Citrus
1591 recipes found
Classic Mentaiko Spaghetti
Mentaiko spaghetti is a staple of wafu cuisine, or Japanese adaptations of foreign ingredients. At its simplest, mentaiko spaghetti is made with nothing more than mentaiko (the salt-cured roe of Alaskan pollock), cream, butter and some simple umami seasonings like soy sauce or Parmesan. They’re whisked together in a bowl and tossed with hot pasta and a splash of pasta water, as with any sauce that is best served warm but uncooked (like pesto or carbonara). Adding an egg yolk to the base gives the dish a glossier, creamier texture, and using crème fraîche in lieu of regular heavy cream brightens the flavors. So does a bit of lemon zest and juice. The minty flavor of Japanese shiso leaves is a nice finish, but mint, basil, parsley, chives or even torn nori all work.
Caramelized Zucchini and White Bean Salad
This flavorful and hearty salad makes use of one of summer’s most abundant vegetables, zucchini. You start with a big pile of shredded zucchini and onions, then might marvel at how much it cooks down as it browns and caramelizes. Next, you’ll toss that potent blend with creamy white beans and herbs to make an easy, flavorful side or main. The mint adds brightness, and it pairs well with other soft herbs, like parsley, dill and basil. The caramelized zucchini mixture makes a great base for bean salad, but it is so versatile it can be used in many other ways: Make a big batch and toss it with pasta, serve it on top of ricotta-slathered toast, or top a flatbread with it; you really can’t go wrong.
7Up Sheet Cake
This old-fashioned Southern dessert, commonly seen at potlucks, church picnics and family barbecues, is a true center-of-the-table cake. Part lemon cake, part sheet cake, it uses 7Up in two ways: first, for moisture and, second, for leavening, replacing traditional leaveners, such as baking soda or baking powder. The carbonation in the soda helps the cake rise and keeps it tender. (If you don’t have 7Up, you can also use Sprite.) While this cake is traditionally made in a Bundt pan, this recipe uses a half sheet tray, which is perfect for feeding a crowd.
Classic Lemon Tart
This classic lemon tart has a buttery, shortbread crust and a soft, dense lemon curd filling that barely holds its shape when you cut a slice. The textures should be a combination of crunchy and velvety; the flavor, sharp and tangy, with just enough sugar to take the edge off the citrus. This version has all of that, with one tweak for ease. Instead of making a traditional dough that needs to be shaped with a rolling pin, this one has a simple press-in-the-pan cookie crust made with melted butter. For a nutty-scented brown butter crust, let the butter cook until it turns golden. This tart is at its best when served on the day it’s baked, but it’s still delightful a day or two later (though the crust will lose some of its crispness). Store it in the refrigerator and serve it cold or at room temperature.
Grilled Chicken Breasts
Depending on your perspective, a chicken breast can be a bland protein requiring bold external seasonings to make it palatable — but it’s also a blank canvas awaiting your culinary creativity. Either way, it has the advantage of cooking quickly and the disadvantage of potentially drying out on the grill. Enter a simple olive oil, lemon and herb marinade, which adds flavor, keeps the bird moist and doubles as the sauce.
Toasted Sesame and Citrus Wedding Cake
Everyone loves receiving a homemade gift, but how about a showstopping, two-tiered, citrus-festooned, sesame-laced wedding cake? With a little planning (and an organized freezer), it’s so much easier than you think. Thin, even layers of vanilla sponge cake, soaked with a vivid citrus syrup, are draped like lasagna sheets into pans, along with swaths of nutty sesame buttercream, charred citrus compote and a granola-adjacent sesame crunch. The cake rests while you do, then is removed from the pans, coated in buttercream, packed up and assembled the day of the wedding. There's no finer — or more delicious — way to allow the effort, care and creativity of its maker to come through. And don’t forget to save and freeze the excess cake scraps for ice cream sandwiches, trifles or snacking. For the equipment you’ll need to put this cake together, check our Wirecutter’s recommendations for baking essentials and cake decorating tools.
Strawberry Cream Cheese Tart
Briefly simmering fresh strawberries in a light sugar syrup before baking them into a tart keeps the berries plump and juicy and the crust from becoming soggy. Here, the syrupy berries are layered with a cream cheese filling and baked on a sheet of store-bought puff pastry, which turns golden and flaky in the oven. Quick to put together and elegant to serve, it’s a terrific way to showcase the fresh berries.
White Beans and Asparagus With Charred Lemon
These velvety, vegan beans get a lift from lemon, but they also hold a smoky secret. Aromatics are often sweated in fat to bring out their sweetness, but crank the heat and char them instead for, as Tejal Rao wrote, “serious, almost meatlike depth of flavor.” This is a common technique in pho, black-eyed peas and other long simmers, but it also develops flavor in quicker dishes. After searing lemon wedges, their blackened bits scatter throughout beans, asparagus and coconut milk, creating a creamy bowl that’s subtly smoky and comforting. When asparagus isn’t in season, replace it with a dark, leafy green like kale or chard. Serve solo, or with rice.
Torrijas (Spanish-Style French Toast)
Though variations on French toast abound, this torrijas recipe hails primarily from Spain, where the bread slices are first soaked in wine or milk and beaten eggs, then pan-fried until golden and finally dusted with cinnamon sugar or drizzled with honey. You’ll find many approaches to pain perdu (French for “lost bread”), all of which speak to an ancestral desire to turn a stale staple into edible comfort food. The use of Malaga or cream sherry (sweet wines from southern Spain) plants this recipe firmly in the Spanish camp. With its large surface area, the hot griddle permits you to cook it off in just one batch.
Chicken and Artichoke Francese
Inspired by chicken francese, a popular Italian American breaded chicken dish, this lemony breaded chicken-and-artichoke recipe creates a bright, one-skillet meal. This recipe embraces the traditional flavor profile — “Francese” means French in Italian, acknowledging the origins of the butter-and-lemon sauce — but otherwise veers from tradition: The chicken breasts are cut into bite-size pieces (rather than being thinly pounded) to mirror the size of the artichoke hearts. The breaded chicken and artichokes are all prepared in the same pan, then lacquered with the wine and lemon butter sauce. Fried lemon slices add visual flair and tart flavor. A smattering of parsley makes this meal feel like a restaurant-quality dish.
Buckwheat Blueberry Waffles
You could leave your waffles unadorned, but the combination of toasty buckwheat flour, fresh lemon zest, a tickle of nutmeg and pockets of fruit make these practically irresistible. The blueberries here could be fresh or frozen, and feel free to substitute other berries you have on hand. Serve warm with a pat of butter and a generous drizzle of maple syrup or honey. The batter can be prepared ahead and stored refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 24 hours. Remove from the refrigerator and cook as directed in Step 3. The cooked waffles can be tightly wrapped and stored in the freezer for up to 2 weeks. To serve, toast a frozen waffle in a toaster, toaster oven or an oven set to 375 degrees.
Strawberry Parfait
Ricotta cream — sweetened fresh ricotta, lightly whipped — is used in Sicily to fill cannoli or frost traditional cakes. Here, it’s combined with whipped cream and strawberries for a layered “parfait” and a very simple but impressive dessert.
Spring Salad
Some salads are tossed, while others, like this one, are composed. Feel free to improvise here: A few spinach leaves, watercress, a handful of raw sweet garden peas or fava beans, or thinly sliced raw artichoke can be nice additions. For a true celebration of spring, make sure to gather an assortment of complementary leaves, herbs and vegetables, and arrange them artfully.
Marble Cake
Buttery and not too sweet, this pound cake has a fine, tender crumb that’s lovely with tea, coffee and on its own. Because chocolate tends to be the flavor that dominates marble cake, this version includes potent almond extract in the vanilla swirl and delicate orange blossom water in the cocoa batter, so the two tastes balance and complement each other. The cake develops even deeper flavors over time and keeps well at room temperature in an airtight container. It holds up in the freezer as well, wrapped tightly, for up to three months.
Limonada (Brazilian Lemonade)
Creamy, frosty and tart, this popular Brazilian drink is a fantastic refreshment for a hot day. In Brazil, it’s also known as limonada Suíça, which translates to Swiss lemonade, because it typically includes sweetened condensed milk, which was marketed by the Swiss company Nestlé in Brazil in the 1940s. Sweetened condensed milk is essential to Brazilian sweets, including desserts like brigadeiros. A shelf-stable dairy product that doesn’t curdle in the presence of acid, it gets blended here with limes, sugar, ice and water to make this tangy beverage creamy. Limonada Suíça always includes condensed milk, but limonada sometimes leaves it out. And even though it’s called lemonade, it often uses limes since the word limão is often used interchangeably for lemons and limes in Portuguese. Pulsing the entire lime into this drink adds an extra layer of brightness and depth from the rind. This drink takes only minutes to blend and is best served immediately.
Pink Grapefruit Bars
Think of these pink grapefruit bars as the ritzier, more alluring version of classic lemon bars. By swapping out the lemon for grapefruit juice, the bars take on a floral quality and bittersweet complexity. For the boldest flavor, avoid using store-bought grapefruit juice, which often contains added sugar to tame its tartness, and opt for juicing your own. To further enliven the bars, zest the grapefruits and massage the zest into the sugar for the filling. The oils in the zest will perfume the sugar and embolden the grapefruit flavor. For an eye-catching presentation, shower the bars in a blend of freeze-dried strawberries and confectioners’ sugar before serving. The dusting provides a subtle sweetness and a vibrant rosy hue that alludes to the flavor within.
Crudités With Lemongrass-Fermented Tofu Dip
For rau củ sống chấm chao, a Vietnamese take on crudités, serve raw, seasonal veggies with a tangy, spicy, umami-rich sauce featuring chao (fermented tofu), a wondrous ingredient that’s akin to creamy, winy cheese. Fermented tofu typically punches up stir-fried greens or a bowl of porridge, but Vietnamese cooks love to let it shine as a sauce. The dynamite nước chấm chao (fermented tofu dipping sauce) could be paired with grilled goat or lamb, but it’s fantastic as a dip. For this recipe, from my cookbook “Ever-Green Vietnamese” (Ten Speed Press, 2023), choose at least three vegetables from the crudité options. The sesame seed addition isn’t standard, but adds body and richness to the sauce, uniting the ingredients. Make a double batch of sauce, if you like, so you have extra to dress grilled romaine; top it with fried shallots for a summertime salad.
Tofu Milanese
The breaded cutlets known as Milanese are often made of veal, pork or chicken, but, here, tofu stands in with excellent results. To accompany, broccoli rabe is a delicious choice, though mustard greens of any variety make a fine substitution.
Kumquat Panna Cotta
Panna cotta is a creamy dessert custard, set with gelatin instead of eggs. It’s lovely plain or with a drizzle of honey on top. And, of course, it’s delicious with berries or stone fruit. Here, it’s topped with quickly candied kumquat slices, but a spoonful of marmalade or other homemade jam can be nice instead.
Creamy Meyer Lemon Pasta
With their friendly flavor, Meyer lemons are thoroughly enjoyable from peel to pith to juicy flesh. In this simple weeknight meal, they add complexity to the classic pasta al limone with notes of orange and tangerine, a sweeter tang and a softer, more tender pith. Each bite of pasta is studded with a sautéed mix of tangible lemony bits and garlic slivers cloaked in the dill-forward cream sauce. If you’re in need of a protein here, try with a rotisserie chicken or some seared shrimp.
Grilled Lemongrass Pork
This recipe was inspired by thịt heo nướng xả, the sweet, salty and aromatic grilled pork dish that is popular in many Vietnamese restaurants in the United States. Lean pork steaks cooked over high heat can dry out quickly, but a quick 15-minute soak in a mixture of baking soda and water ensures a moist and juicy steak. Baking soda causes a chemical reaction on the surface of the meat, which makes it more difficult for the proteins to bond during cooking or grilling. This means you end up with tender, not tough, meat. Shoulder steaks work well here because they have more flavor than lean pork chops and can take high heat and a strong marinade better than other thin cuts. Your butcher can cut the steaks for you or you can use thin cut pork chops.
Butter-Poached Shrimp With Dill Mayonnaise
Poaching shrimp in a combination of butter, lemon juice and white wine gives them a bright, tangy flavor and plump, succulent texture, and it takes only about five minutes. Served in bowls with a little of their broth and a dollop of dill-speckled mayonnaise, they’re rich and soupy, perfect with a hunk of crusty bread on the side to mop up every last drop.
Jicama Salad
At the Brooklyn Mexican restaurant, Cruz del Sur, practically every table has this salad on it. Why? It tastes as refreshing and vibrant as it looks. The key to its greatness comes from Tajín, the mildly spicy-tangy chile-lime salt that goes into the dressing (double the batch, trust us) and also gets sprinkled on top of the finished salad. Tajín and fruit are a classic sweet-salty combination in Mexican food, but bringing herbs, chiles and vegetables like jicama and cucumber into the mix make it even better. At the restaurant, the chef Hugo Orozco varies the herbs and flowers seasonally. He also recommends adding a few slices of perfectly ripe avocado on top, if you have access to them.
Shrimp Tacos
Spiced shrimp and quick-pickled red cabbage fill corn tortillas for dressed-up tacos that are easy to put together and sure to be a favorite. The seasoned shrimp is cooked in a heated skillet for a slight char, but resist the temptation to move the pieces before the contact side is properly browned. You can keep the add-ons simple with slices of creamy avocado, bits of fresh cilantro and acidic bursts from lime slices. Or bulk up with dollops of guacamole, chunky pico de gallo, and sour cream. The choice is yours!