Brunch
923 recipes found
Fluffy Pumpkin Pancakes
Crisp fall mornings call for cozy breakfasts, and these fluffy pumpkin pancakes are just the thing to warm you right up. Packed with pumpkin and a sprinkle of cinnamon and vanilla, they feel and taste special, but are quick to stir together. The buttermilk and pumpkin make the batter quite thick, but they will spread. Be sure to leave lots of room between the pancakes when cooking them.
Mushroom Bread Pudding
Wonderful served as a brunch centerpiece or as a holiday side, this rich meatless casserole can be assembled in advance, refrigerated overnight, then baked just before serving. You could certainly prepare it day-of and let the bread soak for 15 minutes before baking, but allowing it to sit overnight will make it more tender. Delicate brioche is the ideal bread for this pudding, and it is available in most supermarkets, often in the form of hamburger rolls, which are a good size and shape for this dish. Challah is also a good option, but it’s a bit denser, so it may take more than 15 minutes for it to soak up the custard.
Rice Cooker Steel-Cut Oats
The rice cooker isn’t a one-trick pony: It’s actually the secret to waking up to hot, creamy oatmeal. Steel-cut oats soften in the machine while retaining their nutty flavor and nubby chew — all without any effort on your part. Since rice cooker models vary, you can play around with the water proportions to achieve your favorite consistency. Generally, though, you’ll need a lot more water to oats using a rice cooker because oats stiffen and soak up even more water as they rest after cooking. Once they’re done, you can top them however you like, but regardless of whether you prefer your oats sweet or savory, be sure to cook them with salt to enhance their flavor.
Overnight Pumpkin Spice French Toast
You only need a few everyday ingredients like milk, bread and eggs — plus a heavy dose of your favorite pumpkin spice blend — to make this warming breakfast for a crowd. The whole thing is assembled the night before, so all you need to do when you wake up is a few finishing touches before you pop it in the oven. If you don’t have a favorite pumpkin spice blend, there is one at the bottom of this recipe for you to try. Don’t forget the maple syrup — and potentially some toasted nuts or fruit — to serve.
Maple Pecan Monkey Bread
Maple syrup gives an autumnal feel and subtler sweetness to traditionally sugary monkey bread. Any grade of maple syrup works: B and C will give you a more robust maple flavor, while Grade A will deliver a more delicate, refined sweetness. Here, the syrup is mixed with brown butter and used to glaze extra-rich brioche dough rounds and toasted pecans. It all caramelizes together into a fluffy yet chewy pull-apart bread punctuated with the crunch of nuts. If you prefer a rustic look, you don’t have to roll the pieces of dough into balls. Just cut them into even pieces and coat with the cinnamon sugar. This recipe is at its soft and gooey best the day it’s made, but it can be kept at room temperature overnight and reheated in a 350-degree oven for 10 minutes.
Apple-Gruyère French Toast With Red Onion
Light and fluffy, here the bread takes on a soft, cakelike texture from its custard bath, which is a nice foil to the sharp cheese, savory onions and caramelized apple. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this sandwich could replace latkes on Hanukkah. But it sure makes a nice alternative that I could see making all year long.
Home Fries
The great thing about this recipe is that it can be cooked in just one skillet — and it eliminates the time-consuming task of blanching your potatoes first. Water, oil and salt are combined in one pan. Once the potatoes enter the skillet, the lid is added and the potatoes steam, cooking evenly and absorbing the flavors of the salt and oil. Once the lid comes off, the water evaporates yet the oil remains, so the potatoes pan-fry until crispy. The results? Crunchy home fries with pillowy centers. If cooking for a crowd, double or triple the recipe, but do cook in batches, to avoid crowding the pan.
Biscuits and Gravy
This is not the traditional way to make biscuits, but it may become your new technique. Instead of preparing individual drop biscuits, a sturdy dough is spread out into a baking dish over a bed of melted butter. Scoring the biscuit dough allows the butter to seep into the sides as the biscuits bake, creating tall biscuits with crisp edges and flaky insides. They’re perfect to soak up a classic Southern gravy, warmly seasoned with sage and nutmeg. This dish tastes like the holidays in the best way possible, while still being light enough for brunch. But if you made it for dinner, we wouldn’t blame you.
Torta Rustica With Ricotta and Spinach
Torta rustica (also called pizza rustica) is a rich, ricotta-stuffed pie that’s traditionally baked for Easter in Southern Italy. This version includes greens (either spinach or chard) for color and freshness. The ham is optional; feel free to leave it out, or substitute chopped olives or sundried tomatoes if you’re looking for a similar savory bite. The crust, adapted from Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s 2007 cookbook, “Cucina del Sole,” is sturdy and slightly sweet, which makes a nice contrast to the salty filling. (For more on producing a lattice-style crust, see our How to Make Pie Crust guide.)
Fluffy Cheddar Biscuits
These biscuits are golden and crisp outside, light and fluffy inside, and wonderfully cheesy inside and out. They come together in minutes, and triple basting them in butter (before baking, halfway through baking and once more when they come out of the oven) really takes them over the top. You may be tempted to skip the 3 tablespoons of sugar in this otherwise savory biscuit, but don’t: It’s the secret to the biscuit’s tender interior. Inspired by Red Lobster’s buttery biscuits, these are drop-style, which means you just scoop up the batter and gently plop it onto baking sheets. Try to handle the dough gently to avoid compressing it, which can result in a less-than-fluffy biscuit.
Grapefruit with Olive Oil and Sea Salt
At Marco’s, the chef Danny Amend takes the brunch cliché of a broiled grapefruit half and turns it on its head. In his version, fresh grapefruit are sliced into rounds and very simply dressed with superb olive oil and flaky sea salt. The result is a juicy salad that works particularly well when served with sausages, eggs, and other rich brunch favorites. Or offer it for dinner with grilled or roasted meats. If you can’t get good grapefruit, try it with oranges, tangerines and other citrus.
Spicy Big Tray Chicken
At Spicy Village in in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Spicy Big Tray Chicken arrives on an aluminum tray. You eat it on a foam plate with a plastic fork or chopsticks. It’s a mound of chicken nearly afloat in a bath of dark, spicy sauce that contains star anise, Sichuan peppercorns, chile, garlic, cilantro, a few mystery ingredients and potatoes. Those of you who live in or visit New York should eat this dish whenever you can, but it can absolutely be prepared at home. It’s not precisely a simple recipe. But it’s an excellent project one. And you can improve on the ingredients. The restaurant uses both MSG and Budweiser in the recipe. We subbed in Modelo Negra and omitted the MSG, but you certainly don't need to.
Cheese Grits
There’s very little simpler than cooking grits. A few ingredients come together into something comforting, good for a cold morning and just as good for Sunday dinner. Use the best ingredients, pull out that pepper mill and season well. Make sure you pay attention to the details. The trick to good grits is cooking out the grittiness. The extra cream and frequent stirring here give it a consistency that’s not too dense and not too liquidy. Don’t leave it alone too long: If you stir it frequently, giving it love, it will love you back.
Skillet Poached Eggs
There’s a little trick here that makes poaching eggs easy and prevents them from spreading into flat, floppy disks: rolling the eggs in the boiling water in their shells before cracking them into the pan. This technique helps them maintain their shape when they’re cracked into the boiling water. Because the whites don’t spread, six eggs can fit in a skillet comfortably without running into one another, and you can serve a crowd with little effort. You can use this move to poach fewer eggs, too, of course. No matter how many you cook, you’ll end up with silky eggs for toast, a breakfast sandwich or as an accompaniment to bacon, sausage, waffles or pancakes.
Cherry Tomato and White Bean Salad
This simple salad makes a bright, tangy companion to grilled meat or fish. Marinating the red onions and garlic in the vinaigrette for 15 minutes not only diffuses their flavor but also softens their bite. This salad travels well and would be an excellent choice for a potluck or picnic. It’s also supremely versatile, and can be dressed up with any soft herb like basil, tarragon or mint, and chile, in almost any form.
Berry-Jam Fried Chicken
The name sounds like a sweet-tooth parade, but this recipe makes sense when you pair it with a spicy scallion cornmeal waffle. Wells’ Restaurant, a popular 1930s Harlem supper club, cemented the chicken and waffle combination in American culinary history; Amy Ruth’s in Harlem, Beans & Cornbread in suburban Detroit and Hotville in Los Angeles continue that tradition. Almost any summer-fruit jam can be substituted in the marinade, and if you don't have peanut oil, use another oil with a high smoke point.
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.
Rock-Shrimp Roll
Rock shrimp are meaty and firm, like lobster tail, and have a mild, bland flavor that can really use the help of seasoning at several stages. So we salt them before cooking and during cooking. Once the shrimp are mixed with onion and celery and mayonnaise, taste the shrimp salad as a whole to decide if it could stand even another pinch of salt or grind of pepper. But use unsalted butter on the bun when griddling, to get the perfect play between the sweet and the saline.
Perfect Boiled Eggs
If your goal is perfectly smooth, blemish-free boiled eggs that jump out of their shells every single time, I’ve got bad news: No technique in the world can promise that level of perfection. But armed with data from scientific tests done with more than 90 testers and more than 700 boiled eggs, this technique for boiled eggs — technically steamed, as they cook in just an inch of water — will maximize your odds. Fresher eggs will take slightly longer to peel, but they should peel just as cleanly as older eggs. The eggs in this recipe should be cooked straight from the refrigerator; reduce cooking times by 1 minute if using room-temperature eggs.
French Onion Grilled Cheese
Grilled cheese is a near-perfect food on its own, but adding bacon, kimchi or, in this case, heaps of caramelized onions really makes it special. Caramelizing onions takes a good half-hour, so save this recipe for when you have a little extra time and company (this recipe serves two). If time permits, you could even prep them ahead in a slow cooker. Rather than layer the grated Gruyère and the warm caramelized onions in the sandwich, you should stir them together before assembling, which guarantees that the cheese will melt evenly throughout and that each bite will contain the perfect ratio of fragrant cheese to jammy onions. A splash of sherry, red-wine or white-wine vinegar added to the onions balances out the buttery flavors, but a side salad dressed with a tangy mustard vinaigrette would do the trick, too. (Watch the video of Ali Slagle making French onion grilled cheese here.)
Filipino-Style Breakfast Sandwiches
Breakfast is hugely important in Filipino culture, a legacy of the country’s rich agricultural past, when farmworkers ate large morning meals to get through the day. Accordingly, the morning after Thanksgiving, the brothers Chad and Chase Valencia — who own the Filipino restaurant Lasa in Los Angeles's Chinatown — make breakfast sandwiches for their family out of leftover asado (a salty-sour pork dish), ham or turkey. The sandwiches are endlessly customizable: Chase mixes the asado and its accompanying sauce into the eggs, like a scramble, to become the base of the sandwich, while Chad crowns his with a fried egg. But the constants are the queso de bola, a nutty Filipino cheese (similar to Edam cheese) served during the holidays that melts elegantly atop the meat, and pan de sal, a slightly squishy, yeasted roll whose sweetness stands up to all the savory components of the sandwich. Both the cheese and the pan de sal are readily available at many Asian grocery stores, and well worth getting to make superior sandwiches.
Fruit Sandwich
The origins of the fruit sandwich are believed to go back to Japan’s luxury fruit stores and the fruit parlors attached to them. This version comes from Yudai Kanayama, a native of Hokkaido who runs the restaurants the Izakaya NYC and Dr Clark in New York. Fresh fruit — fat strawberries, golden mango, kiwi with black ellipses of seeds, or whatever you like — is engulfed in whipped cream mixed with mascarpone, which makes it implausibly airy yet dense. (In Japanese, the texture is called fuwa-fuwa: fluffy like a cloud.) Pressed on either side are crustless slices of shokupan, milk bread that agreeably springs back. The sandwich looks like dessert but isn’t, or not exactly; it makes for a lovely little meal that feels slightly illicit, as if for a moment there are no rules.
Eggs in Purgatory
It’s unclear whether "purgatory" refers to the bubbling red tomato sauce used to poach the eggs in this easy skillet meal or the fire of the red-pepper flakes that the sauce is spiked with. In either case, this speedy Southern Italian dish, whipped up from pantry staples, makes for a heavenly brunch, lunch or light supper. Note that the anchovies are not traditional, but they add a subtle fishy richness to the tomatoes. However, feel free to leave them out.
Classic Kouign-Amann
A yeast-risen pastry with soft layers, deep buttery flavor and a chewy, caramelized top, this recipe, adapted from Nicolas Henry of the Montreal patisserie Au Kouign-Amann, celebrates the classic Breton kouign-amann, traditionally made as a round skillet cake and served as slices. There’s no shortcut and no substitute for the repetition needed to perfect this pastry. But you are in good hands: The process is a series of simple steps, with plenty of opportunities to make ahead. And the results of your efforts are sure to please, whether it accompanies your morning coffee, serves as a delightful afternoon snack or stunningly ends a meal. You’ll need an oven-safe nonstick skillet for this cake. A cast-iron skillet will work, but will produce a deeper, more caramelized result.