138 recipes. Page 4 of 6
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Crack the golden crust with a spoon and a thick cream sauce full of chicken, carrot, potato and peas comes up in a puff of steam. It is an everyday American home bake, and the sauce is butter and flour cooked together, then loosened with chicken stock and cream.
Through the sides of a glass bowl you can see the bands: sponge cake, strawberries and blueberries, custard and cream. Soaked in sherry or juice, the sponge turns soft as pudding, and the custard and whipped cream above it meet in the same spoonful. Fruit that goes in without being patted dry thins the custard and blurs the lines between layers.
Gochujang stirred into cream and milk, with no tomato involved, makes an orange sauce where the heat arrives slowly behind the cream. Brands of gochujang differ in saltiness, so start small and taste before adding more.
Mussels steamed fast in white wine release their juices into the pot, and that liquid becomes the sauce once a spoonful of cream and chopped parsley are stirred through. Any mussels already open before cooking are left out. Shallot and garlic soften in butter without taking color, giving the wine a mild, sweet base. One shake of the covered pot halfway through helps the shells open at about the same time. The cream waits until they have all opened, and crusty bread takes care of the broth.
Split warm by hand, these scones have a crisp golden top and a soft interior that crumbles rather than chews, ready for clotted cream and strawberry jam. Cold butter rubbed into the flour is what keeps them light; the more the dough is handled, the firmer the centers turn.
From Eton College in England, this dessert is named for what it looks like: a mess. Meringue broken by hand into big and small pieces is folded with strawberries and whipped cream just two or three times, and half the berries are crushed with lemon juice first so their red juice runs through the cream. Meringue left to sit goes soft, so it is served the moment it is mixed.
Pear slices warmed in butter meet sharp, salty Gorgonzola melted into cream, with sweet and salty trading places from bite to bite. The pear gets just 1 minute over medium-low heat, enough to turn its edges slightly translucent while the center stays crisp. Boiling would split the cheese sauce, so the Gorgonzola melts slowly over low heat. Walnuts toasted in a dry pan add crunch against soft potato gnocchi, and a little lemon juice and black pepper cut the weight of the blue cheese. The gnocchi come out as soon as they float, before they turn soft, and start to finish the dish takes about 15 minutes.
Thin potato slices bake in cream and milk until the liquid thickens between the layers, with Gruyere melted through the middle and browned on top. Garlic never touches the potatoes themselves, only the buttered dish, where it leaves a faint scent at the base. Baking happens in two phases, covered with foil until the potatoes cook through and then uncovered to color the cheese, which keeps the top from scorching before the center softens. There is no bechamel, just cream poured straight over the slices.
Cut a slice and the layers read clearly: golden crust, cream-colored custard, white whipped cream, and a scatter of toasted coconut that adds crunch. Cooked from coconut milk and regular milk, the custard has a clear coconut flavor and, once chilled, holds firm on a fork.
A spoon slips cleanly through this black sesame pudding. The sesame powder is whisked into warm milk and cream and set with gelatin, and the milk comes off the heat as soon as small bubbles appear at the edge. If it boils, the milk fat separates and the smoothness is gone.
Cubes of firm tofu, browned at the edges, do the job meat usually does, while kimchi squeezed of its juice lends a sour, spicy note to a Parmigiano cream sauce. Left mostly unturned while it fries, the tofu colors at the corners without breaking apart. Bow-tie farfalle holds pockets of sauce in its pinched centers.
Coarsely crushed peppercorns pressed into the sirloin give every bite a sharp, aromatic crackle, while finely ground pepper would add heat but lose that fragrance. The sauce comes from the same pan, where the browned bits left by the steak meet shallot, brandy, cream, and Dijon. Cream rounds off the pepper's bite and the mustard adds a quiet acidity that keeps the sauce bright rather than heavy.
Strips of puff pastry wound around a cone mold bake into a hollow spiral horn, which is then piped full of whipped cream folded into cream cheese. The thawed pastry stays cold and is cut into strips without rolling or stretching it, which protects the flaky layers. Sugar pressed onto the surface bakes into a crisp coating, and each bite brings the open layers and the cold cream together.
Thin chocolate wafers draw moisture from whipped cream during a long chill, turning a stack of crisp cookies into sliceable dark and pale layers. Nothing is dipped in coffee or milk, so the cream has to touch every cookie surface.
Kkaennip, the Korean perilla leaf, smells nothing like basil or mint, and its grassy herb note is what sets this mushroom cream sauce apart from other cream pastas. Its aroma fades with long simmering, so only part of the shredded leaves cooks in the sauce and the rest is scattered raw on top, layering the scent twice. Thick-sliced button mushrooms are cooked until their water is gone, so their flavor holds up against the cream. Parmesan brings salt to the sauce, and the pinched folds of farfalle trap it. If the sauce tightens, a tablespoon of pasta water at a time loosens it again.
A small spoonful of doenjang, Korean fermented soybean paste, goes into the brown sugar caramel spread under the apples, but the aim is for it to sit behind the sweetness as a faint salty, savory depth rather than taste like doenjang. Pea-sized bits of butter left in the dough make the crust bake up flaky, and the cinnamon apples soften in the oven.
The Italian name means half-cold, and that is how it eats: lighter than ice cream, colder than mousse. It is frozen in its mold without any churning and cut into slices, with chopped pistachios scattered through.
Mala sauce, the numbing, chili-hot seasoning of Sichuan cooking, gets wrapped in cream, milk and Parmigiano, so the tingle stays but the burn is gentler. Chicken thigh is browned hard before the mala sauce is stirred in, so the meat picks up the spice before the cream does. Mala sauces differ a lot in saltiness from brand to brand, so the recipe starts with 1 tablespoon and leaves final seasoning until the cream is in. Pasta water, added a little at a time, keeps the cream sauce from splitting, and when it is right the sauce no longer pools in the pan but sits in the spirals of the fusilli.
Salted caramel works because salt lifts sugar, and these mini tarts take the idea further by stirring a little doenjang, Korean fermented soybean paste, into the caramel alongside the salt. Taken off the heat before it reaches a deep amber, the caramel stays merely sweet and the doenjang disappears. Toasted pecans are coated in it and piled into the shells, and the tarts set at room temperature into a firm top that cracks under a fork.
Misugaru, a roasted multigrain powder, is whisked smooth into milk, folded with whipped cream and frozen, and at a full 100g it gives the ice cream a heavy, nutty grain flavor. The freezer does not do all the work: the surface has to be scraped with a fork once an hour, three times, to break up the ice crystals, which makes this one for a day spent at home. Black bean misugaru makes it nuttier still.
Japanese-style cream pasta uses mentaiko, salted pollock roe, in two ways: two thirds melts into the butter and cream sauce, and the rest goes on top raw with crumbled roasted seaweed. A teaspoon of lemon juice at the end lightens the cream. The roe is stirred in with the burner off or barely on. Over strong heat it turns fishy.
Two Earl Grey tea bags steep in warm cream that then goes into the cream cheese filling, so the cheesecake tastes like milk tea under the richness of the cheese. The cream is only warmed at the edges, never boiled, and the bags come out without squeezing. Baked in a water bath over a pressed digestive-biscuit base, the filling sets smooth and even.
Cream and milk are set softly with sheet gelatin, then topped with a red sauce of omija syrup and lemon juice and a few berries. The sauce goes on only after the panna cotta has fully set, which keeps it from bleeding into the cream and leaves a clean red layer.
Mushrooms brown over high heat, while the truffle oil is added only after the burner is off, at the very last stir. Each aroma is handled at its own temperature because heat flattens truffle oil. Well-drained gnocchi matter too: water clinging to them thins the cream sauce.