By Leslie Brenner
All of a sudden, we’re in the height of stone fruit season, and nectarines have been spectacular. This simple sorbet — adapted from a recipe in The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz — is fabulous on its own, and even more special with dropped into glasses of red wine.
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Snapper Ceviche with Dashi and Seaweed
By Leslie Brenner
[Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a multi-part series. Here’s Part 1.]
If you’ve eaten ceviche in Peru, or dined anywhere in the world with a serious ceviche program, you’ve probably heard of leche de tigre — “tiger’s milk.” A marinade and sauce that can also be sipped after you’re done eating the ceviche, it’s one of the most delicious tricks up the sleeves of the Peruvian ceviche masters — Peruvians even spike it with pisco (Peru’s national liquor) and drink it as a cocktail.
Leche de tigre is brilliant for introducing umami into a ceviche, while at the same time smoothing out the harsh acid of the lime juice. You’ll see it as an ingredient in many ceviche recipes, along with a sub-recipe, as it’s not something you can buy: It’s fish broth combined with lime juice, fish trimmings and cilantro, maybe garlic and/or chile. Perhaps some red onion, which is also used in the fish broth. Oh, yes — first you’ll need a recipe for fish broth. And in order to make fish broth, you’ll need fish frames and heads.
In other words, most home cooks will skip that recipe.
It’s easy to see how restaurants can manage to make fish broth for leche de tigre; they can start their ceviches from whole fish and use those heads and frames for big batches of broth. But for most of us at home, part of the appeal of ceviche is that it’s not just fresh, cool and expressive, but also relatively quick and easy.
So how to add umami into the equation without going to all that trouble? Two interesting — and very different — ways to go are dashi or tomatoes.
Ingredients for dashi (kombu and katsuobushi, or dried bonito flakes), and the finished stock
I thought about dashi, the simple, easy-to-make stock that’s the foundation of Japanese cooking, because it’s packed with umami, redolent of the sea, and quick and easy to make. In fact, it only involves two ingredients besides water: kombu (a type of seaweed) and bonito flakes. You can keep both on hand in the pantry, and it only takes 10 or 15 minutes for a batch. You can freeze the leftover dashi, or use it later to make a quick miso soup.
Dashi as a ceviche ingredient makes sense culturally, because there’s a strong Japanese influence in Peruvian cooking — known as cocina nikkei — thanks to Japanese immigration to Peru beginning in the late 19th century. And dashi’s ingredients — seaweed and bonito — are both found in Peru’s Pacific.
While I’ve seen various ceviches that use Japanese ingredients — including shaved bonito (or katsuobushi) as a garnish — I haven’t seen any recipes that use dashi in the marinade.
It works beautifully, imparting a gentle sea-kissed umami to the fish. I chose red snapper from the Gulf of Mexico for this ceviche because that’s what looked beautiful that day, but you could use sea bass, or any firm-fleshed white fish. Wakame seaweed and cucumbers play nicely with the fish, and you can finish it with furikake — the Japanese condiment that includes sesame seeds, salt, red pepper and nori seaweed.
Taking advantage of tomatoes’ awesome umami power feels just right for the season. Sure, you can dice tomatoes and toss them in with whatever fish or seafood you’re using, or use halved cherry tomatoes, which also add pretty color. But why not include some puréed tomato in the marinade?
In Central Ecuador, there is a tradition of including puréed tomatoes in the marinade for a ceviche of blanched shrimp.
Here I poached the shrimp in a quick broth made from their shells, along with cilantro and red onion. I strained the broth, combined it with chopped tomato, lime juice, salt and arbol chile, then blitzed it for the marinade/sauce. Slivers of red onion and sliced cucumbers garnished the ceviche — which I served with tostadas. (In Ecuador, it would be more likely to be served with plaintain chips, but the tostadas are really nice.)
The sauce, meanwhile, is so delicious my husband and I drank every drop.
RECIPE: Ecuador-Inspired Shrimp Ceviche
Finally, here’s an easy raw-fish ceviche that requires no cooking except zapping an ear of corn in the microwave for 60 seconds (or giving it a quick dunk in boiling water). Starring tomatoes, avocado, yellow bell pepper, scallions, cilantro and barely-cooked corn kernels, it’s a full-on celebration of summer. The tomato takes two forms: It’s puréed in the marinade as well as diced with the other garnishes.
This time it was rockfish that spoke to me from the fish case: it was fresh and gorgeous. Snapper or sea bass would be fabulous, too; choose what looks most appealing.
RECIPE: Rockfish Ceviche with Tomato and Corn
FDA guidelines stipulate that any fish other than tuna species (including bigeye, yellowfin, bonito/skipjack and bluefin) and farmed salmon must be frozen before it’s safe to consume raw; freezing it kills any possible parasites. However, as this excellent Serious Eats article explains, the risk of infection from raw fish is very low. Personally, I would never eat raw farmed salmon, because of well documented problems in their feed (and I don’t like their flavor.) The phrase “sushi-grade” is meaningless. If you’re nervous about the safety of eating raw fish, it’s best to choose something that’s been frozen.
Curious about how this article came to be? Check out our weekly Substack newsletter where we develop ideas and deliver extra recipes. Here’s the issue that birthed this ceviche series.
By Leslie Brenner
[Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a multi-part series. Updated June 22, 2023.]
There’s nothing more enticing than a gorgeous ceviche.
Maybe it’s one starring satiny sliced scallops, bathed oh-so-briefly in coconut and lime, consorting with velvety avocado slices. Or maybe it’s luscious bonito, with cancha (toasted corn nuts), sweet potato and cucumber. Or vermilion snapper, with flecks of tomato and cilantro and slivers of red onion. Or a vegan one, featuring hearts of palm, chile threads and radishes.
At their best, ceviches are cool, vibrant, alluring and expressive. The fact that they’re so exciting and inventive in their ostensible birthplace, Peru, is arguably the reason Lima has become such a culinary hot spot over the last decade. Peru’s northern neighbor, Ecuador, is all-in with ceviche culture, too, as is Mexico — including with aguachile, a type of ceviche. As chef Douglas Rodriguez pointed out in The Great Ceviche Book (2003, revised 2010), variations are also enjoyed in coastal towns throughout Central America, South America and the Caribbean.
Dazzling ceviches have broken out of Latin America in recent years. They first started appearing in the U.S. in the late 1980s, and they had some time in the spotlight when Rodriguez opened Patria in New York City in 1994, followed by Chicama in 2000. Now, once again, ceviches and aguachiles are having a major moment. (Not in your town or country yet? Let’s talk again in a month or two.)
On the other hand, there are legions of lesser versions rattling around in the world. At their most careless, ceviches can be pretty awful — too harsh, too acid, too relentlessly twangy. That’s because the basic recipe is raw fish plus lime juice (with some chile and salt). The lime juice, which is intensely acidic, “cooks” the fish by transforming its proteins, thereby firming up the flesh.
So what do the Peruvians and Ecuadorians know that most of us don’t?
They know how to tame the lime juice.
Here’s the great thing: If you understand how to do that, you can throw together incredibly elegant starters that’ll wow your friends and family with very little effort, usually without even turning on the stove. Perfect for summer! They can star raw fish or other seafood “cooked” with (tamed!) lime, but seafood that’s been literally cooked (maybe shellfish, squid or octopus) is welcome, too. There are even duck ceviches, and versions starring beef. Meanwhile, plant-based ceviches are happening — including in Peru. Gastón Acurio, the country’s most famous chef, gives recipes in Peru: The Cookbook for Artichoke Ceviche, and Ceviche de Champiñones (mushroom ceviche). “You can make ceviche with button mushrooms or any other type of vegetable,” he writes. “Ceviche is a blank canvas, not just a recipe.”
Ceviche’s canvas is open to all kinds of cultural inspiration and improvisation, thanks to the dish’s origin story and evolution.
In Peru, citrus-bathed raw seafood cebiches (that’s the original spelling) were first eaten in the 16th century. According to Maricel E. Presilla’s authoritative Gran Cocina Latina, bonito and baitfish (such as anchovy) were marinated in juice squeezed from Seville (bitter) oranges, the first citrus to be brought to the New World from Spanish colonists. In the second half of the 19th century, Japanese immigrants brought their culinary ideas to Peru, resulting in today’s cocina nikkei, and Chinese immigrants contributed theirs, with la cocina chifa.
But there are antecedents elsewhere in the world, such as the Philippines, whose kinilaw is “cured” in vinegar. Catalan people in Spain were marinating fish and seafood in lime, orange and vinegar as far back as the 14th century (escabeche!). Presilla refers to pre-Inca archeological sites on the coast of northern Peru where passion fruit and tumbo seeds were excavated “side by side with hot pepper seeds and the remains of shellfish and fish bones.” Not a citrus-juice situation, but it suggests fruit-juice-and-chile-marinated fish; tumbo is an acidic fruit.
All of which is to say that with so much cross-pollination, ceviche is a culinary canvas on which cooks of every culture can feel comfortable painting.
You can certainly use the recipes that follow — one with this article, and others in upcoming installments of this series. I’m super excited about them, so I hope you do. But once you grasp the lime-softening principal and gain a sense of the possible range of ingredients (coming in future installments), you’ll also have what you need to improvise based on whatever fabulous seafood catches your eye and whatever other ingredients appeal. Stunning success is practically assured.
I had my first ceviche-taming lesson about 10 years ago, when my friend Bradford Thompson (a James Beard-Award winning chef) visited us at our home in Dallas. We’d invited him for dinner, and he showed up with ceviche components, including gorgeous diver scallops. I can’t remember what else was in the particular ceviche he threw together (he can’t either), except that it definitely relied on coconut water — yes, to soften the lime juice. The result was spectacular: suave, soft and lightly tangy, and tasting gently of the sea. And the texture of those scallops — which only got a quick coconut-lime bath — was magnificent.
It was an ocean apart from the usual white fish cooked in straight lime to toughness.
I adored that ceviche, but somehow it took me a decade to synthesize why it was so good: not simply because the coconut water made it nice, but because the coconut water diluted the lime.
My hunch was confirmed when I turned to the very first recipe in Acurio’s Peru — Ceviche Classico. It starts with white fish fillets (sole, croaker or grouper) cut into 3/4-inch cubes and seasoned with salt and pepper. They cure for one minute, then you add chopped garlic and chiles, lime juice and chopped cilantro — along with ice cubes. Ice cubes! What do the ice cubes do? They melt as you stir them into the ceviche, diluting the lime juice.
In Gran Cocina Latina, one of Presilla’s 10 ceviche tips is adding ice cubes “to tone down” lime juice’s acidity. Remove them, she advises, before the ice melts completely, “or it will water down the flavor.”
While you ponder the power of frozen water to finesse fabulousness, help yourself to a recipe inspired by Bradford’s scallop ceviche that leans into coconut water to tame the lime. While Bradford didn’t recall the other ingredients, he did remember that it used twice as much coconut water as lime juice. (That’s a ratio that chef Rodriguez also used in his signature Honduran Fire and Ice tuna ceviche at Patria, which appears in The Great Ceviche Book.)
If you can find fresh dry-pack sea scallops — the ones that have no chemicals or water added — this dish is a great place to start. As with all ceviche and other raw-fish recipes, make sure you’re buying the freshest possible product from a trusted purveyor, use it the day you purchase it, and keep it well chilled until you use it.
RECIPE: Scallop Ceviche with Coconut and Avocado
FDA guidelines stipulate that any fish other than tuna species (including bigeye, yellowfin, bonito/skipjack and bluefin) and farmed salmon must be frozen before it’s safe to consume raw; freezing it kills any possible parasites. However, as this excellent Serious Eats article explains, the risk of infection from raw fish is very low. Personally, I would never eat raw farmed salmon, because of well documented problems in their feed (and I don’t like their flavor.) The phrase “sushi-grade” is meaningless. If you’re nervous about the safety of eating raw fish, it’s best to choose something that’s been frozen.
Curious about how this article came to be? Check out our weekly Substack newsletter where we develop ideas and deliver extra recipes. Here’s the issue that birthed this ceviche series.
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Slivered Pork with Flowering Chives, from ‘Land of Fish and Rice’
By Leslie Brenner
Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer — so where are all the great tomatoes and corn? Coming soon, don’t worry!
Rather than rush prematurely into zucchini and eggplant, it’s worth taking a minute to slow down and appreciate the final fabulous weeks of spring and all that means for cooks who follow the seasons.
Such a delicious moment, with artichokes and asparagus still gorgeous, strawberries and new potatoes at their best, flowering chives in the Asian markets and peaches just starting to come in. That’s why we’ve put together a bunch of recipes that celebrate this spring-into-summer moment.
The dish shown above comes from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Fish and Rice, one of my all-time favorite cookbooks.
READ: Cookbooks We Love: Shanghai and its Jiangnan region shine in ‘Land of Fish and Rice’
I love the recipe for so many reasons, starting with I’d seen flowering chives in Asian markets so many times and always wondered what to do with them. Also, as Dunlop writes in her headnote, it serves as a master recipe “for any stir-fry that follows the basic formula of slivered meat plus slivered vegetable.” Dunloop has a wonderful way of teaching important lessons in Chinese technique with each of her recipes — which always work and are always revelations.
Inevitably I start craving gazpacho each year before tomatoes are at their peak. Since creating this recipe a few years ago, this is what I always make. It’s an easy blitz of cukes, celery, bell pepper, tons of parsley and almonds or cashews, seasoned with sherry vinegar and olive oil.
June’s the perfect month for it. It happens to be vegan and gluten-free. I once made it for a movie star (a big one — no joke!), and she loved it.
Perfect for Father’s Day, a Juneteenth celebration — or hey, even a Memorial Day picnic today! — this classic comes from Toni Tipton Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. It tastes very much like the potato salad my mom used to make when I was a kid.
This mayo-based sauce is my current favorite thing to dunk asparagus in. It would also be great to serve with boiled artichokes. You can make your own mayo for it, or use store-bought.
Yes, it’s as good as it sounds.
Peaches are here! I had superb ones when I was in California a couple weeks ago, and I bought some from South Carolina a few days ago here in Dallas. Memorial Day is when the Texas peaches usually start — hurray! Which means if you’re somewhere in the U.S., you’re probably not far from peaches.
This pavlova is a rolled sheet of meringue, filled with whipped cream, peaches, blackberries and almonds and topped with more of the same. It comes to us from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Sweet, cowritten with Helen Goh, and an assist from Tara Wigley. It’s one of the most fun desserts I’ve ever made — and showstoppingly striking when you slice it.
By Leslie Brenner
When I was a seafood-loving child growing up in Los Angeles back in the late 1960s, one of my favorite family excursions was going to dinner on the Santa Monica Pier. About halfway out, on the south side of the pier, was a laid-back, checkered-tablecloth seafood joint that offered two of my favorite foods in the world. One was house-made potato chips that were crisp on the edges and soft in the middle. I can’t remember what they served them with, only that they were incredible.
The other was a seafood Louie. I may be rewriting history — that was a long time ago! — but the way I remember it, you could choose between Crab Louie, Shrimp Louie or Crab and Shrimp Louie. I always went for the the combo. What landed before me was a magnificent assemblage of iceberg lettuce, plump shrimps, pieces of Dungeness crab (in and out of the shell), tomato wedges, hard-boiled egg quarters, a wedge of lemon and a pitcher of Louis dressing. How royal!
Somehow, the Louie salad (also spelled Louis, like its sauce) has fallen out of fashion, but I’ve always kept it in my rotation: A shrimp Louie has always been one of my favorite summer dinners to make at home. It’s easy, it’s delicious, it’s satisfying and it’s cold.
Interested? Here’s the recipe.
On the rare occasions I have access to Dungeness crab, I’ll make it a crab Louis; otherwise shrimp is dandy. (I always buy wild shrimp rather than the farmed stuff from Southeast Asia, which often suffers from poor farming practices.)
You may be wondering, what is the origin of seafood Louie, and why have I never heard of it? Really it’s a West Coast/last century thing, so if you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s probably either because you’re younger, or not from the West Coast, or both.
The crab Louis dates back at least to the early 20th century; it was likely born either in Washington State or California’s Bay Area. Either would make sense, as both are home to delicious Dungeness crab.
The exact origin is hazy. It is known to have been served at the Olympic Club in Seattle in 1904, when — according to What’s Cooking America — the legendary opera singer Enrique Caruso kept ordering it “until none was left in the restaurant’s kitchen.”
But this excellent short documentary segment — “Cracking the Case of Crab Louie,” from a show called “Mossback’s Northwest” shown on Seattle’s local PBS station — debunks the Caruso tale, pointing out that Caruso never visited Seattle. The segment also points to the earliest known appearance of a recipe in the Pacific Northwest for Crab Louis: in the Portland Council of Jewish Women’s Neighborhood Cookbook, published in 1912. The recipe called for lettuce, crab meat, hard-boiled and a dressing made from oil, vinegar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, English mustard, salt and paprika. (Apparently those ladies did not keep kosher!)
The Davenport Hotel — some 270 miles inland from Seattle — is another possible birthplace. The hotel’s restaurant, The Palm Court, states on its website that its founder — Louis Davenport — had his chef, Edouard Mathieu, create it. It’s still on the Palm Court’s menu, “served according to the original recipe.” Interesting to note that as described on the menu, that signature dish has the same ingredients as our basic recipe — “Crisp butter lettuce topped with fresh Dungeness crab leg meat, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, and our famous housemade Louis dressing.”
San Francisco also lays claim to Crab Louis’ invention. In a 1914 book called Bohemian San Francisco, author Clarence E. Edwords gave a recipe for the Crab Louis from a restaurant called Solari’s. There’s no lettuce, tomato or hard-boiled egg involved; it’s just crabmeat dressed with Louis dressing: mayo, chili sauce, chow-chow, Worcestershire sauce and herbs. The St. Francis Hotel is sometimes mentioned in Crab Louis’ origin story as well.
Although James Beard — who was a native of Portland, Oregon — adored Crab Louis and reportedly included recipes for it in at least three of his cookbooks, the salad had a hard time gaining traction away from the West Coast. Clementine Paddleford did not include it among the more than 600 recipes she collected for What America Eats, her exhaustive 1960 survey of dining habits across the country.
It was, however, in both Craig Claiborne’s 1961 The New York Times Cookbook and the 1964 edition of Joy of Cooking. Both were basically crabmeat mounded on lettuce, with Louis dressing spooned over.
A rendition included in Time-Life’s famous American Cooking series (“The Great West” edition, published in 1971) looks and sounds more enticing. This one has you toss crabmeat with the dressing and set the dressed crab in half an avocado, arrange bibb or Boston lettuce leaves around it and garnish with tomato and hard-boiled egg wedges.
Since then, written mentions of the salad — whether in books or on menus — are few and far between. Perhaps you can still find it here and there on the West Coast.
In 1996, I had the opportunity to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth II, invited as a first-class passenger. That included dinners in the Queen’s Grill — where you could order whatever you wanted, whether or not it was on the menu. Everyone enjoyed playing “stump the kitchen,” but stumping those polished servers wasn’t so easy. One night I asked for a Crab Louis: Of all the things I could think of eating that moment, that sounded the best. The elegant waiter, who had seemingly never heard of the dish, nevertheless didn’t miss a beat. “Certainly, madame,” he said. “And how would you like that prepared?”
“Oh, the usual way,” I said. “A bed of Boston lettuce, with Dungeness crab heaped on top, wedges of tomato and hard-boiled egg, and that Louis dressing that’s pretty much a Thousand Island.” A few minutes later, a gorgeous one appeared. Absolutely royal.
Quiabos Tostados com Pimenta — Brazililan Chargrilled Okra with Chile
By Leslie Brenner
Simmer it in a savory gumbo. Capture it in a pickle. Roast it to show off its depth. It’s the height of okra season, and there are endless delicious ways to treat the fascinating, polarizing pod.
You can shallow-fry it as Indian-spiced rounds that highlight its captivating geometry. Halve it lengthwise and grill it to smoky goodness. Cook it with tomatoes and onions, stir in olive oil and herbs and serve it as a tangy, cool Levantine salad.
Food historians disagree about okra’s origins. Most, including Jessica B. Harris (author of The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent), pin it as Africa. “The mucilaginous pod is the continent’s culinary totem,” she writes. “From the bamia of Egypt to the soupikandia of Senegal, passing by the various sauces gombos and more, this pod is used in virtual continent-wide totality.” Others say it comes from South Asia or Southeast Asia.
What’s indisputable is that okra has long since become a citizen of the world.
In Asia, it appears in various guides from India to Vietnam to Japan. A sour fish soup from Vietnam, canh chua cá, features okra, tamarind and pineapple. The late Shizuo Tsuji gave a recipe for okura wasabi-jōyu — a simple okra salad with wasabi, soy sauce and mirin — in his landmark 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. And in India, okra is popular quick-fried till crispy.
Crispy Sumac Okra from Anjali Pathak’s ‘The Indian Family Kitchen’
Intrigued? Try this crunchy, addictive version of Crispy Sumac Okra, adapted from Anjali Pathak’s The Indian Family Kitchen.
In Africa, Egypt has bamia (okra made sweet and sour with honey and lemon); Ethiopia has bamya alich’a (okra simmered with tomatoes, onions, garlic and spices); Benin has sauce bombo (okra simmered with tomatoes and chile, served on rice); and Nigeria has akara awon (bean-and-okra fritters). Recipes for all four, and more, can be found in Harris’ The Africa Cookbook.
Out of Africa, okra dishes appear all over the Levant, and in Afghanistan, Armenia and Kurdistan. In Turkey, okra are dried and later made into a soup, banya corbasi. Lebanon is home to a lamb and okra stew called bamya bel lameh, and also a delightful braised okra and tomato dish served cool or room temp, as part of a mezze — bamieh bi zeit. Glossy with olive oil, it’s particularly nice this time of year, as tomatoes and okra are both in high season. Claudia Roden offers a wonderful version in her classic 2006 book Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. Our adaptation takes her up on her suggested variation of using tangy pomegranate vinegar in place of sugar in the recipe.
Bamieh Bi Zeit — Lebanese Okra and Tomato, served cold as a salad
And then there are all the African diasporic dishes. These are the okra dishes that, over the centuries, have become extraordinarily meaningful for the communities descended from enslaved people, from South America to the Caribbean to the United States.
In the American South, okra appears in gumbos and other soups and stews — often with tomatoes (as in Lebanon and all over the Levant) and/or shrimp. BJ Dennis, a Charleston, South Carolina chef with roots in the low country Gullah-Geechee community, has a magnificent recipe for Okra & Shrimp Purloo in Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, edited and curated by Bryant Terry and published last year. From Dennis’ headnote:
“Okra is a vegetable that is dear to many of us throughout the African diaspora. And of course there’s shrimp, which is vital to our culture. This is a dish of pain, resilience and celebration. It’s the story of our existence in the so-called New World. If you were to give me one final meal to eat, it would be this.”
BJ Dennis’ Purloo with Okra & Shrimp, from ‘Black Food,’ edited and curated by Bryant Terry
Recently Dennis helped the International African American Museum (slated to open in January 2023) develop a Gullah-inspired menu; the cafe, Dennis tells me, expected to open the following year. Meanwhile, here’s our adaptation of his marvelous recipe, which also features Carolina Gold rice, another low country food with deep meaning for Gullah-Geechee’s descendants of enslaved people.
Okra pods go by the name molondrones in the Dominican Republic, where they’re eaten as a stew (guisado de molondrones) or salad. Guisados starring okra are also popular in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the vegetable is called quimbombó.
From Brazil comes salada da quiabo, an okra salad, and caruru — a shrimp and okra stew. The state of Bahia is known for the dish; in Pará — the country’s northernmost state — caruru is a shrimp and okra curry. There’s a delicious-looking recipe for it in Thiago Castanho’s 2014 book Brazilian Food. “The origins of caruru point to a divided authorship between native Indians and Africans,” writes Castanho in the headnote. “This typical dish of Bahia state is nowadays associated with the African-Brazilian religious ritual, Candomblé, and served as a main course, as here, or as part of a banquet.”
I haven’t yet cooked or tasted a traditional caruru, but I recently had the pleasure of tasting a fabulous spin at Meridian, a spectacular modern Brazilian restaurant in Dallas (which happens to be a client of my consulting business).
Grilled Jumbo Prawn Caruru from Meridian, a modern Brazilian restaurant in Dallas, Texas
In his Grilled Jumbo Prawn Caruru, Meridian’s executive chef, Junior Borges — who is from Brazil, near Rio de Janeiro — featured okra all kinds of ways: braised in the sauce, halved lengthwise and charred to top, raw as little round okra exclamation points. It was an okra tour de force — served with a Carolina Gold rice cake that’s deep-fried and dusted with ramp powder.
Chef Borges told me, when he featured the dish recently, that caruru has “deep meaning” for him and his family.
Much simpler than either chef Borges’ or Castanho’s caruru — and unlike those, a snap to prepare at home — is Quiabos Tostados com Pimenta (chargrilled okra with chile). Our adaptation is also from Castanho’s Brazilian Food. To make it, drizzle whole okra pods with olive oil, char them on a grill-pan, season them with aviú (tiny Brazilian dried salted shrimp) or other dried salt shrimp, plus thinly sliced fresh red chiles, lime juice and cilantro.
It’s absolutely transporting. And I love chef Castanho’s suggestion that if you can’t find aviú or other dried shrimp, you can use katsuobushi — Japanese bonito flakes — instead. The katsuobushi adds a similar aquatic umami note, while incontrovertibly proving that okra is, by any measure, a well traveled, adaptable, flexible, deliciously versatile citizen of the world.
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RECIPE: Shrimp Sauté with Texas Vegetables
RECIPE: Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra
RECIPE: Charred Okra with a Little Spice
Shrimp Sauté with Texas Vegetables celebrates late-summer flavors.
By Leslie Brenner
Oh, happy day — we’re out of triple digit-weather in North Texas, where I live. It’s not a moment too soon, as it’s such a delicious season produce-wise. All the corn and tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant, with incredible flavor bursting every-which-way — it’s enough to make a person pull out the knife sharpener, dust off the stove, polish the pepper grinder and get chopping.
Here are a few dishes I’m loving this summer-into-fall moment:
To celebrate these flavors a few nights ago, I put together a quick sauté of shrimp and late-summer Texas vegetables. It’s inspired by two dishes: one I grew up with, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, and a dish I love from Adán Medrano’s Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita. The resulting easy sauté is pictured up top. If you believe what we read about the health benefits of eating things of many hues, you’ll certainly feel great about this. The taste benefits? Take a bite, and you’ll see.
Have you ever made (or even tasted) a great ratatouille? I thought not. Last year, I cracked the code of how to make one — and it’s easier than the normal way. Pro tip: This approach involves letting your oven concentrate the flavors and safeguard the textures.
Anyone bored by zucchini will have a life-changing moment upon tasting this. It has been Cooks Without Border’s most popular recipe since we wrote about it two years ago.
The national dish of Palestine is traditionally prepared during olive harvest season to celebrate the olive oil harvest. This version, from Ottolenghi’s partner Sami Tamimi’s 2020 cookbook Falastin (written with Cooks Without Borders’ friend Tara Wigley) is insanely delicious.
RECIPE: ‘Falastin’ Chicken Musakhan
Not ready to turn on the stove or light your grill just yet? Here’s an outstanding dish you can achieve with just a quick pass in the microwave. It’s from superstar chef José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed.
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Tomato Burrata Salad: no heat required!
By Leslie Brenner
We’ve done a lot of not-cooking this insanely hot month — and loved it! Opening a tin of sardines, squeezing a lemon, arranging greens, slicing height-of-the-season tomatoes: That’s the kind of low-stress prep it takes to make something delightful without going near the stove.
Especially this time of year, when there’s so much great produce. That’s right — we’re talking about dishes you can accomplish without so much as coddling an egg or toasting bread.
Put a few of them together — add a bottle of rosé or orange wine, if you’re so inclined — and you’ve got a royal spread.
Whether you scoop up your favorite selections from the olive bar, or just open a jar of Castelvetranos, this easy toss with fresh herbs, citrus and garlic is welcome at any gathering.
RECIPE: Mikie’s Marinated Olives
Every French home cook has this tangy raw carrot salad in their bag of delicious tricks.
Every guac is great this time of year — from a traditional one to a Thai-inspired renegade. The celery-happy version in Josef Centeno’s wonderful Amá cookbook is lovely, light, and particularly summery.
The combination of lime juice, fish sauce and peanuts makes Southeast Asian green papaya salad highly craveable during summer. Leela Punyaratabandu’s excellent version from Simple Thai Food gets the balance just right.
RECIPE: Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Green Papaya Salad
Cool and satisfying, with some richness from raw almonds or cashews and tang from sherry vinegar, this chilled soup is one of our favorites ever. It’s vegan — and unlike traditional bread-thickened Gazpacho Sevillano, it’s gluten-free.
A touch of orange-blossom water makes this minty little number transportingly good.
RECIPE: Cucumber, Radish and Feta Salad
Keep a log of organic goat cheese in the fridge (unopened, it keeps for ages) as an insurance policy for when you need this quick app on the fly. (Follow the “skip the heating” suggestion in the recipe.)
This jazzy, sesame-fragrant cold chicken salad is one of our favorite dishes from one of our favorite cookbooks, Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice. It’s a great use for store-bought roast chicken.
RECIPE: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Spicy Sichuan Chicken Salad
I usually have everything on hand to make this delicious toss of an Italian-inspired salad: a can each of tuna and cannellini beans, a red onion, some parsley and celery. A squeeze of lemon or drizzle of vinegar adds lift and bounce.
RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad
The platter of herbs that accompanies just about every Persian meal can make a fabulous meal on its own — especially when it includes good feta and walnuts and it’s served with a nice flatbread.
RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan (Persian Herb Platter)
This is the moment for the classic salad, as tomatoes are bursting with flavor. Use mozzarella or ricotta if you can’t find burrata.
RECIPE: Tomato and Burrata Salad
Mint, green olives and salty Italian cheese come together harmoniously in this unusual and pretty fabulous raw zucchini salad. It’s adapted from Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgren’s A16 Food & Wine cookbook, inspired by their San Francisco pizza place.
RECIPE: A16’s Raw Zucchini Salad
Make this once or twice — after that, you’ll be able to whip it up with your eyes closed. It’s so delicious, we make it every couple of weeks, all year long.
RECIPE: Smoked Trout ‘Rillettes’
The Levant region’s minty, sumac-y green salad has crispy pita; our bread-less one may infuriate purists, but we think it’s pretty swell — and gluten-free.
Help yourself to our award-winning version of the world’s most famous cold soup!
Did you enjoy this story? If you, you might like:
READ: “Dinner on Ice: 5 cold dishes that refresh and delight”
READ: “Zucchini coming out of your ears? These 8 delicious dishes will make you wish you had 5 more pounds”
READ: “Cookbooks We Love: David Lebovitz’s ‘The Perfect Scoop’ is the only ice cream book you’ll ever need”
A selection of oysters waiting to be shucked at Glidden Point Oyster Farm in Edgecomb, Maine
By Leslie Brenner
The hotter it gets, the colder I want to eat. Last night I returned from a work trip to Maine, a paradise cool and green with no shortage of pellet ice or spectacular oysters. Today, we’re in triple digits where I live, in Dallas. Yep, 107. I just want to put everything on ice.
Is it hot where you are? If so, let’s do this. I’ll give you 5 summer recipes that are great eaten cold, and you supply the ice.
These traditional Vietnamese summer rolls with stretchy rice-paper wrappers are meant to be a starter, but they’re so good, I like to make a whole meal of them.
Ice Opp: Make a platter of goi cuon and set it atop a larger rimmed platter filled with ice. Refreshing! (Note to self: develop a recipe for Che Ba Mau — the three-color Vietnamese ice dessert. Would be the perfect frozen exclamation point to the summer rolls.)
When I was growing up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where summer temps frequently topped 100, my mom steadfastly refused to put air conditioning in our house; she didn’t believe in it. We did have a pool, and to keep cool, we’d go in wearing oversized tee-shirts and then sit in the shade of our big rubber tree playing cards dripping wet and drinking iced tea.
Come dinnertime, my mom would set out what she called “cold summer din.” Usually that meant a bowl of cold borscht, followed by a plate of salmon salad (flaked canned salmon, diced red onion and celery, lemon juice), quartered tomatoes and egg noodles mixed with cottage cheese. The latter wasn’t cold; go figure.
But truth be told, today when I eat this borscht — my mom’s recipe, accompanied by a bowl of diced radishes, cukes and scallions, plus sour cream and optional boiled potato — I inevitably want a second bowl, and that’s enough dinner for me.
Ice Opp: Throw a couple of big cubes right in the bowl. Colder the better!
The famous parsley salad of the Levant makes a simple yet delicious summer dinner on its own, especially when scooped up with tender, young romaine leaves. Cast a couple of co-stars next to it, maybe Baba Ganoush and/or Hummus (either the Ultimate version or its quick-to-whip-up cheater cousin), and suddenly you’ve got a mezze spread. We won’t ask you to bake your own pita bread for it; not in this heat! Instead, pick up pitas from a Middle-Eastern bakery if you’re lucky enough to have one, or the supermarket if not.
While you’re at it, grab some marinated olives (or marinate some!), plus a tin of sardines and a can of dolmas (arrange on plate, add lemon wedges). Also great with this spread: Cucumber, Radish and Feta salad.
Ice Opp: Pour a glass of arak — Lebanon’s iconic anise aperitif — and add an excessive amount of ice.
Inspired by Korean flavors, this is a noodle bowl and a salad in one — tossed with a lusciously umami-ful dressing with great body. It’s emphatically cold, and highly customizable: Change up the garnishes as you see fit. Choose Korean somyeon or Japanese somen or soba noodles, and feel free to play fast and loose with the vegetables. Skip the egg and add tofu, or finish it with shredded cold leftover chicken.
Bonus points: Swap the hard-boiled egg for a Japanese marinated ajitama egg (also known as a ramen egg) — the kind with the gelatinous yolk. (Our recipe’s headnote links to a recipe for that.)
Ice Opp: Toss ice cubes in with the noodles when you drain them to get them really cold.
In some parts of coastal Mexico, the seafood dish known as vuelve a la vida (or “come back to life”) is served hot. But the kind I love is cold — much like a cross between ceviche and a seafood coctél. The version from Pati Jinich’s 2021 book Treasures of the Mexican Table is wonderful.
Ice Opp: Fill a huge bowl with crushed ice, and sink glasses of Vuelva a la Vida in the ice. Or stir up a few Margaritas on the Rocks!
If you enjoyed this story, you might like these:
READ: Flavors of summer: 10 favorite (produce-forward!) recipes bursting with exuberant tastes and scents
READ: Recipe for Today — Beat the heat with zingy, cool and refreshing Gazpacho Sevillano
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By Leslie Brenner
Yipes! The mercury reached 112 degrees in Portland, Oregon yesterday! Let’s hope for quick relief for our friends in the Pacific Northwest.
Until the outdoor thermometer cooperates, delicious relief can be a cool bowl of Gazpacho Sevillano. Down here in hot-as-blazes Texas, it feels like this week opens gazpacho season, as our friends with gardens and farms have been gifting us with gorgeous heirloom tomatoes bursting with flavor. When a windfall like that happens faster than you can gobble up the treasures (or when finally start seeing tasty-looking tomatoes in the markets), it’s the moment to grab some cukes as well, pull out your sherry vinegar and plug in the blender.
Our recipe for the classic Spanish summer refresher is a smooth-as-silk, elegant, purist version; the headnote offers a couple of short-cuts for a quickie version that gratifies instantly and deliciously.
Pro-tip: You don’t even have to wait for it to chill in the fridge — just drop a couple of ice cubes in each bowl and enjoy right away!
By Leslie Brenner
Today is the official unofficial season opener for summer’s most craveable side dish — the underdog show-stealer of every picnic or potluck. We can all pretend we can do without it, and then boom! A great potato salad blindsides us with deliciousness.
Here are five — three American, and two Japanese-style — that will round out your celebrations from now through Labor Day. (And probably beyond!)
Why Japanese-style? Because potato salad is a delicious example of yoshoku — Western dishes that migrated to Japan in the late 19th century and became truly Japanese. There’s something truly fabulous about this particular yoshuku fusion; Japanese flavors really make potatoes sing.
Red potatoes, red wine vinaigrette and either shallots or scallions come together under a flurry of fresh, soft herbs with this light, quick potato salad that’s a snap to make.
Salaryman Potato Salad: Each portion of the Japanese potato salad gets topped with half an ajitama marinated egg
Mayonnaise-based and built on russets, this cucumber-laced Japanese potato salad gets umami from HonDashi (instant dashi powder — a secret weapon of many a Japanese chef). Each portion is topped with half an ajitama, the delicious (and easy-to-make) marinated egg that often garnishes ramen. We fell in love with the salad at Salaryman, Justin Holt’s erstwhile ramen house in Dallas, and chef Holt was kind enough to share the recipe.
When I came upon this recipe in Toni Tipton-Martin’s award-winning book, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, it was so luscious it sent me into a potato-salad binge that went on for weeks. Eggy, mayonnaise-y and old-fashioned (in a good way!), it reminds me of the potato salad my mom used to make. Try not to eat the whole bowl.
For a different style of Japanese potato salad, try Sonoko Sakai’s “Potato Salada” from her award-winning book, Japanese Home Cooking. It’s dressed with homemade Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese-style tahini), but sometimes we cheat and use Kewpie mayo (our favorite brand of commercial Japanese mayonnaise) and store-bought tahini. We love the carrots, green beans and cukes in this one!
I cringe a little every time I see the moniker of this bad boy, which I named before discovering Toni Tipton-Martin’s, Justin Holt’s or Sonoko Sakai’s. Still, I do think Best Potato Salad Ever is worthy of at least tying for the title. The secret to its wonderfulness is New Wave Sauce Gribiche — soft-boiled eggs tossed with chopped herbs, capers, cornichons and shallots, plus Champagne vinegar, lemon juice and Dijon mustard. How could you go wrong, right?
Have an excellent, potato-salad-filled Memorial Day weekend!
By Leslie Brenner
Cucumbers, celery, green bell peppers, parsley and a serrano give this green gazpacho its gorgeous color. Raw almonds or cashews add body, and sherry vinegar provides zing and olive oil (use your best, freshest one) makes it silky and deep.
Because there is no bread in it, it is not technically a gazpacho, but that vinegar-and-nut vibe definitely makes it eat like one — not the vibrant tomatoey kind that’s the word “gazpacho” usually brings to mind, but its cousin ajo blanco, or white gazpacho. (Ajo blanco, beloved in its birthplace of Málaga, Spain, is made with bread, garlic, almonds, salt and sherry vinegar — and in summer, garnished with green grapes.)
Our Greenest Gazpacho is just the thing for a meatless Monday. (It’s vegan! And gluten-free!) It’ll keep you cool and happy all through the summer.
By Leslie Brenner
Every spring, as the sun comes out, the earth warms up, and thoughts of picnics, patios and pool parties pervade, this deliciously optimistic Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh finds its way to my table lickety-split.
From Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s superb 2015 book Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, it’s one of my favorite things to eat all the way through summer’s end.
Easy to make, and from ingredients that are not hard to find (frozen peas!), it’s super-versatile. Serve it as a starter, part of a creative mezze spread, maybe, or a simple spring dinner. Or as a side dish with lamb, chicken or fish —or even as a vegan main course. It travels well and eats great at room temp, so it’s a dreamy dish to bring to a potluck or picnic. I love it on its own for lunch — especially when it’s leftover from the night before — either on its own, or stuffed into a whole-wheat pita pocket.
Because I’m so fond it it, I make sure to keep a bag or two of those petite peas in the freezer and quinoa in the pantry all spring and summer long. That way when I see fresh mint (or my potted one is in a giving mood), I can chop it all together.
Oh, just one thing: If you’re more than one or two people, consider doubling the batch. The few times I made just a single dose, I’ve kicked myself for not making more.
By Leslie Brenner
Ripe and bursting with flavor, tomatoes do not want to be fussed with. That’s why some of the most delicious things you can do with them don’t require a recipe.
• Slice them, arrange them on a plate, strew Maldon salt on them, grind black pepper generously, drizzle your best olive oil and serve with crusty bread.
• Want to get fancier? Add dollops of fresh ricotta, or slices of mozzarella, or pull apart a ball or two of burrata and arrange it on top. From there you can add torn basil, a flurry of mixed fresh herbs, or a big handful of baby arugula. If you go the arugula route, a drizzle of really good balsamic wouldn’t be a bad idea.
• Peel, seed and dice ripe tomatoes, put them in a bowl with a good dollop of great olive oil, salt, pepper and lots of torn basil, let it sit an hour or so, then use to toss with pasta. Grated parm or cubed mozzarella optional.
• BLT. This is the best time all year to eat the iconic sandwich. That slab of gorgeous red tomato with all its juices mingles meaningfully with the mayo on perfect toast, hopefully one of those sourdoughs your friend or partner has been perfecting, or good whole-wheat. Cool crunch of iceberg, chewy-crisp, salty-smoky warm bacon: This is sandwich nirvana. To get one made with the proper care and love, you’ll probably have to make it yourself. Eat it alone and enjoy every bite.
• Make a simple, beautiful, easy tomato tart: Roll out thawed frozen puff pastry, poke holes in it with a fork, cover with slices of tomato (lay them first on paper towels, salt them and let them sit a few minutes to get rid of moisture), salt, pepper, thyme leaves and crumbled goat cheese. Bake 25 minutes at 400. Slice and eat. This one gets a recipe.
• I’m not saying you should do this, but one of my mom’s favorite things to eat was juicy slices of tomato on white bread slathered with mayo. Call it a poor man’s BLT. Other times she would hold a large ripe tomato in her hand, take a bite, sprinkle the rest of it with salt and eat it like that, out of hand. This, she told me, was how she liked to eat tomatoes when she was a kid and she picked them, warm and ripe and bursting with flavor, from her victory garden at home in New Jersey during World War II.
Tomatoes à la Provençale, from a Julia Child recipe
• Invite them to the South of France — by way of Tomatoes à la Provençale. Make a filling of bread crumbs, herbs, chopped shallots, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and stuff that into half-tomatoes you’ve emptied of seeds and juice. Roast 10 or 15 minutes at 400 and eat. Here’s Julia Child’s recipe, which I’ve been making my whole life.
• Blitz up a batch of Gazpacho Sevillano. Maybe you tried this in May, hoping to usher in summer, but the tomatoes weren’t quite in the mood yet. Now they are. Three pounds of tomatoes, a cuke, a red bell pepper, torn-up day old bread, Sherry vinegar, a couple or three garlic cloves put through a press, a pinch of red pepper, more salt than you think: Into the blender they go, and whirr away. Drizzle in some olive oil while the motor’s running. Some people let it chill in the fridge so the “flavors meld”; I usually can’t wait and just eat it like that, garnished with another drizzle of olive plus diced veg, especially avocado.
• Try a less common cold Spanish soup, Salmorejo, which is Córdoba’s version of gazpacho, garnished traditionally with chopped hard-boiled egg and Serrano ham. Our recipe is adapted from one by superchef José Andrés.
Palestinian Chopped Salad (Salata Arabieh), from ‘Falastin’ by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley
• When the tomatoes get ripe, the smart go chopping. Ripe tomatoes are fabulous in the chopped salad that’s ubiquitous on Levantine tables, including Palestinian ones. Cucumbers, bell peppers (red in this case), scallions, parsley, mint and serrano or jalapeño chiles, garlic and lemon join the fun. Our recipe is adapted from Falastin, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley.
We feel your zucchini abundance-state here at Cooks Without Borders, where we’ve been grating, shaving, slicing, dicing, salting, draining, sautéing, roasting, steaming and sashimi-ing zucchini round the clock to help you make the most of the season’s inevitable bumper crop.
• One dish — Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa — is so outstanding it shook the two courgette-fatigued fellows with whom I shelter out of their summer-squash stupor.
“Amazing,” said the older one. “I would eat this again tomorrow!” (We did.)
“Wow,” said the younger. “Whose recipe is this?” Ottolenghi’s, I replied — from his 2018 cookbook Ottolenghi Simple. “He is a genius,” proclaimed the younger zucchini critic.
I had been skating on thin ice with the vegetable when this show-stopper saved us. It was maybe only day 3 of zucchini trials, but junior and elder had already hit the zucchini wall. They are weak, after all, and lack summer squash stamina.
I had set my sights, this particular evening, on two possible Ottolenghi recipes. The exhausted eating panel chose the Stuffed Zucchini, pictured above. Excellent call: Its filling is rich with Parmesan and egg, bright with height-of-season heirloom cherry tomatoes, plumped with bread crumbs and set with a golden-brown crust inside a perfectly roasted shell that maintained integrity but melted at fork’s touch. On top of that, a deeply herbal salsa — at once dusky (oregano) and bright (thanks to lemon) — made meaty and crunchy with toasted pine nuts.
Do try it; I think you’ll love it. It’s so delicious, you can let it stand proudly as centerpiece main dish, even probably for dyed-in-the-wool carnivores. (But oh, yes, it would also be great with lamb. Or chicken.)
Once your swooning subsides, consider the possibilities for your next zucchini triumph. For you know there will be more zucchini!
Here are other faves:
• Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino. I first learned the joys of raw zucchini in the early 00’s from Russ Parsons, the L.A. Times’ longtime columnist (“The California Cook”), who taught us that salting thin-sliced or shaved raw zucchini and letting it sit a few minutes turns it delightfully silky and slippery, seeming almost to cook the flesh while keeping it firm.
For years I had a Parsons salad in my arsenal and pulled it out often. Slice zucchinis in half vertically, then cut them into thin half-moons. Toss with salt in a colander and let sit for 15 or 20 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and dress with minced garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, freshly ground black pepper or red pepper flakes and fresh herbs — mint is especially nice, but you can do any combo of mint, dill, parsley or basil. The Ottolenghi recipe makes me think oregano would be smashing as well.
Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino from A16 Food + Wine
Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgren took the salting-raw-zucchini technique to delicious heights in a recipe published in their 2008 cookbook, A16 Food + Wine, named for their beloved Southern Italian spot in San Francisco. Their salad marries ribbons of zucchini carpaccio with a brilliant trio of complementary flavors. I’d never have thought of green olives and mint together, but the combination sings — especially with the bright, pure flavor of Castelvetrano olives (green Cerignolas would be great, too). Earthy pecorino smooths it out and pulls it together.
• We’ve been thinking about Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters since test-driving the recipes in José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed led us to a zucchini fritter recipe that didn’t quite do it for us (the batter was thin and the fritters ran all over the pan). Barry’s Insanely Delicious are little flavor-bombs, soft and packed with herbs (dill, mint and parsley) on the inside, crisp on the outside and warm, served with a cool and tangy yogurt sauce. Pop one in your mouth and it’s hard to stop there. They’re brilliant bites for your next Zoom Happy Hour, if that’s still a thing.
Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters
• Speaking of José Andrés, another zucchini recipe in that cookbook turned out to be one of our favorites ever: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs. It’s as simple and wonderful as it sounds and looks, with a sprinkle of za’atar — the Levantine herb and spice mix — to keep things zippy.
Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs from José Andrés’ ‘Vegetables Unleashed’
• If you like zucchini noodles, you will love Camarón con Fideos de Calabacitas, from Adán Medrano’s Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking.
Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita (Shrimp with Zucchini Ribbons) from Anán Medrano’s ‘Count the Tortillas’
• Another dish that probably has roots in the Texas Mexican cooking known as comida casera, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken is an easy, delicious pseudo-braise that makes luscious use of abundant zucchini (and any other summer squash that needs a home), along with corn, tomatoes, onions, cilantro and serrano chile. It has been one of my favorite late-summer dishes since I was a kid growing up far from Texas, in Southern California. (It’s a pseudo-braise because you don’t actually add liquid; the juices that end up braising all come from the vegetables.)
Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken (the chicken formerly known as The Chicken that Killed Grandpa)
• A super-flexible dish we call Warm Summer Salad Without Borders is another late summer stunner — and a great way to feature as much zucchini as you want to throw at it, along with grilled corn, tomatoes and — if you like — grilled okra. It makes a lovely light dinner when it’s still blazing hot, or a warm pick-me-up for when you’re a little sad the season is on the way out.
And hey — I sometimes toss some grilled okra on top of Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, too. The Warm Summer Salad is kind of like a vegetarian salad version of that dish.
Warm Summer Salad Without Borders
• Last but certainly not least — as it’s one of my favorite things in the world to cook and to eat — a Chicken and Lamb Couscous will usher summer into fall, pulling a pound or two of zucchinis in its wake. As the season changes, keep it in mind. We offer an easy version that uses canned garbanzos and five-minute couscous grains and slower OG version that has you soak dried chickpeas overnight and steam and fluff the couscous grains two or three times. Both are tucked into the same recipe, as you might want to combine them (dried chickpeas + quick couscous grains, for instance). On our to-do list: Creating or turning up a stellar harissa recipe.
Chicken and Lamb Couscous (with . . . zucchini!)
RECIPE: Stuffed Zucchini with Pine Nut Salsa
RECIPE: Raw Zucchini Salad with Green Olives, Mint and Pecorino
RECIPE: Barry’s Insanely Delicious Zucchini Fritters
RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacitas
RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs
RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken
My cookbook shelves are lined with hundreds of earnest volumes filled with culturally faithful recipes for legions of traditional dishes. Usually the recipes work and the dishes are correct, often they’re pretty good, occasionally they’re very good. But rarely, when cooked as written, are they so delicious that they make me want to cry.
Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin: a Cookbook, which Ten Speed Press published last month, is bursting with recipes from Palastine that do just that.
Because it’s described in the headnote as “the hugely popular national dish of Palestine,” I stuck a Post-It on the page with Chicken Musakhan on my first pass through the book, as a reminder to cook it soon. But it looked so simple, like there was nothing to it — just some cut-up chicken rubbed with spices and roasted, served on flat bread with cooked onions (how great could that be?) — so I kept passing it by.
Until one evening I didn’t.
It was gobsmackingly, soul-stirringly fabulous. The chicken, a whole quartered bird, gets tossed with a lot of cumin and sumac, plus cinnamon, allspice, olive oil, salt and pepper, then roasted. Once out of the oven, it gets layered on crisped pieces of torn flatbread with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts, plenty of parsley and spooned over with the roasting juices from the chicken. More olive oil gets drizzled on, and more sumac. It’s a stunning, fragrant centerpiece. Before serving it, you pull apart the chicken pieces with your fingers into two or three piece each. Put it in the middle of the table, and have everyone dive in, pulling the chicken apart with fingers, grabbing some soaky, juicy, crispy bread and sumac-ky onions, and groaning with pleasure, and diving back in.
When can we have this again??!!
I went back and reread the headnote. The dish was traditionally made during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil, but now it’s enjoyed year-round. “Growing up, Sami ate it once a week,” goes the headnote. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends, served from one pot or plate, for everyone to then tear at some of the bread and spoon on the chicken and topping for themselves.”
Traditionally, taboon bread is used in the dish. Baked on pebbles in a conical oven, the bread has a pock-marked surface that are great for catching the juices. But the recipe calls for any Arabic flatbread (we used pita from a local Lebanese bakery that I’d stashed in the freezer), or naan.
I can see why Tamimi’s mom, Na’ama, made it once a week: It’s fun and easy to make, probably no more than an hour from start to finish, and a great crowd-pleaser. I’ll be buying sumac futures this week: A full three tablespoons of the spice (a powerful anti-oxidant) go into the dish.
If you’re not familiar with Tamimi, some context may be helpful. Chances are you do know of Yotam Ottolenghi and his cookbooks. Tamimi is head chef for and a founding partner in Ottolenghi’s namesake London restaurant empire. He co-authored Ottolenghi’s first cookbook (Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, 2008). Together the two — led by Ottolenghi — created a style of produce-forward, Levant-accented, slouchy-chic improvisational cooking. In other words, what they did powerfully influenced the way so many of us cook now, and the way food looks on blogs and on Instagram — seductively dissheveled, vegetable happy and casually strewn with tons of herbs.
The two chefs went on to co-author Jerusalem: a Cookbook (2012). Both had grown up in Jerusalem in the 70s and 80s — Ottolenghi, who is Israeli and Italian, in the Jewish west part of the city and Tamimi, who is Palestinian, in the Muslim east. They didn’t know each other back home; they met in London, where they were both living in the 1990s. To the Jerusalem project, each brought his delicious perspective, and they wove together a gorgeous, deep, inspired, cookable portrait of their hometown. The book didn’t shy away from politics, but its explorations managed to unify rather than divide.
With Falastin, Tamimi explores the cooking of his beloved Palestine. “There is no letter ‘P’ in the Arabic language,” begins the introduction, so ‘Falastin’ is, on the one hand, simply the way ‘Falastinians’ refer to themselves.’”
Of course there is an “on the other hand” — and that’s the substance of the book, which Tamimi co-authored with Tara Wigley, a cook and writer who also co-authored Ottolenghi’s most recent book, Ottolengi Simple, and who is an integral part of the Ottolenghi family.
Cilantro-crusted roasted cod with tahini sauce
Beautifully photographed by Jenny Zarins, it’s a wonderful read that conveys so much about the culture that you might feel you’ve been there, and fallen in love with its people. A visit to the apartment-house kitchen of the “yogurt-making ladies of Bethlehem” gives richness to a recipe for balls of labneh (thickened yogurt) marinated in olive oil then rolled in dried herbs or spices. A trip to the Jerusalem shop where Kamel Hashlamon produces tahini that’s “somewhere between a paste and a liquid and truly good enough to drink” makes us understand what separates great tahini from all the bitter crap we get stateside (Humera sesame seeds from Ethiopia, bespoke millstone made by a master Syrian stonemason, cold-pressing at 140 degrees).
The authors, refusing to tip-toe around the politics, address head-on the difficult questions that arise as they tour us around. For instance, it becomes clear that because Kamel sells to a largely Israeli (but also Palestinian) market, some feel he has “sold out.” When Kamel justifies his position by saying “We are all living in the result of the game,” Tamimi doesn’t let him off easy. In the end, though, the last image of his “small stunning shop,” with its irresistible product, is of Israelis and Palestinians standing “side by side at the counter, looking through the glass, debating little more than which halva to buy.” Complicated, uneasy, but what what a privilege it is to be let in on it in a cookbook.
From a culinary point of view, Falastin is also a rare gift: a cookbook filled with exuberantly delicious recipes, each with the special flair of a super-gifted chef, but without the ridiculous, long lists of obscure ingredients and sub-recipes that you needed to start preparing three days ago. These are approachable, thoughtfully crafted and apparently carefully tested recipes that are easy to follow, simple enough to execute and clearly designed to work for a moderately capable home cook.
If the aesthetic driver of the Ottolenghi books is herbs, with Falastin it is spices — lots of spices, aromatic, dreamy and unapologetic. Flavors in all the dishes are dialed way up. (One touch I really appreciate: Tamimi and Wigley never leave us guessing about how much salt to use — they always specify, and it’s always right on or close.)
Back to my bookshelves and all those earnest volumes. Among all the serious Middle Eastern, Levantine, Mediterranean and North African cookbooks, I hadn’t been able to find an appealing recipe for ful medames — the traditional fava bean dish that’s mostly closely associated with Egypt. There were recipes, sure, but none found any joy in the dish — which is, after all, really just doctored canned fava beans.
Tamimi has a wonderful way of elevating the ordinary. His version of ful starts by ridding the beans of their canned taste — by draining, rinsing, then simmering them in water, a five minute process that makes all the difference. Once they’re drained again, cumin is invited to the party, along with the lemon, garlic and chile. A delightful salad of red onion, sumac and parsley goes on top, along with tomato; avocado adds cool and creamy depth. Soft boiled egg, which is optional, adds another dimension.
Finally, the ful medames I dreamed of — so good I will make sure to keep canned favas stocked, so I can whip it up on a regular basis. (This is what I mean by life-changing.)
Not surprisingly, there’s a little overlap with the dishes in Jerusalem: It would be odd for this book not to include hummus, for instance, or tahini sauce. But the books complement each other really well: While Jerusalem gave us Maqluba, a one-pot layered dish of eggplant, chicken thighs and rice inverted onto a plate to serve, Falastin gives us Maqlubet el Foul el Akdhar — Upside-Down Spiced Rice with Lamb and Fava Beans. (Will be making that soon as I can source some Iranian dried limes!)
And while Jerusalem proposes Kofta B’siniya (seared lamb-and-beef patties in tahini sauce), Falastin offers Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. Another major crowd-pleaser!
Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato
For the three of us, this was a fabulous dinner two nights running — the leftovers were every bit as delectable.
There are so many recipes I still have marked to try. Preserved Stuffed Eggplants; Cauliflower and Cumin Fritters with Mint Yogurt; Shatta (an exciting looking red or green chile sauce); Na’ama’s Buttermilk Fattoush; Roasted Eggplant with Tamarind and Cilantro; a zucchini, garlic and yogurt dip called M’tawaneh; Buttery Rice with Toasted Vermicelli; Eggplant, Chickpea and Tomato Bake (Musaq’a); Pomegranate-Cooked Lentils and Eggplants; Lemon Chicken with Za’atar.
There are baked treats that look incredible, too: Sweet Tahini Rolls, and the triangular spinach pies called Fatayer Sabanekh; Warbat — filo triangles filled with cream cheese and pistachio and doused in rose syrup, and definitely a Chocolate and Qahwa Flour-Free Torte, flavored with lots of cardamom and espresso (Qahwa is coffee in Arabic).
I love this book. I’m happy to think of its treasure-filled pages, and it gives me hope for the future — in more ways than one.
RECIPE: Cilantro-Crusted Roasted Cod
RECIPE: Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato
Cutting to the chase here: This Vietnamese rice noodle salad — from Andrea Nguyen’s new(ish) book Vietnamese Every Day — is probably the most craveable single new (to me) recipe I’ve discovered in four months of daily cooking through the pandemic. That would be my favorite dish in something like 120 days of cooking. Or at least the one dish I know I’ll come back to again and again. It’s the kind of dish you’re excited to add to your life, the kind of dish you think about and crave. The kind of dish you wake up certain days and you simply have to have.
At its base, it’s pretty basic. Put salad greens in a bowl with cilantro and mint, and maybe a handful of bean sprouts and/or some shaved cucumber. Add a layer of cold rice noodles. Then the star of the dish — grilled skewers of meat, chicken or shrimp. Tuck in some pickled daikon and carrot, scatter on toasted peanuts or cashews plus more cilantro and mint, and serve with nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, to toss with as dressing.
It’s cool and salad-y, with a tangy, spicy umami zap of the nuoc cham. It’s fragrant with herbs, and fresh, and cool — perfect for summer. The hot skewer lands atop cold salad and rice noodles, all those herbs and pickle, and it all gets tossed with that delicious, tangy nuoc cham sauce, plus a pickly, nutty crunch — what could be better?
We came upon the rice noodle salad recipe because Wylie was in process of preparing a Crispy Lemongrass Salmon, from the same book. Nguyen writes that while salmon is not native to Vietnam, once her family tasted it in America, they adopted it as if it were. She makes a paste with lemongrass, brown sugar, shallot, Madras-style curry powder, and fish sauce, coats salmon fillets in it, then broils them. In the headnote, she suggests serving the salmon either with rice or on top of the rice noodle salad. Wylie jumped into action, pulled together the rice noodle salad — and we were all gobsmacked.
A week later, I was craving it again, so I tried it with the pork skewers offered in Nguyen’s recipe (and which are shown on the cover of the book!).
I enjoyed putting together the marinade (garlic, shallot, five-spice powder, sugar, molasses, fish sauce, soy sauce and canola oil), and making grillable skewers out of pork shoulder — a cut I’d always thought had to be cooked long, low and slow. I couldn’t get boneless pork shoulder, but it was easy to cut bones out of a small picnic roast (a.k.a. pork butt), and slice the meat across the grain into quarter-inch-thick strips. Marinated and grilled on a cast-iron stove-top grill, the pork skewers were superb: tender, charry, flavorful, just delicious. No doubt they’d be even better grilled over charcoal.
It also seemed obvious that, as Nguyen suggests, the bowl would be fabulous topped with all kinds of alternative things. Shrimp — either marinated and grilled or poached and chilled. Chicken, with this same marinade. Beef (though I’m not usually craving beef with my salad). That’s why we’re calling our adapted version Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers.
To go vegan, you can marinate and then grill tofu and vegetables, and use that in place of the skewers.
If you’re starting from scratch, getting all the ingredients together takes some work, for sure. But you can make the key elements in advance and keep them on hand, so it comes together either in a jiff or with just a little effort, depending on the protein.
Nuoc cham base is worth keeping in the fridge (for up to two weeks); add lime and fresh chiles just before serving. Pickled daikon and carrot can be kept on hand in the fridge as well (we used a Japanese salady-pickle called Namasu, from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since it’s so similar to the one offered in Nguyen’s book), and rice noodles boil up quick and easy. That means if you keep greens, cilantro, mint and either cucumber or bean sprouts on hand (along with roasted peanuts or cashews), and a sudden craving strikes — which it will, if you’re anything like me — you just have to think about the protein.
A super-easy alternative to Nguyen’s lemongrass salmon is fillets of Koji-Marinated Salmon. (It’s easy as long as you have shio koji (the recipe for that is included in the salmon recipe). That piece of fish — which is five minutes broiler-to-table once it has marinated a day or three in the shio koji — is awesome on that bowl. So what if it’s Japanese and the noodles are Vietnamese? It works, and it’s delicious. But honestly, any simple grilled fish or seafood would do.
OK, maybe you’re ready to get to it. Just think of the dish as a way to riff. Try it once as suggested with pork, if you’re so inclined. And then embrace it as a fabulous vehicle for whatever you feel like.
[RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers]
We like to eat pretty simply and lightly at home during summer — that is, when it’s just Thierry and me. When Wylie’s here, he’s happiest making something complicated and involved, with as many ingredients as possible, especially well marbled proteins — and bonus points for flambéing, searing in cast-iron on maximum heat so the smoke alarm goes off or finishing a sauce with a fat knob of butter.
While tomatoes are bursting with flavor, I’d be happy eating nothing more than tomato salad with crusty bread three nights a week — especially if it can be the burrata variation of a classic Caprese, just sliced heirloom tomatoes, burrata, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper.
I’m embarrassed to write about the salad, as it’s so obvious and doesn’t require a recipe. But it feels disingenuous to assemble a dish so frequently and never mention it once in years of publishing — especially as there are young cooks and beginning cooks who may be less familiar with it.
You probably already knew how to make it (maybe you have your own version). To me what elevates it is using great olive oil, the freshest and fruitiest you can find, and my favorite finishing salt, Maldon (love those large, fragile flakes). When burrata’s not to be had, good ricotta can be nice in its place, and of course mozzarella goes back to the classic, if you’re feeling more nostalgic.
Here’s an actual recipe for the burrata version, just for the record (or if you want to forward it to your 19-year old nephew who’s learning to cook):
Classic Gazpacho Sevillano also shows up constantly on our summertime table; it’s one of my favorite dishes of all time. But until recently, I had never made salmorejo, its close cousin from nearby Córdoba (though I mentioned it in a 2003 Los Angeles Times story that won me a James Beard Award). Both Córdoba and Sevilla are in Spain’s southern region of Andalusia, a hot region where cold soups refresh in the summer.
Salmorejo is a cold, smooth, creamy cold soup whose basic ingredients are fewer than gazpacho’s: just tomatoes, bread (quite a lot of it), garlic, oil and salt. Vinegar is commonly included, though it is not necessarily traditional. The traditional — and still ubiquitous — garnish duo is chopped hard-boiled egg and serrano ham.
At a reader’s request I pulled out my blender and my history books and began salmorejo R & D. (Yes, we love cooking to order: If there’s something you’d like us to cover, let us know!)
Claudia Roden tells us in her marvelous, encyclopedic 2011 book The Food of Spain something I hadn’t known when I wrote that long-ago gazpacho story: that Seville was the province where tomatoes were first grown in Spain, and that gazpacho was the meal that farm works made when they worked the vegetable fields. They actually carried with them a dornillo, the large wooden mortar and pestle used to pound the ingredients and made the gazpacho on the spot.
Roden describes salmorejo as “a thick, dense, creamy version of gazpacho made with more bread,” one that you find at all the flamenco festivals and other festive occasions, served with a glass of wine, as well as at “every bar and tavern in Córdoba, topped with chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of jamón serrano.”
In fact, there is quite a lot of bread in salmorejo. If gazpacho is like a liquid salad, salmorejo is like a liquid sandwich — though it eats like a refreshing cold soup. “Some recipes have as much bread as tomatoes,” writes Roden. Needless to say, Keto adherents need not apply.
Another Spanish cooking expert, Anya von Bremzen, calls salmorejo in her 2005 book The New Spanish Table “Andalucia’s other tomato and bread masterpiece.” She describes it as “a cream with a texture that falls somewhere between a dip and a soup,” and points out that besides being a soup, it’s also wonderful as an accompaniment for crudités or “a pile of poached shrimp.” She also likes to serve it in shot glasses as a tapa, topped with a poached or grilled shrimp on a skewer. (Note to self: do that!)
South of Córdoba in Antequera, a town about 30 miles north of the Mediterranean coast, a cousin of salmorejo called porra is garnished with bits of tuna. And of course you can garnish salmorejo with a wide variety of things — von Bremzen suggests small poached shrimp, diced cooked potatoes and/or chopped tomatoes and onions, or those small chunks of canned tuna.
Von Bremzen and Roden both offer recipes that look excellent, and that I’ll definitely get around to trying theirs. (Curiously, I didn’t find one among the 1,080 recipes in Simone and Inés Ortega’s 1080 Recipes. Originally published in 1972 by Simone Ortega, 1080 recetas de cocina, as it’s called in Spain, is known as the Bible of cooking for Spanish home cooks.)
This batch, made with a combo of yellow and red tomatoes, turned out more orange than red.
Instead I went with Spanish-American chef José Andrés, who published a brilliantly simple version in Food & Wine in 2017 (it’s always safe to side with a superhero!).
For his recipe, toss tomatoes, crustless rustic white bread, sherry vinegar, garlic, salt and water in the blender, give it a good, long, thorough blitz so it’s very smooth, stream in some olive oil as the motor’s running, then serve, garnished with torn slices of serrano ham, a swirl of olive oil and chopped hard-boiled egg. I was surprised at how little vinegar Andés calls for — just a teaspoon for 2 1/2 pounds of tomatoes — but it was perfect.
Got tomatoes? Here’s the recipe:
Once you try it as is, you might want to riff on it, adding more or less bread, vinegar and salt to taste, and of course playing with garnishes.
All the recipes I found called for chilling the soup before eating, but I don’t imagine those farm workers who invented it brought coolers, and I couldn’t wait; besides, things tend to be more flavorful when they’re room temperature.
In, any case, it was deliciously refreshing straight from the blender jar.
Happy tomato season!