Recipes

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Apple butter is the surprise ingredient here. Along with molasses, it makes the gingerbread moist, flavorful and a good keeper. The cake’s got a mix of traditional spices — ground ginger, cinnamon and cloves — as well as crystallized ginger, which has a soft, chewy texture and adds a bit of heat. If your ginger is hard, steep it in hot water for 30 seconds, drain and pat it dry. The gingerbread is sweet, but not very, so it’s as good with ricotta, yogurt, a swish of cream cheese or even a slice of Cheddar as it is with whipped cream, ice cream or hot fudge.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Salmon rillettes are the perfect party food for several reasons: They come together quickly and are easily made ahead, best served chilled and happy to be tinkered with. While classic French rillettes are prepared by cooking pork, duck or goose in its own fat for hours and hours until the meat is so soft that it’s spreadable, these rillettes wink at tradition. They’re adapted from the version in “Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook” (Harvest, 2018) and include a mix of fresh and smoked salmon that are mashed with mayo and a bit of butter, then brightened with mustard and capers. The fact that they sound fancy only makes them more fun to serve super casually with bread and bagel or potato chips.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

For those interactive group-gathering festive meals that first come to mind — fondue, say, or raclette — you either have to maintain a giant heated stone by an even larger roaring fire or a balance a pot of boiling oil, molten cheese or finicky chocolate over a live flame. Le grand aioli, by contrast, is a distinctly relaxing, convivial and participatory group meal that requires no dangerous apparatus: It’s just a vivid spread of vegetables, simply cooked, and a few pieces of steamed seafood to go with the large quantity of rather garlicky mayonnaise. Since the meal is served at room temperature – neither hot nor cold – it is one of those exceedingly-gentle-on-the-cook meals for which you can just sit down and stay down. The only exertion involved once you set it out is passing the cold wine.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Duck breasts are remarkably delicious, easy to cook and almost as tender as beef tenderloin. Once seasoned, the breasts go skin-side down in the pan and stay there for 20 or so minutes while the skin crisps, the fat renders out and the meat gently cooks to a perfect rosy medium. Along the way, you pour off the accruing melted fat every few minutes into a heatproof jar, and when it has cooled, you can save the duck fat in the freezer. It has such a special flavor; it would be a pity to throw it away. We use the duck fat for the best roasted potatoes but also love it for cooking trout and char and salmon fillets, and recommend roasting cauliflower and baby white turnips in it as well, for the most special combination of clean, juicy and luscious.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Not nearly as hefty as a Negroni or as lean as a martini, this little beauty is a perfect welterweight cocktail for the early fall.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Rabbits are so lean on their own that they benefit from some added fat — in this case, a few strips of guanciale, the compellingly flavorful cured pork jowl from Italy. Once the pan juices from the roasted rabbit have commingled with the fat from the guanciale and the bitter water released from the Treviso, you have a perfect, craveable balance on the plate, in every forkful.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

The lentils and mushrooms could hold their own, independently, as dependable side dishes, able to play to any menu lead from whole roasted sea bass to suckling pig. The bright, lemony, parsleyed brown-butter croutons, though, are what transforms an otherwise pleasant member of the cast to serious scene stealer.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

You can make your own feuille de brick, but it’s one of those products, like burgundy wine and saltine crackers, better left to the professional artisans. Alas, even finding it commercially made can be difficult as well, but it is worth the effort to procure. Fortunately, it freezes beautifully, so when you find a source, get more than one package and freeze the extra for future use. Thin as a sheet of tracing paper and as transparent, the dough fries up shatteringly crisp, and makes an incomparable borek. Everyone at dinner will ask you how you did it.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Nothing brings down a leek like a few grains of sand, so be sure to wash and wash and wash again. I love to eat these leeks after my main course but on the same plate so that the vinaigrette mingles with the last traces of pan drippings.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Baked alaska is a real toil, no doubt — you have to attend to the cake, the ice cream and the meringue, in the same way a mason lays stone. But there is plenty of opportunity for fun and flourish once the foundation is secure: You can divide the meringue among several pastry bags with varying sized tips to make dramatic and interesting variegated patterns of piped meringue. You can play with the shape of the cake by freezing the semifreddo in a coffee drip cone or a large-format flexible ice cube tray. And when you toast the meringue with a kitchen torch, you can hold the flame near and far, lingering in spots and moving briskly in others, to create extra drama and eye appeal. Try spooning flaming kirsch down its slopes. If you want to go even further, try replacing the white sugar with brown sugar in the meringue for a sophisticated pale-beige meringue that contrasts beautifully when toasted just to golden. Or see what you think of the results using other decorative colored sugars — k

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

While this is a sturdy and reliable recipe for making the greek cod roe spread called taramasalata from scratch, funnily enough it doesn't call for cod roe. I've come to prefer the commonly available and affordable salmon roe instead. If you are putting together a greek meze plate — with feta and kalamata olives, some marinated octopus and skordalia — save the brine from the feta and use it to season the taramasalata instead of lemon juice and see what you think. It lends a great acidity. Be sure to take the extra step of grating the cooked potato instead of more conveniently throwing it into the food processor and whizzing — to avoid a gluey texture. It'll keep in the fridge for a week and can be used a few ways all summer — add a grated white onion and toss with shaved celery and diced tomatoes as a salad dressing. Or thin with a little of the potato cooking water and some good olive oil and consider it as a sauce for whole grilled fish.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

In spite of the very few and very commonplace ingredients in this dish, there is an alchemy of sorts that takes place, transforming them from humble to holy-smokes-delicious in a way you will crave for the rest of your days. Be generous with your pinches, your grinds of the pepper mill, your scatter of cheese, your slivers of garlic and your final portions. It makes the difference.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

The effort is worth it for these perfect homemade fast-food-style French fries! By soaking the raw fries in cold water, you remove some of the starch, a technique I recommend for other interesting preparations in which you want the vegetal rather than the starchy component of the potato. (Try soaking potatoes in several turns of fresh, cold water and then stir-frying in a blistering wok with Sichuan peppercorns someday. Massively addictive!) Once destarched, the perfect French fry concept is straightforward, if laborious. As with making the best home fries, you want to start with an already-cooked potato. The interesting deviation here is that you parcook the potatoes in acidulated water first, give them a second blanching in hot oil and then freeze the fries at this stage. Once frozen, they are yours to cherish for months at whim — ready your clean, hot fry oil and sizzle away.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Diplomat cream is the professional baker’s tool for pastry cream that won’t collapse and turn watery. It uses both cornstarch and gelatin for the reliable structure, but a little cold butter and whipped cream keep it silky, tender and lightweight. You can fill the shells with this cream up to four hours in advance and not be disappointed.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

These elegant swans are made just like an eclair — using two pastry kitchen workhorses: pastry cream and pâte à choux. Pipe the pâte à choux into perfect teardrops, pulling the pastry bag away from the bodies as you finish each one to achieve that pointed tail end. When you are piping out the question marks for the necks, drag the tip of the pastry bag against the baking sheet ever so slightly to create a tiny beak. You'll have so much fun running those golden beaks through a flame after they are baked and watching them blacken into the uncanny likeness of swans.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

There are plenty of opportunities in cooking to riff and freestyle, and many dishes that you can legitimately “set and forget” until mealtime. But this quiche Lorraine is definitely not one of them. If you aren’t in the mood to build — stone by stone — the most classic, tender, custardy, haunting quiche you’ve ever had in your life, continue on and come back another day. If you’re still here, it’s just a matter of enjoying yourself as you take meticulous care with each ingredient, including the size and depth of the pan; each step, including the temperature changes of the oven; and each direction along the way. The downright platonic ideal of quiche that results is the fragrant, golden, encouraging reminder that, as with any endeavor, you only ever get out of it what you put into it.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

I now prefer the caviar sandwich to all other more classic presentations at the holidays. All that caviar crammed into a sandwich makes me feel giddy and extravagant and very lucky to be alive the second I set eyes on it. Context is everything; what I could reasonably splurge for would feel forlorn if showcased on a proper silver trolley atop a mound of shaved ice with a mother-of-pearl spoon at the ready on its nearby velvet pillow, but here, by contrast, in the context of a lowly sandwich, it feels as decadent as if I were eating caviar straight out of the tin, like a midnight pint of ice cream. Buy the caviar you most prefer from a retailer you trust the most—the most expensive may by no means necessarily be your favorite-- and see if this luscious sandwich doesn’t make you feel pretty giddy, too.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

A well-seasoned, chile-paste-slathered pork shoulder is already going to win, no matter what you do to it. Which seems to me like the ideal reason to try a new technique: slow roasting, off-flame, with ambient heat, using your outdoor grill as a coal-fired oven in the off-season of dead winter. Even if your live coals snuff out, or smoke too heavily, or you get bored of the snow-muffled silence or feel lonely in the winter solitude of your backyard, even if you miscalculate sunset and find yourself in the dark with a cellphone flashlight trying to read the internal temperature of the meat to discover it’s still raw in the center — all you have to do is close up shop out back, come inside and shove the thing in your conventional oven and then read the newspaper until dinner.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Cheddar crackers. Cheese wafers. Coins, biscuits, straws and crisps. Known by many names and claimed by many grandmothers, they are all the same, delicious thing: a savory, addictive, shortbread cookie. The key to any short dough — that distinctive tender sandy crumbly texture — is the high fat-to-flour ratio, and this version not only relies on butter but also counts on the delicious fats that come from sesame seeds, block Cheddar and even the oil from the pecans. For a remarkable distinction among the many, many versions of these to be found, toast them until just passing golden into brown, and see how that in itself sets these apart.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

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.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

Beef tenderloin is called for here as it will unfailingly yield the tenderest carpaccio. It is a long, slender, tapered muscle that runs under the ribs and close to the back bone, and as such is, in a way, shielded from being worked very hard, unlike cuts lower on the animal. As for all of us, the closer to the ground the muscle lives, the tougher becomes the work. Some chefs have a real affinity for the harder-working muscles. Top round, for example, is also often called for in carpaccio recipes and is cut from a muscle that has to work harder, and therefore, is thought to have more character, and more flavor. I would gently warn that harder-working muscles come with a little more “chew.” Try it here, as written, with sure success, then explore other cuts if you're interested.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

This method for preparing artichokes is so simple and so effective because it does one important thing: It accepts the bitter, thorny truth of the artichoke and doesn’t try to fight against it. Instead of wrestling with the thing in order to prepare it for cooking, by trying to trim those tightly closed petals that stab your fingertips and leave them coated in a wretchedly bitter film, just leave the artichoke alone. Slice off the domed top, then drop the artichoke, stems and all, right into the boiling salted water and cook until tender. Once done and cool enough to handle, the artichoke is effortless to peel, revealing sweet flesh at the base of each leaf, and her large tender heart is yours for the taking.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

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.

Gabrielle Hamilton · NYT Cooking

At the heart of superb jerk seasoning is the coalescing of spice and heat, specifically the two dominant forces of allspice berries and chile peppers. This marinade, which came to me from Shaun Lewis, a Jamaican cook I worked with during my time as a summer camp chef, is the best I’ve ever tasted, delivering a quietly thrilling, savory warmth that kind of spreads across the chest and remains there without ever ferociously igniting. This achievement — like a dark rolling thunder that somehow remains in the neighboring field and never crosses the fence — is undoubtedly the result of the 20 other ingredients in the recipe working in tandem, so don’t omit any of them. Gabrielle Hamilton