Snack
993 recipes found
Pan-Fried Okra
As one of the most respected cooks in America’s Lowcountry region, Emily Meggett knows a thing or two about taking humble ingredients and transforming them into an irresistible plate of food. Such is the case for the matriarch’s pan-fried okra, from her cookbook “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island” (Abrams, 2022), a book that I co-wrote. Her recipe is constructed around the use of fresh, seasonal okra pods. Mrs. Meggett dismisses what she views as the excessive use of dairy-based cornmeal batters in restaurant versions of fried okra; instead, she lightly coats her okra, allowing the beauty and taste of the vegetable to shine in each mouthful.
Quick-Pickled Okra
Quartering the okra significantly cuts down pickling time in this recipe: The vegetable pickles more quickly because its insides are exposed. Most picklers have their own special way of seasoning the love-it or leave-it vegetable. “Pickled okra had to grow on me,” Kenneth Garrett, a lifelong New Orleans resident and avid pickler, said. Now, he eagerly awaits okra’s growing season, and he makes pickled okra with basil and oregano, all from his garden. He serves it alongside fried chicken or as a snack. Mr. Garrett adds Creole seasoning, but this recipe uses whole peppercorns instead. Feel free to be creative with spices here. This recipe is ready in hours, but you can minimize okra’s characteristic gooeyness by refrigerating the pickles for two weeks before enjoying. Lastly, whenever preserving or canning, even for a “quick” job like this, it’s important to maintain a sterile environment. Wash the jars, lids and rims with hot, soapy water and dry them with clean towels.
Flourless Beet Brownies
Despite being flourless, these beet brownies bridge the gap between fudgy and cakey, offering the best of both worlds. Raw beets make the brownies dense and moist, helping them stay luscious and soft long after they’ve finished baking. Though the beets bring their own natural sweetness, pulsing the chopped raw beets in a food processor with some additional granulated sugar breaks down the hard root into a vibrant red base. In fact, the food processor does most of the work in this recipe. Baked until just cooked through, the resulting brownies are rich, subtly sweet and deeply chocolatey. If you prefer your brownies a little sweeter, sub the bittersweet chocolate baking chips for semi-sweet baking chips. You can top them with a little flaky sea salt out of the oven. Serve them warm with ice cream for dessert or at room temperature with a cup of coffee in the morning.
Toasted Almond-Coconut Financiers
These simple, French-style cookie-cakes are usually baked in special rectangular molds to resemble little bars of gold. In her book “Paris Sweets” (Clarkson Potter, 2012), Dorie Greenspan makes the process easier by baking them in mini-muffin tins, and the method works beautifully. They bake up soft and chewy, into perfect two-bite-size treats. This recipe uses toasted almond flour, which deepens the flavor. A dip in melted bittersweet chocolate gives the financiers a polished look and balances out their sweetness. This recipe makes 12, but easily doubles for a crowd.
Pecan Crunch Cream Cheese Poundcake
This is an exceptionally velvety and tender cake, reminiscent (in the best possible way) of the frozen pound cake you might buy at the supermarket. Perfected over many years by the expert baker Rose Levy Beranbaum (and published in her book “Rose’s Baking Basics’), its fine texture comes from cake flour and superfine sugar. A caramelized pecan and graham cracker coating lines the pan and provides delicious crunch, but it is optional.
Gingerbread Biscotti
Have a hot cup of coffee ready for dipping these spiced, crunchy biscotti. Like most Tuscan biscotti, these include no fat, which makes for an extra-dry cookie. That means it saturates quickly when dunked, turning it into something like silken cake while also sweetening your coffee. Pops of chewy candied ginger and a slick of dark chocolate make this biscotti a little more special. And while the ingredient list may be longer than some, each item builds upon the last, creating a symphony of warming flavors and smells. To help keep track of the many spices while assembling your ingredients, measure them into small piles on a dinner plate.
Korean Corn Cheese
A uniquely Korean-American creation, corn cheese is a dish inspired by two cultures. The simplicity of the ingredients — canned corn, mayonnaise and mild shredded cheese — yields a nearly effortless banchan, or side dish, that smells and tastes like comfort. It’s extremely kid-friendly, but is also enjoyed as anju, or food that pairs well with alcohol. (Soju, a popular Korean alcoholic beverage, is a great match.) This versatile, sweet-savory dish is best enjoyed hot and accompanied by an array of dishes, like kimchi, gochujang-glazed eggplant, bulgogi or galbi.
Cherry Coconut Ice Cream Sandwiches
Who doesn’t like ice cream sandwiches? These are miniature, just 3 inches in diameter. Bright pink fresh cherry ice cream (there’s a little coconut milk in the custard) is sandwiched between lemony butter cookies, with a dash of grated coconut. This is a bit of a project, but it only requires about 2 hours of active cooking time over the course of 2 days.
Chocolate-Stuffed Oatmeal Cookies
These big, chewy oatmeal cookies filled with soft chocolate ganache are perfect for sharing. To make the process a little simpler, you can prep and refrigerate the dough and the filling up to three days in advance. (You could also freeze them for even longer; just let them warm up a bit at room temperature to make them easier to work with.) The assembly is easy: Simply enrobe the truffled filling by stacking it between two pieces of dough and pressing the edges to seal. The stuffed cookie balls can be frozen for up to a month. Bake off a few at a time for warm, gooey cookies whenever the mood strikes.
Earl Grey Tea Cake With Dark Chocolate and Orange Zest
Loose Earl Grey tea stirred into buttery cake batter adds a sweet, floral essence that’s subtle but lovely. A little dark chocolate and orange zest makes this cake extra special. While you could use chocolate chips, using chocolate chopped from a bar produces the best result: The varying sizes of chopped chocolate blend in nicely without overpowering the delicate tea flavor.
Chocolate Trail Mix
Anyone who has experienced the accidental melting of chocolate trail mix during hot weather has also likely enjoyed the blissful moment when it solidifies again, leaving it in a different form: one composed of sweet, salty and crunchy clusters, with an eggshell-thin chocolate coating. This simple and adaptable recipe — which includes a tip for achieving the melted version — is one that you can enjoy during long hikes, after hard workouts or simply to snack on with beer or cocktails. While trail mix is often raw, this version lightly toasts the nuts and seeds, which imparts extra flavor. Finishing with flaky sea salt is a nice touch, too.
Yogurt and Jam Pops
Reminiscent of breakfast but masquerading as dessert, these pops are made with Greek yogurt or Icelandic skyr, which are thicker and creamier than regular plain yogurt. Pick whichever you enjoy the most, but make sure it’s plain and unsweetened.
Strawberry Drop Biscuits
Somewhat of a cross between a muffin top and a biscuit, these sweet breakfast treats are foolproof and easy: No rolling or cutting is required, and everything is mixed in a single bowl. They bake up craggy and crunchy on the outside, but are tender once you break them open. The heavy cream adds richness, and the additional water creates just the right amount of steam while baking to keep the biscuits light and fluffy. Salted butter works nicely here, but if you’re using unsalted butter, just add 1/4 teaspoon or so of fine salt to the dry ingredients. If you don’t have strawberries, feel free to swap in the same amount of fresh blueberries, raspberries or diced stone fruit.
Double Ranch Mozzarella Sticks
This is a dream recipe for ranch-dressing superfans (you probably know one, or maybe you are one). Creamy, peppery ranch dressing became hugely popular in the 1990s, and now it often shows up on chicken wings, burgers, tacos, pizza and even mozzarella sticks. In this recipe, the bread-crumb coating is spiked with ranch seasoning, and then the crunchy nuggets of melted cheese get dipped into cooling ranch. Or you could go back to the classic dip for these: marinara sauce.
Cinnamon Toast Popcorn
This snackable pile of lightly sweetened popcorn is reminiscent of buttery cinnamon toast and the perfect treat for two or four (or one!). You can easily make another batch to serve a crowd. Popcorn is coated in syrup and toasted in a pot to create a shell of caramelized sugar that’s dusted with cinnamon. Five minutes out of the pot, the popcorn cools to a soft crispness, but if you bake it for just 10 minutes, the popped kernels dry all the way through and become crunchy to their core. This treat is delicious on its own or as part of a dessert board with gingerbread biscotti, iced oatmeal cookies or any other cookies of your choice.
Peanut-Butter Fudge
Traditionally, fudge is made by boiling sugar and flavorings to a specific temperature, then cooling it, and finally beating it for just the right amount of time. It’s not hard to do, but if the conditions are not just right, the texture of the finished fudge can be too soft, too hard or even unpleasantly grainy. This peanut butter fudge may not be traditional, but it’s much simpler to make properly and results in the creamiest confection imaginable. For a delicious textural contrast, don’t skip the toppings!
Salted-Caramel Rice Pudding
Rice pudding is pure dessert magic. Simple ingredients like jasmine rice, whole milk and sugar cook together to make a luscious treat, and the bittersweet salted caramel swirled throughout makes it even more irresistible. This pudding is flavored with vanilla, but a little orange zest, some instant espresso powder or a few smashed green cardamom pods would take it in another delicious direction.
Mustard-Shallot Vinaigrette
Store-bought salad dressings are an automatic shortcut for many cooks. But with their sweeteners and stabilizers, they aren't worthy of a well-made salad, whether your tastes run to iceberg and romaine or mizuna and mesclun. And — revolutionary notion ahead — they aren’t really more convenient than a basic vinaigrette like this one, made in big batches from real ingredients, which can also live happily and indefinitely in your refrigerator door.
Stuffed Mushrooms
These fun stuffed mushrooms turn humble mushrooms into rich, savory bites with the flavors of escargots, the classic French delicacy of snails cooked in garlic butter. Here, fragrant and buttery bread crumbs infused with garlic, shallots and parsley fill mushroom caps. The roasted cremini mushrooms emerge from the oven juicy, with a garlicky topping that’s golden and crispy. Make use of your trimmings: The mushroom stems can be frozen for later use in vegetable or chicken stock.
Sweet-and-Salty Party Mix
This joyful, crunchy snack to share with friends (and enjoy with cocktails) relies on corn syrup, sugar and soy sauce for a balance of sweet and savory. The glaze in this recipe is a riff on the sweet-and-salty coating used in cereal-seaweed snack mixes found in Hawaii that bakes into an irresistible, super-crisp shell. A bit of Worcestershire sauce lend some tang, and cayenne adds a surprising touch of heat. Use the mix-in amounts as a guide, and feel free to use whatever cereals, crackers and nuts speak to you.
Whole-Orange Snack Cake
It may strike you as curious, but adding an entire orange to this easy snacking cake, rind and all, imparts a wonderful flavor reminiscent of orange marmalade, pleasantly bitter and sweet. A high-speed blender is the best way to process the orange, but a food processor works too. You want the purée to be as smooth as possible. While the cake bakes, prepare an easy orange glaze. For that step — or any recipe requiring both orange zest and juice — be sure to zest your orange before juicing it, as it’s much more difficult the other way around.
Tomato Bruschetta
This classic recipe is for lazy summer days that beg for moving slowly and snacking often. Chop tomatoes, place them in a colander, shower them with salt, then make yourself a drink or go for a swim. The longer they drain, the better they’ll be. This bruschetta gets better as it sits for a bit, so make it up to an hour ahead. While most bruschetta recipes have you rub a raw garlic clove on toasted bread, this one calls for making a quick infused oil that’s stirred into the tomatoes and basil, providing a more delicate garlicky note. Pile it all on toasted bread, and enjoy bite after juicy bite.
Chocolate Banana Icebox Cake
Banana pudding with a twist, this icebox cake embraces chocolate wafers instead of the classic vanilla. After a bit of time in the fridge, the cookies soften into thin layers of chocolate cake. Add some mini chocolate chips to the vanilla custard, if you like, but be sure to cover the bananas completely to keep them from oxidizing. This pudding is best the day it’s made, or up to 24 hours later — but it’s so delicious that it may not last that long.
Butter Tarts
There may be no more perfectly satisfying treat than a Canadian butter tart. It is small and sweet, bracingly so, with hints of butterscotch and caramel. And each bite delivers three textures: flaky crust, chewy top, gooey center. While its exact origins may never be found, the tart became popular in Ontario in the early 20th century and spread across Canada thanks to its inclusion in the 1913 “Five Roses Cook Book.” Today there are numerous variations. Runny or firm? Raisins or plain? This recipe can be adapted to please all partisans.