THE JOURNAL
Savoury French toast with cherry tomatoes and basil. Photograph by Mr David Malosh and Mr Simon Andrews, courtesy of Ebury Press
One might think that the difference between talented chefs and, well, you and me, is down to painstaking preparation. Careful measurement of ingredients, obsessive timing – that kind of thing. Professional cheffing is about knowing exactly what, when and for how long.
Turns out this isn’t exactly correct and doesn’t refer to any cook worth their rock salt. If you truly understand flavours and ingredients, you do not dabble in the undignified business of “weighing” – who needs scales when you have hands and eyes? Nor would you consult a greasy iPhone screen to understand how long your venison needs in the oven. Top pan rattlers operate on subconscious instinct and muscle memory – informed by a thousand gastronomic experiences.
If all this “practising a skill and passion” sounds like hard work, but you still want a decent dinner, this New York Times book might be for you. No-Recipe Recipes shows you how to make amazing dishes, but without the grams, cups, teaspoons, novel-sized methods or spices even Mr Yotam Ottolenghi would struggle to conjure up. Instead, this book favours choice supermarket ingredients and strings together a few sentences explaining how to make them taste (and look) great. A cheat sheet, yes, but also inspiration to start cooking with instinct. Here are three “recipes” to get you started.
01.
Crispy pork sandwiches with spicy mayo and scallions
Crispy pork sandwiches with spicy mayo and scallions. Photograph by Mr David Malosh and Mr Simon Andrews, courtesy of Ebury Press
This is a freestyle rendition of restaurant food, made with supermarket ingredients.
Ingredients: pork belly or fatty pork chops, soy sauce, oyster sauce, chilli oil, sugar, hamburger buns, mayonnaise, chilli-garlic sauce, scallions and coriander (aka cilantro)
Get some pork belly if you can or some fatty pork chops if you can’t. Cut the meat into cubes. Toss the cubes with a mixture of soy sauce and oyster sauce, some hot chilli oil and a sprinkle of sugar. Line a sheet pan with foil and heat your broiler. Cook the pork under the broiler, tossing it around a couple times until it’s crisp, glistening and cooked all the way through. Toast the buns. Stir together some mayo and chilli-garlic sauce. Mix in a lot of sliced scallions and coriander. Smear the buns with the mayo mixture. Spoon the pork onto the buns and there you go.
02.
Steamed mussels with tomatoes and chorizo
Steamed mussels with tomatoes and chorizo. Photograph by Mr David Malosh and Mr Simon Andrews, courtesy of Ebury Press
Simplicity itself, if you can find a bag of mussels at the store.
Ingredients: mussels, cured and dried Spanish chorizo, olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, white wine, parsley and bread
Scrub and debeard the shells as necessary. Then grab a big pot and use it to sauté some cubed chorizo in olive oil over medium-high heat. When it starts to crisp, add a few handfuls of halved cherry tomatoes and a clove or two of chopped garlic. Let the tomatoes blister in the fat, then add the mussels and a glass of white wine. Cover the pot and allow the mussels to steam open. (If at the end you have mussels that haven’t opened, ditch them: they’re dead.) Cut fat slices of bread and toast. Garnish with chopped parsley and serve with plenty of toast for the sopping.
03.
Savoury French toast with cherry tomatoes and basil
Savoury French toast with cherry tomatoes and basil. Photograph by Mr David Malosh and Mr Simon Andrews, courtesy of Ebury Press
It’s axiomatic that a stash of leftover bread makes the best French toast for breakfast, and so it stands to reason that a savoury version would be equally satisfying for the crew around your dinner table. At least, that’s true in my house.
Ingredients: eggs, basil, black pepper, hot sauce, bread, butter and cherry tomatoes
Whisk the eggs in a shallow bowl as you usually would, but omit sugar and cinnamon, and instead hit them with freshly ground black pepper, chopped basil and a dash of hot sauce. Slide some slices of old bread in there to soak, then fry up the slices of toast in butter. Scattering a few handfuls of halved cherry tomatoes into the pan as the bread cooks yields a fine topping. Doubters will doubt no more.
Extracted from New York Times Cooking: No-Recipe Recipes by Mr Sam Sifton. Image courtesy of Ebury Press