Recipes

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Pick up a heat-lamp roast chicken at the market on the way home — it’s O.K.! — and tear it apart to feed four, or half of it for two, shredding the meat with your fingers. Mix the chicken with a few handfuls of baby arugula, a large handful of sliced scallions and a lot of chopped cilantro. Cut an avocado or two into the mix if you have them on hand. Then make a dressing out of lime juice — one juicy squeezed lime will do — a pressed garlic clove and a few glugs of olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Drizzle that over the top and serve. Dinner in 15 minutes, tops. 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.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. There are generally a few kinds of barbecue sauce in my refrigerator, leftovers from various experiments. That may be true for you as well? I bet there’s a half-bottle of store-bought sauce, anyway, or a dusty unopened one in the pantry. Check: There probably is. Let’s make dinner with it, and some salmon fillets. Put the barbecue sauce in a small pot on the stove over medium heat, then turn the oven to 400. Roughly chop a few jarred pickled hot peppers into the sauce, and add a couple of pats of butter to silkify the situation. Warm that through while the oven heats, then salt and pepper the salmon fillets and roast them skin-side down, on a lightly oiled sheet pan, for 10 or 12 minutes, or until they are just barely cooked through. Spoon the pepper-studded barbecue sauce over the top, and go to! Sam Sifton features a no-recipe recipe every Wednesday in his What to Co

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Maybe tonight is calling for simple rice and beans, with limes to squeeze over the plate, warm tortillas to scoop up the food? First, rinse a cup or two of rice and cook as you usually do. As it steams away, dice an onion and sweat it in a saucepan with a drizzle or two of olive oil set over medium-high heat. When the onion begins to go translucent, add a few cloves of garlic and, if you’d like, some crumbled sausage, ground beef or lamb, then cook until it has started to crisp and the onion has started to caramelize. Add a healthy dusting of cumin, some salt and pepper to taste, and allow it all to go muddy and fragrant. Splash the mixture with the orange juice, maybe half a cup, and allow it to cook down, almost to syrup. Then add a big can of black beans (drained, please) and stir to combine, turning down the heat and allowing the flavors to come together, perhaps u

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Get some nice baseball-sized, yellow-fleshed potatoes, one per person, and cut them into quarters. Toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper on a sheet pan, and slide them into a hot oven to roast, say 425 degrees. While they’re cooking, make yourself useful: Fry some bacon; grate some Cheddar; toss a few large handfuls of spinach or baby kale with olive oil, just enough to lightly coat the leaves; slice some avocados; and see if you have some sour cream in the refrigerator. When the potatoes are soft, pull them from the oven and smash the pieces down with the bottom of a coffee cup or drinking glass. Arrange the smashed potatoes on the sheet pan, and top each portion with greens, a chopped slice of cooked bacon, and plenty of cheese. Return to the oven to melt the cheese, then garnish with avocado and dots of sour cream. Or yogurt! It’s a no-recipe recipe. There are n

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. How about a kale salad? (Stick with me, please.) Just make a mustardy vinaigrette that’ll stand up to the greens — mustard, olive oil, a splash of lemon juice, salt and pepper — then drizzle it over clean, chopped kale with a host of big-flavored mix-ins that wink at whatever season you’re in without being dorky about it: dried cranberries or currants, say; pecans toasted with maple syrup and a pinch of cayenne; some crumbled blue cheese; a spray of croutons. Sweet, salty, spicy, sour. That and a chilled glass of red wine? Why don’t we eat salads for dinner more often? 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.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. Get some fresh tortillas and a pound of skirt steak, then make salsa from mostly fresh or canned pineapple, pickled jalapeños and a healthy couple shakes of chile powder, along with plenty of chopped cilantro. Shower the steaks with salt and pepper, and broil them for 2 to 3 minutes a side until they’re perfect and rare. Warm the tortillas. Grate some Cheddar. Rest the steak, slice it, and serve with the tortillas, cheese and that awesome salsa. Anyone want to watch a movie after dinner? We have time. 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.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This is a no-recipe recipe, a recipe without an ingredients list or steps. It invites you to improvise in the kitchen. This one calls for something in the neighborhood of a quarter- to half-pound of fish fillets per person and works as well in the heat of South Florida as it does on the frozen Northern Plains. Dice a strip or two of bacon if you’re a meat eater, or grab some butter if you are not (or use both if you are reckless). Add it to a Dutch oven set over medium-high heat and sauté with a few handfuls of diced onions, carrots and potatoes until the onions have gone translucent. Hit the mixture with some salt and pepper and a flash of smoked paprika if you have it. If you can find good corn on the cob, that would be a fine addition. So would a cup of frozen corn. Do you have any fish stock? No? White wine? Surely you have water. Add enough liquid (of any combination of the above) so that the potatoes are almost swimming, then add a bay leaf and reduce the heat to a simmer. Allow

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

This recipe for griddled chicken thighs with chicken livers and hearts comes from Mike Solomonov and Steven Cook, the Philadelphia restaurateurs whose cookbook, “Israeli Soul,” is an invaluable guide to making Israel’s most beloved street foods and restaurant dishes at home. But you don't need to make it with the livers and hearts. “I like a little funk in there,” Solomonov told me, “but I get it if you don’t like that, if it freaks you out.” So omit the offal if you want. “The dish is as much about the spicing, anyway,” Solomonov said. Serve the meat mounded onto a drift of hummus, as you might spoon a thick ragù on top of polenta, or alone beside a salad. Solomonov likes it as a sandwich. “Eat mixed grill in a pita,” he said. “Eat it with some onion and tehina and a pickle, and it’s so satisfying. It’s a taste of Jerusalem at the end of the night.” Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

In Hong Kong in the 1980s, when expensive Cognac was all the rage, legend has it that some smart cook at the Spring Moon restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon got it into his head to name the funky new condiment he’d come up with after the status mark on the bottle of Remy Martin at the bar: “XO,” extra old, rare, very expensive. The stuff was a hit: dried scallops and dried shrimp, a ton of chiles, a faint pork-smokiness and a whisper of allium, expensive to make and worth it for the flavor-enhancing pop. By the end of the decade, XO sauce was on menus all over Hong Kong and eventually the world. Recipes for XO vary wildly, save for those scallops and shrimp. Mine derives from the teachings of Diana Kuan, who included a formidable XO in her 2019 cookbook, “Red Hot Kitchen.” Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Noodles dressed with sesame are popular in many parts of China, but this particular style, made with peanut butter and served cold, became a Chinese-American staple in the United States in the 1970s. The family of Shorty Tang — an ambitious restaurateur who emigrated from Sichuan to Taipei to New York — firmly believes that he invented the dish and still serve it at Hwa Yuan, the restaurant he opened in 1967 in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They have never divulged the exact recipe; this is our own lush but refreshing version. Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

I ate a version of this rice as an accompaniment to a few deep-fried paddles of Australian crab, sitting at the kitchen counter of Paul Carmichael’s excellent Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney. It tasted of a world far away, of Mr. Carmichael’s childhood in Barbados, in the Lesser Antilles, where influences of Africa, India, China and Britain combine in the food: the grains fried in butter scented with murky yellow curry powder, warm and fragrant, and flavored with fiery minced habanero and a salty punch of soy and oyster sauces. I sighed when I finished and asked for a recipe. I’ve been messing with it ever since. Please note: You’ll end up with more curry paste than you’ll need to season the rice, even if you season aggressively. Refrigerate the extra to make the dish a second time (it keeps well), or to enliven ground meat for a Caribbean-ish version of sloppy joes, even just to improve a bowl of instant ramen. Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

We cook a lot of burgers indoors on a fat-slicked iron skillet, and you can do that on a grill as well. (Here’s our burger guide for more information and inspiration.) But sometimes you want a smoky grilled burger. For that, a charcoal grill is best, but a gas grill can do the trick, too. Resist the temptation to press down on the burgers with a spatula, which only spews juice and fat on the fire, causing the flames to flare up and the burger to lose flavor. If you feel your burger is cooking too quickly, use the cooler sides of the grill to rest them. And remember: lowering the top on the grill helps cheese melt.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

To make this effervescent fermented tea, you will need a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that is known by its acronym, Scoby. Also some already-brewed kombucha that you will most likely receive from the same source as the Scoby — a friend or the Internet. You'll need very clean glass jars in which to brew your sweetened tea and ferment it with your Scoby, and very clean clamp-top bottles into which to funnel it when you’re done. You’ll need flavoring agents for that second fermentation. Start with apple juice, perhaps, and ginger. With later batches you can try turmeric, pomegranate, cayenne, orange, whatever you like. Welcome to the kombucha lifestyle.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Cheese buldak is a Korean dish that is incredibly easy to prepare: a marinade of red-pepper paste and red-pepper flakes that becomes a fiery sauce for braised chicken, which is then served beneath a cloak of broiler-melted mozzarella. A child could do it, or an adult who often acts like one. Mine is an adaptation of a recipe that owes its deepest debt to Emily Kim, the Korean web star known as Maangchi, whose video for cheese buldak has been viewed on YouTube more than seven million times. (Omit the rice cakes if you can’t find them easily!) Thanks to subtitling by her fans, the video can be read in 24 languages. There are thousands and thousands of comments below it, mostly positive. One reads, “Can you be my mom?” Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Bert Greene was one of the owners of the Store in Amagansett, a gourmet shop and catering outfit on the eastern end of Long Island, N.Y., that was in the early 1970s a kind of lodestar of casual-elegant cooking and entertaining — expensive and, to those with the money to spend it, worth it. (He was like a cross between Ina Garten and Anna Pump, of Loaves & Fishes in Sagaponack.) This is his recipe for a tart, abrasive and wildly delicious dip to serve, garnished with watercress, with an enormous quantity of iced, slivered vegetables. (It’s also great on fish, sandwiches, or even as a dip for slices of delivery pizza.) Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

I love a clandestine soda in the preparation of food, a flash of carbonation where the French might use wine, or brandy. It may be transgressive to say so, but I’m hardly alone, for all those who cringe at the thought. Page through church or community cookbooks and you’ll find examples: Coke-spiked Jell-O situations, root beer-glazed fillets of salmon, beans simmered in Moxie. This recipe for a lemon-and-lime soda cake came to me a while back from a Times reader who thought I’d appreciate it (I did!). She said she’d gotten it from a grandmother down south, who stored it on an index card placed in her copy of the cookbook published by the Symphony League of Jackson, Miss., in 1971. The original called for oleo and Crisco oil. I swapped these out for dairy and neutral oil, and a little less soda, and an additional 15 minutes in the oven. This leaves the cake toast-brown and glistening, glossy-crumbed and high-risen, a marvelous moist yellow within. I’m no shill for Big Soda. You could ju

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Here’s my favorite recipe in Toni Tipton-Martin’s excellent and invaluable “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking” (2019). It’s a remix of one that the chef Nathaniel Burton collected into his 1978 opus, “Creole Feast: Fifteen Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets,” and one that Tipton-Martin glossed-up with lemon zest, juice and extra butter, a technique she learned from the restaurateur B. Smith’s 2009 collection of recipes, “B. Smith Cooks Southern-Style.” It’s a dish of smothered pork chops, essentially, made into something glorious and elegant. “The food history of Blacks in America has been a story of the food of survival,” she told me in an interview. “We need to start celebrating the food they made at work." Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

You can use this sauce — spicy and fragrant and slightly syrupy, what the Italians call agrodolce — on veal chops as I call for here, or on pork chops, on steaks, on chicken. I bet it’d be good on grilled seitan or drizzled over tofu. The recipe is reminiscent of the cooking at red-sauce emporia like Bamonte’s in Brooklyn, Rao’s in Manhattan, Dominick’s in the Bronx and, I hope, Carbone in Greenwich Village, where I first learned how to put it together at the elbow of the chef Mario Carbone. Serve with spaghetti dressed in butter and Parmesan, with garlic bread, with a spoon so you can slurp what’s left on the plate. “It’s a flavor that’s purely Italian-American,” Carbone told me. “You won’t find it in Italy, no way.”

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

You can use this sauce — spicy and fragrant and slightly syrupy, what the Italians call agrodolce — on pork chops as I call for here, or on veal chops, on steaks, on chicken. I bet it’d be good on grilled seitan or drizzled over tofu. The recipe is reminiscent of the cooking at red-sauce emporia like Bamonte’s in Brooklyn, Rao’s in Manhattan, Dominick’s in the Bronx and, I hope, Carbone in Greenwich Village, where I first learned how to put it together at the elbow of the chef Mario Carbone. Serve with spaghetti dressed in butter and Parmesan, with garlic bread, with a spoon so you can slurp what’s left on the plate. “It’s a flavor that’s purely Italian-American,” Carbone told me. “You won’t find it in Italy, no way.”

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Chinese roast pork on garlic bread is one of the great New York sandwiches, a taste of the highest peaks of Catskills cuisine: thinly sliced, Cantonese-style char siu married to Italian-American garlic bread beneath a veil of sweet-sticky duck sauce. It’s been around since the 1950s, a favorite of the summertime borscht belt crowd. You can make the sandwich with store-bought char siu if you like, but I prefer the homemade variety because I can make it with fancy pork from the farmers’ market. It’s also juicier and more flavorful. Then, layer the meat onto garlic bread, and add a drizzle of duck sauce – for that, I use leftover packets from Chinese takeout orders or make my own with apricot preserves cut through with vinegar. Some people add a slash of hot mustard; others fresh pickles, or coleslaw. “It’s the ultimate assimilation crossover food,” the food writer and erstwhile restaurant critic Arthur Schwartz told me. “That sandwich is a symbol of acculturation.”

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Forget what you think you remember about this putatively Russian dish, which saw its zenith in American kitchens during the 1950s and its nadir in school cafeterias two decades later. Beef stroganoff makes for an outstanding dinner: a vat of tender sautéed meat in a silken gravy studded with caramelized mushrooms, alongside a huge tangle of buttered noodles. Be careful when adding the cream at the end: Sour cream easily curdles in the heat, while crème fraîche or heavy cream offer smoother results.

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

I first ate this hot dish, a Midwestern favorite, on a late fall evening in the humid kitchen of the cook and television star Molly Yeh, at her farmhouse in Minnesota. The casserole accompanied venison, lefse and talk of the sugar beet harvest outside. I thrilled to the cream-beefy, umami-strong flavors that sat beneath its golden, cobbled exterior, and I loved the way the potatoes soaked up the gravy that pooled below the venison. You could substitute other ground meats for the beef, and other frozen vegetables for the peas or corn, but the tots are mandatory, and I do love the addition of cheese at the end. Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

Here’s a simple udon salad I picked up from the chef and entrepreneur Bart van Olphen, who elevates canned tuna to the heights of deliciousness. Van Olphen dresses the noodles in what he calls wafu dressing, which translates roughly as Japanese-style: a sweet-salty vinaigrette of soy, sesame oil, mirin and rice vinegar. I add a little sweet miso for texture and taste, and increase the amount of seaweed in the salad as well. Garnish with sesame seeds or furikake, the Japanese seasoning blend, and you have a superior tuna casserole. It is as good served cold as hot. Sam Sifton

Sam Sifton · NYT Cooking

I love to cook with chile crisp, a fiery hot-pepper condiment born in the Sichuan Province of China that generally relies on fried shallots and garlic for texture, and on any number of umami-rich special ingredients for distinction and oomph. It’s magical: a boon to noodle soups and kitchen-sink stir-fries, to eggs and cucumbers, to plain steamed fish. Here, I use it as the base of a marinade and topping for baked tofu and green beans, with black vinegar, a little sesame oil, a wisp of honey, minced garlic and ginger, along with scallions and cilantro. But you could use the mixture on a mitten and have a very nice meal.