Kitchen Sink Cookies
These salty-sweet, crisp-soft cookies are a great way to use up extra candy, baking chocolate and even pretzels and chips. Making toffee is surprisingly easy and it's fun to mix in chopped peanuts, sesame seeds or whatever you like — but store-bought toffee bits are fine, too. (And you can make the cookies smaller, or drop the chilled dough onto the cookie sheet instead of slicing it, if you prefer.)
Double Strawberry Cheesecake
This creamy pink dessert breaks out of the usual strawberry cheesecake mold. Instead of two distinct layers (creamy cheesecake on the bottom, bright red berries on top), the berries and cream cheese mixture are puréed together until smooth, silky and deeply flavored. A little red wine adds complexity and intensifies the rosy color, but feel free to use water or orange juice instead. Just don’t skip the goat cheese, which tamps down the sweetness and adds a mild and pleasant earthiness to the cake without being an obvious ingredient. You can make this three days ahead; store it in the refrigerator until just before serving. It’s at its best served cold.
Red Wine-Braised Short Ribs With Lemongrass and Soy
This is the dish that the chef Marcus Samuelsson made for President Obama when he visited the restaurant Red Rooster Harlem. This is an easy braise with wonderful flavors — plum sauce, lemongrass, soy sauce — and as it is pointed out in "The Red Rooster Cookbook," short ribs taste more expensive than they actually are, making them ideal for guests. Make it earlier in the day, then simply reheat when you're ready to serve dinner. The book suggests freezing the extra braising liquid in ice cube trays, so you can slip it into pan sauces or pasta for oomph.
A Spice Cookie to Share
The only thing better than a plate of cookies is one big cookie meant to be shared by everyone around the table. It’s the kind of dessert that will encourage your friends and family to linger at the table and to keep the conversation going. It’s a brown-sugar cookie redolent of ginger, honey, cinnamon and clove that carries the scent of the season and tacks between crisp and slightly chewy, between gingersnap and gingerbread. That it has ground coffee in it marks it as a sweet for grown-ups. It’s a roll-out cookie, but not a fussy one – any shape works and ragged is better than perfect. I usually sprinkle the cookie with sanding sugar, but you can drizzle it with melted chocolate or frost it, if you’d like. For extra fun, put out chocolate or caramel sauce (or both) and invite everyone to dip.
Lemon Goop and Vinaigrette
The first time I made this lemon concoction, I called it “goop,” and still haven’t found a better name. My inspiration was an offbeat lemon jam I’d had in a Paris bistro. The jam, which I think was served with mackerel, was thick, velvety, salty, tangy, only a bit sweet and made with salt-cured preserved lemons. Haunted by the flavor and not patient enough to wait a month for lemons to cure, I cooked ordinary lemons, some with their peel, in a sugar-and-salt syrup, then blended them into a kind of marmalade, the goop. It’s excellent swiped over cooked fish, seafood, chicken or vegetables. The syrup, fragrant and full flavored, is terrific in marinades and great mixed with a little goop, sherry and cider vinegars, honey and oil to make a vinaigrette for beans, grains and hearty salads. I guess that goop is technically a condiment, but I call it a transformer. It’s that good.
Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
What makes these cookies truly “perfect” isn’t anything radical; it’s simply an attention to detail. The pastry chef Ravneet Gill was meticulous in developing her recipe, and all of her instructions exist for a reason. When she tells you to chill your dough overnight, don’t think you can skip over that. (If you do, your cookies will spread.) When she instructs you to roll the dough into balls before transferring them to the fridge to rest, do as she says, and you’ll get a nice plump, domed cookie instead of a sad flat one. Don’t go swapping in milk chocolate for dark, and chop the chocolate into large chunks for those dramatic, dense puddles of goo. One allowance: If you don’t have Maldon salt, another flaky salt or even kosher salt will do.
Milk and Honey Cake
The flavor of this ultrabuttery layer cake, adapted from Odette Williams’s “Simple Cake” (Ten Speed Press, 2019), can be as mild or pronounced as you like, depending on the variety of honey you use. Clover honey will give you something gentle and mellow, while more assertive buckwheat or chestnut honey have more depth. You can serve the cake plain, with dollops of the whipped cream on the side, for a casual gathering, or frost and fill it, adding berries or other fruit, for a more celebratory affair. It makes an excellent birthday cake.
Mulling-Spice Cake With Cream-Cheese Frosting
The spices in this cake from “Live Life Deliciously” by Tara Bench (Shadow Mountain, 2020) are, indeed, those you’d use if you were mulling cider or wine. They’re the flavors of fall and winter, and especially of the holidays; that their aromas linger in the kitchen is a bonus. They’re warm and hearty enough to hold their own when blended with the cake’s apple cider and molasses (use an unsulfured brand, such as Grandma’s). The batter is very thin, but it bakes up sturdy, easy to cut and ready to be generously filled and covered with cream cheese frosting. The cake is lovely on its own, but it welcomes extras. Ms. Bench decorates hers with almond and candy Christmas trees, but a little crystallized ginger or chocolate is nice too.
Skillet Mustard Chicken With Spinach and Carrots
In this one-skillet meal, mustard-coated chicken thighs are nestled on a bed of butter-sautéed scallions and carrots before the whole pan is popped into the oven to roast until golden. Just before serving, baby spinach and loads of fresh dill are tossed with the pan drippings, wilting slightly and absorbing all of the rich flavors. Serve this over rice or polenta, or with bread for mopping up the drippings. That’s all you’ll need to make it a satisfying meal.
Citrus Layer Cake With Orange and Chocolate Frosting
This cake appeared in The Times in 1954 as Halloween Cake, the centerpiece for a children’s party. When you strip away the original instructions for decoration (dyed yellow frosting and a black cat of piped chocolate), you’re left with a luscious citrus cake that works for any occasion, All Hallows’ Eve included.
Strawberry Galette
A strawberry galette served with a side of fresh whipped cream or ice cream is a spring salve that is just as soothing to prepare for oneself as it is to share with others. Inspired by the baker Alice Medrich’s yogurt-butter pie dough, the dough in this recipe includes almond flour for a flaky, subtly nutty crust that comes together without much fuss. This dough is very forgiving and works well with the rustic charm of a galette. It’s OK if the edges of the crust crack and some juices leak. Even out-of-season strawberries would work, as there’s just enough sugar here to coax them back to life. Make sure you give the galette enough time to rest before slicing into it, so that the juices have time to set.
Skillet Chicken Thighs With Broccoli and Orzo
A one-pan meal is always a good option for a weeknight. This one is nice and bright because of the white wine and lemon, and rich from the olive oil and butter. You can save on prep time by using precut fresh or even frozen broccoli florets to get dinner on the table even faster. For those who like crispy bits, keep the skillet on the stove for a little bit longer so that the orzo browns where it meets the pan, as it would in a paella or fideuà.
Slow-Cooked Beef Cheeks With Spring Vegetables and Rosemary
Edna Lewis’s Rhubarb Pie
The chef and cookbook writer Edna Lewis believed that the key to spring cooking was a light hand, and here she goes easy on rhubarb, sweetening it just a little with sugar and nutmeg. This recipe, which was featured in The Times in 1991, tempers the rhubarb’s natural tartness a bit but still allows it through, showcasing the fruit’s natural texture.
Anchovy-Garlic Dressing
Tasting this bold dressing on its own, straight out of the jar, might make your eyes widen. It is very assertive. But don’t tone it down thinking there must be an error. The high ratio of potent raw garlic to bright lemon juice to salty anchovy is very much on purpose — once you spoon the dressing over cold braised celery hearts or fennel heads or steamed cauliflower or leafy mustard greens, the ferocity is tamed. If it didn’t start so high and assertive, it would become docile rather than perfectly obedient.
Lemon-Soda Buttermilk Parfait
These seriously elegant and tongue-tingling parfaits are an excellent dessert to have in your year-round repertoire and are as perfect in the formal dining room under the chandelier as they are in the backyard tent on picnic tables under the paper streamers. Alternating thin precise layers of lemon soda gelatin and tangy buttermilk gelatin takes patience and focus, but once built, they can sit, covered, up to a week in the refrigerator. Be sure to pull them twenty minutes before serving to allow the fully chilled and set parfaits to relax a little, tempering to a perfectly jiggly consistency — then try not to giggle as you eat that first zingy lemony spoonful.
Pocket Dressing
In a lot of states, people don’t just eat food on Thanksgiving; they hunt for it. Lora Smith, a writer and farmer with roots in Kentucky, sends along a recipe handed down from her great-grandmother, for her family’s “pocket” dressing: a baked patty of dressing that slides easily into the pockets and knapsacks of rabbit and quail hunters. The Smiths also have the patties at the table, where they are passed around on a platter. Texture is key. The outside must be browned and crisp. Inside, softness comes from cornbread and biscuits, and chewiness from foraged mushrooms. A family member (traditionally, the oldest matriarch) leaves a thumbprint indentation on each patty before baking, so that a little gravy can settle and soak in. The hunt continued through Thanksgiving weekend. “They’d again take the leftover dressing wrapped in wax paper with them, and sometimes turkey sandwiches or turkey with fresh biscuits pulled out of the oven that morning,” Ms. Smith said. “My father always carried a small backpack where he kept extra leftovers and cold bottles of Coke. His other job was to carry the rabbits and quail they shot in the backpack.” When the weather was especially chilly, the patties solved another problem. According to Ms. Smith, “they also served as nice hand warmers.”