74 recipes. Page 1 of 4
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Imam bayildi is not served warm; it waits in the fridge until fully chilled. This Turkish dish is eggplant peeled in stripes, filled with browned onion and tomato, and braised gently in olive oil, and on a cold plate nothing hides the taste of that oil. That is why the recipe asks for a good extra virgin olive oil.
Dough rolled into an open boat is filled with cheese and baked, then an egg and a pat of butter go into the middle for a second bake. The cheese here is a mix of mozzarella, ricotta, and feta in place of Georgian Imeruli and sulguni. To eat it, tear off pieces of the crust and swirl them through the cheese and egg.
Think of a cream pasta sauce spooned over rice instead of noodles: butter, garlic and onion, then chicken breast seared until browned, all simmered in heavy cream. Scrape up the browned bits from the pan as the cream goes in; much of the sauce's flavor comes from them.
Corn sauteed in butter is folded with mayonnaise, covered with mozzarella and heated in the cup it is served in. A microwave or an oven both do the job. Each spoonful pulls up a string of cheese, and the corn underneath is sweet and salty.
Halved garlic cloves go into the pan first and lose their raw bite, turning sweet and soft. The gizzards get nothing but salt and pepper, which leaves the garlic to do the work of a sauce.
Half the soup is blended and stirred back in, so the broth thickens while whole corn kernels and pieces of potato stay intact. The onion and garlic cook in the fat left from crisping the bacon, and the bacon itself returns at the end, scattered over each bowl with parsley.
Aglio e olio means garlic and oil, and the Neapolitan dish asks for little beyond that: sliced garlic, chili flakes, olive oil, and spaghetti. With so few ingredients, the result rests on how the garlic cooks. Over low heat it should reach a pale gold in 3 to 4 minutes, and a few seconds past that the oil turns bitter. Starchy pasta water, added in portions and shaken hard with the oil, turns into a cloudy emulsion that clings to every strand. The traditional version uses no cheese and no cream.
Chewy barley grains carry crisp bell pepper and cucumber, sharp red onion, and plenty of parsley in a simple lemon and olive oil dressing. The barley should stay slightly firm at the center; cooked soft, it turns porridge-like once dressed. Letting the barley cool completely does more for the result than any seasoning tweak: warm grains pull water out of the vegetables and thin the dressing.
Shreds of salt cod and matchstick potatoes fried crisp are bound together by eggs cooked only to soft, creamy curds. Soaking the cod in cold water for 24 to 48 hours, with several changes, means starting a day or two ahead. Even after soaking it keeps some salt, which makes tasting at the end more reliable than salting along the way. Taking the pan off the heat before the eggs fully set and letting residual heat finish them keeps the dish moist rather than dry. Black olives go alongside when you have them.
Eggs poach right in a thick, spiced tomato sauce, a pan dish cooked across the Middle East and North Africa. Cumin, smoked paprika, and peperoncino are fried in olive oil with onion and pepper before the tomatoes go in, so their aroma runs through the whole pan. The sauce is reduced until it can hold a hollow for each egg, and the whites set while the yolks stay loose. Tear bread, break a yolk, and drag it through the sauce.
The croffle, a café favorite, is made here from store-bought frozen croissant dough and finished savory with garlic butter and grated Parmesan. Left shut in the waffle iron too long, the pastry dries out hard, which is why the first one gets cut open to check for raw dough before the rest go in.
The dirty in the name comes from finely chopped chicken liver and pork, which stain the rice brown. It is a Cajun dish from Louisiana, built on the usual onion, green pepper and celery, with cayenne for heat.
Each muffin cup gets sweet batter halfway up, a little chopped ham, and a whole egg cracked on top before baking. You see it often on Seoul streets in winter, and paper muffin cups give the same shape without a special pan.
Cuttlefish is thicker and denser than ordinary squid, so the inside of the body gets a deep crosshatch before it hits the pan, and the garlic butter seeps into those cuts as it cooks. A little chopped cheongyang chili, a hot Korean green pepper, leaves a faint kick at the end of the butter.
Smoked haddock warmed in milk with a bay leaf flavors the whole pot, and that infused milk becomes the base of this soup named after the village of Cullen in northeast Scotland. There is no salt in the ingredient list because smoked fish brings its own, and how much varies by product. Fully cooked potato, not cream or flour, thickens it.
The dish turns on slicing the garlic thin and even. If the slices vary, the thin ones burn first and the whole pan of oil turns bitter. Done right, no oil pools in the pan; it has all gone onto the strands as a thin sheen.
Celeriac looks like a gnarled root, yet its pale flesh smells gently of celery and stays crisp when cut raw into fine matchsticks. Bound with mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, the French remoulade resembles coleslaw at a glance, but the mustard's sharp tang sits further forward.
Cooked, chopped pork and liver are mixed with rice and packed into casing, giving a link that eats more like moist meat stuffing than a springy raw-meat sausage. A little of the broth from the long simmer brings the filling together; too much turns it into porridge. Cleaned, food-grade salted hog casings work best filled loosely, because tight links split during the final gentle poach. With no curing salt or drying stage, boudin stays a fresh sausage that belongs in the refrigerator and gets eaten within two days.
Ham and low-moisture mozzarella are rolled up inside pizza dough, so each slice shows a spiral of bread and filling. No tomato sauce goes inside. Melted cheese does not mean it is done: if the dough in the middle is still damp, it needs more time, and 93°C at the center is the mark to aim for.
Big flakes of smoked haddock and halved hard-boiled eggs show through rice tinted yellow with curry powder. Haddock is a cod relative, and the smoked fillets used here are the kind sold for cooking, so they need to be cooked through, not eaten straight from the pack.
Korean street vendors sell this egg bread in winter; here it bakes in a home oven. Muffin cups stand in if you lack the special molds, and eggs left at room temperature cook more evenly on top. After about 15 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius, the white is set and the yolk sits between soft and firm.
Scallops come off the heat when the outside is dark brown and the center still slightly translucent. Over high heat that takes 1 to 2 minutes a side, and after the flip, butter and minced garlic go into the pan and are spooned over the top.
With no potatoes or flour, this stew is thinner than a chowder, and the oysters taste clearly of themselves against the milk and cream. Their strained liquor goes into the pot too, carrying the briny flavor through the broth. A curled edge is not enough to call them done. They stay on the heat until opaque all the way through, and butter melted in off the heat finishes the bowl.
All of the heat in this penne comes from the peperoncino, so adjusting that one teaspoon sets the spice level. The chili gets only 10 seconds in the garlic oil before the tomatoes go in; blackened garlic or chili leaves a bitter streak through the sauce. Simmered uncovered for 8 minutes, the tomatoes thicken enough to coat the outside of each tube and fill the hollow. A pinch of sugar rounds off tomatoes that taste too sharp.