253 American recipes. Page 3 of 11. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Caramel Apples, Southern Sweet Tea, Chicken Noodle Soup.
Packaged soft caramels, melted with a splash of water, coat a crisp raw apple without any stage of cooking sugar to a dark caramel. Whether the coating clings depends on the fruit's skin: water droplets and heavy wax both let it slide. Small apples coat more evenly and make a manageable portion. Once on their sticks they go in the fridge rather than sitting out on display, and come out only as they are eaten.
No milk, no condensed milk. Eight grams of black tea steep for four to five minutes in just-boiled water, the leaves are strained out, sugar is dissolved while the tea is warm, and cold water goes in before it chills in the fridge. Boiling the leaves for a darker color only makes it astringent. Loose tea is weighed rather than counted in bags because bags hold different amounts.
The chicken breast is pulled into long shreds, so it hangs off the spoon together with the egg noodles. If you plan on leftovers, lift the noodles out and store them separately; otherwise by the next day they will have soaked up the broth.
The filling is already sealed inside small refrigerated cheese ravioli, and the real work is the breadcrumb coating and the frying. Fine dry crumbs settle around the seams more evenly than coarse flakes, and letting excess egg wash drip away keeps the coating from sliding off in the oil. Pieces that puff and start to split at the seams have steam building inside and come out promptly. Tomato sauce stays in its own bowl for dipping, since pouring it over softens the crust right away.
A dressing of nothing more than lime juice and olive oil cuts cleanly through creamy avocado. Golden pan-seared chicken breast supplies lean substance, romaine and cucumber bring crunch against the soft avocado, and cherry tomatoes add a sharp, juicy note. Sliced hot, the chicken loses its juices to the cutting board and turns dry, and a rest on a plate before cutting prevents that. Avocado works the other way: it browns as it sits and is sliced only just before the dressing goes on. The result is a simple American-style salad that eats as a full meal, and lemon stands in well when there is no lime.
Cutting skirt steak across the grain on a diagonal is what keeps such a short, fierce sear tender. Cumin, lime and smoked paprika give the beef a smoky, sharp edge, while the peppers and onion cook first in the same hot pan and come out still crunchy. Everything goes into warm flour tortillas right away, before the vegetables start to weep.
Whipped full of air, the meringue works as insulation, keeping a hot 230°C oven from reaching the ice cream inside. The whole thing spends only a few minutes in the heat, just long enough to brown the swirled peaks. Vanilla extract beaten into the meringue warms in that short bake and comes through as aroma. Cut it open and the face shows three layers at once: toasted meringue, cold vanilla ice cream and soft sponge.
Fresh parsley, chives and dill give this ranch its green flecks and most of its flavor, carried in mayonnaise, sour cream and buttermilk. Raw garlic is mashed with salt into a paste so no single bite hits hard.
Mashing some of the beans is all it takes to thicken the pot, and spooned over separately cooked rice, it seeps between the grains like a sauce. This version uses canned beans that are already fully cooked.
Popcorn that is already popped gets a coat of brown sugar and corn syrup caramel, then dries in a 120°C oven for 45 minutes. Baking soda stirred in off the heat makes the syrup foam up, and the foam spreads thin through the popcorn. It comes out of the oven tacky and turns crisp as it cools.
The stew is credited to San Francisco wharf fishermen who pooled their leftover seafood in one pot. The tomato and white wine broth simmers on its own first; mussels, white fish and shrimp follow at the end, one after another, for a short cook. Any mussels still shut after cooking are picked out before serving.
Grilled chicken breast turns the classic side salad into a full meal. Pressing the thick end flat before cooking gives the breast one even thickness, and the thin edges stay juicy while the center finishes. The chicken is cut in moderately thick pieces, since very thin slices lose heat and moisture fast and turn chalky. The dressing skips anchovy and relies on mayonnaise, lemon juice and garlic, and the croutons go on at the end without any toasting.
Sour cream and Dijon give this sauce a gentle tang with a sharp mustard finish, and mushrooms cooked until golden supply most of its savory weight. The sirloin barely spends time in the pan: seared on each side, set aside, and returned only at the end so it stays pink and tender. Once the sour cream is in, a boil will split the sauce.
With baking soda doing the lifting, the batter goes into the pan as soon as it is mixed, with no rise to wait for. Three mashed bananas supply most of the moisture and sweetness, with melted butter and an egg making the crumb dense and tender. Baking it a day ahead costs nothing: the banana flavor gets stronger overnight and the loaf stays moist once cool. Walnuts or chocolate chips can be folded in for texture.
One chip dragged to the bottom of the dish should pick up refried beans, cream cheese, guacamole, salsa, cheddar, olives and scallions at once. Draining the salsa for 10 minutes keeps its juice from bleeding into the layers, and spreading each layer in small dollops avoids dragging up the one underneath.
One browned slice of luncheon meat, one pressed block of rice and a single strip of nori: every cut shows just those two layers. The meat and the bottled sauce carry all the salt, and the rice is left plain. These are made to be eaten right away, not packed to sit for hours at room temperature.
Strips of flour dough cook straight in grape juice, and the loose flour on their surface slowly turns that juice into a sauce without any separate starch. The thin strip shape follows a publicly available Cherokee Nation cookbook, made here with pasteurized bottled juice. The juice is measured for two jobs: a small portion hydrates the dough and the rest is the cooking liquid, and mixing them early leaves a batter too wet to roll. Swelling alone does not mean done. Cut a thick piece and look for a raw flour layer.
A white, milk-based chowder with small cubes of potato and pieces of clam in every spoonful. Celery, softened with the onion, adds a faint bitterness that keeps the milk from being the only thing you taste.
Rinsed quickly under cold water, quinoa loses its natural coating of bitter saponins and tastes clean and nutty. Cooled quinoa, seared chicken breast, romaine, cucumber, and bell pepper come together under a lemony Greek yogurt dressing, and the result eats more like a grain bowl than a side salad.
Ready-made biscuits get a heavy ladle of white milk gravy with ground pork in it. Plenty of black pepper goes into the gravy, and that peppery bite is what makes it taste Southern.
The coarsely chopped walnuts are toasted in a pan before they go in, so they come through as distinct nutty pieces in the moist banana crumb. Only half a teaspoon of cinnamon is used, not enough to cover the banana.
Collard leaves simmer for 75 to 90 minutes with onion, garlic, cider vinegar and bourbon until even the ribs are easy to chew. There is no meat in the pot, only vegetable stock, and the broth takes its flavor from the vinegar's tang and the onion and garlic. The tough center stems come out first. Collards are their own vegetable, and neither kale nor the Korean ssam kale used for wraps stands in for them.
Peppers turn sweet and soft in the oven, which is why the beef, rice and tomato filling is seasoned a little saltier than would taste right on its own. Mozzarella goes on for the last 10 minutes and melts into a cover over the filling.
A fully baked crust gets a chocolate custard cooked in a saucepan, and the pie then sets in the fridge for at least four hours instead of going back in the oven. The custard keeps bubbling for a full minute after it boils so the cornstarch cooks through; stop early and the slices slump.