Recipes

Kreplach (Dumplings)

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 16, 2012

Crispy Kreplach/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

My neighbor, Lois Baron, gave me a version of this recipe, which calls for roasting and braising a beef brisket. When I told her I intended to give it a shot using leftover pot roast she said, excellent idea! Kreplach, a great way to make use of leftovers. Kreplack are often called Jewish ravioli, a staple of Jewish cuisine. Consistent with that cuisine, the main item is cooked, then it's cooked again, and then its cooked again. (Why is this?!) At least in Lois's recipe. A brisket is roasted, then it's braised, then it's ground with seasonings and egg, wrapped in dough, boiled, cooled then cooked to serve. That's three times that it gets fully cooked before being eaten. These are traditionally used in soup, and they're great that way, but Lois fried some ...

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Also posted in Beef, Ethnic Cuisine, Guest Post | Tagged Beef Kreplach, Jewish Cuisine, Kosher, Lois Baron, recipe | 25 Comments

The Egg and the Pressure Cooker

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 14, 2012

Pressure cooked eggs. Photo by Laura Pazzaglia

This guest post is thanks to twitter, when someone asked me about pressure cooking eggs. I had never done them, but Laura Pazzaglia had. Laura is a pressure-cooker maniac living in Italy and blogging at hippressurecooking.com. My friend Annie LaG took her up on how to cook easy-peel hard-cooked eggs and pronounced them amazing. I have long been a fan of the egg and recently a fan of the pressure cooker (here's the one I use, via Opensky.com). I love it especially when I want to have a quick stew ready for a weeknight dinner. A 2 to 4 hour stew can be completed start to finish in under and hour. But the egg and the pressure cooker came together on twitter. I invited Laura ...

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Also posted in Appetizers, Eggs, Guest Post, Kitchen Technology, Kitchen Tips, pressure cooker | Tagged boiled, cocotte, Eggs, hip pressure cooking, Laura Pazzaglia, pressure cooker, recipe | 36 Comments

How To Fry Chicken

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 9, 2012

The chicken wings I made for a Super Bowl party. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Fried chicken, done right, is one of the best things to eat on earth. It's all about the proportions—crunchiness: juiciness: chewiness: savoriness. And this ratio hits golden proportions with the wing, lots of crunchy peppery surface area and sweet succulent meat. The study of fried chicken began for me in 2007 during discussions, observations and eating with chef Dave Cruz at Ad Hoc in Yountville, CA, as we worked on the book Ad Hoc at Home. While Ad Hoc's method of flour-buttermilk-flour is not unique, their trial and error experimentation with various methods (including sous vide), proved to them and to me, that this method is indeed superlative. That was 2007, and I've since fried a lot of chicken. My recipe is in Click to Continue Reading

Also posted in american regional cuisine, Donna Turner Ruhlman Photography, Main Courses, Seasonings and Spices, Technique | Tagged food photography, fried chicken, recipe, twenty | 33 Comments

Israeli Couscous with Butternut Squash

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 6, 2012

Israeli couscous with butternut/Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

I almost never "do" recipes. I've written a book that if anything is an anti-recipe book. I set out on this culinary journey in part because, as I wrote in Making of a Chef, I sensed that recipes were nothing more than a tease, that the real cooking lay beneath the recipes. This is not to say that recipes are bad. Say you made a really killer stir-fry and wanted to be able to do it over and over, or you wanted your best friend to give it a try, you'd want to follow a recipe. If you want to recreate a dish, you need a recipe. I could probably make a decent oatmeal raisin cookie just by figuring it out, but I'd feel better at least glancing ...

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Also posted in aromatics, sidedishes, Technique, Vegetables | Tagged couscous, david lebovitz, lemon confit | 20 Comments

Lobster Pie

By emilia | Published: February 6, 2012

Make heads turn with a luscious recipe for lobster stew with puff pastry, via NYT.

Also posted in Article, baking, Holiday, Seafood | Tagged lobster, new york times, puff pastry, valentines day | Leave a comment

Eastern North Carolina BBQ

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: February 2, 2012

Pulled pork sandwich, from Ruhlman's Twenty. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

With these last few posts on cooking for groups, it occurred to me that I should post one of my go-to, fabulously easy, always-gets-raves main course that serves a lot of people. East Carolina barbecue, called pulled pork here up north. When I arrived at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, from Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1980s I knew the word barbecue to be a verb. You did it on a grill. As a noun, it meant a gathering to eat food cooked on a grill—it was something you had, something you invited neighbors to. But on the drive back from a place called Jugtown (to get there we’d gone through a town called Whynot, with a church named after the town; loved that), we stopped at what looked ...

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