I spend a fair amount of time writing recipes, instructions for how best to prepare specific dishes. (It’s a living!) These recipes take a familiar shape: I explain the reporting that went into each dish’s development, then provide a list of ingredients and step-by-step directions for their use. I think of these texts as a kind of sheet music, notation that allows home cooks to recreate the work of others, just as a printed chord chart allows Mike from Sheboygan to play a Beatles song passingly well in his den.
But I don’t cook only with recipes. Indeed, I’ve discovered that cooking without recipes is a kitchen skill , no different from dicing vegetables or flipping an omelet. It’s a proficiency to develop, a way to improve your confidence in the kitchen. It can also make the time spent there feel more like fun when it can occasionally seem like a chore.
You begin with a prompt — like the one I offer below, or the inspiration that comes from simply staring into your refrigerator until the muse alights on your shoulder — and then proceed to make a meal out of what you have or what you desire, guided by your experience with actual recipes. This is improvisation, not unlike what jazz musicians and jam bands do. They know the scales. They know the rules. And knowing them, they can let the music take them where it takes them.
You can do the same in the kitchen, even if you don’t consider yourself a particularly good cook. Many of us have, after all, been cooking a lot more during the pandemic. We’ve roasted and sautéed, braised and fried, prepared salad dressings and simple desserts, assembled sandwiches, made soups, baked muffins. And in so doing, we’ve built up pantries and stockpiled staples where before we might have stored takeout menus: flour and beans, dried fruit and pasta, rice and onions. There are tubs of gochujang in some of our fridges now, jars of chile crisp, containers of oil-cured olives. People who never cooked more than once or twice a week now have a lot of stuff on hand to make delicious food daily: anchovies, tahini, roasted peanuts, Parmesan, eggs, a few vinegars, a couple of different oils, some Yukon Golds in the larder. Using these, using whatever ingredients we have at hand, we’ve gotten a sense of the basic conventions and how to combine them in the kitchen and on the stove, wielding mixtures of salt, sweet, bitter, sour and savory. You’re better at this than you think, I’d wager. It’s time to capitalize.
Here’s a jumping-off point, a no-recipe recipe that takes less than an hour: meltingly tender pork chops in an onion gravy, with lemon-bright mashed potatoes and sautéed greens. It’s a bulwark against cold weather, one of the great winter feasts.
Cooking without recipes is a kitchen skill, no different from dicing vegetables or flipping an omelet.
Start with the pork chops, as many as you need, on the bone if possible. Dredge them in flour that you’ve mixed with chili powder, salt, black pepper, smoked paprika and red-pepper flakes, or with Lawry’s seasoned salt or Old Bay seasoning or any spice you like, really. (Save what’s left of the flour; you’ll use it later.) Then sear the chops, in batches if you have to, in an oil-slicked Dutch oven or heavy cast-iron pan, over fairly high heat. (I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a Dutch oven, one of those big, heavy numbers in which you can burble beans, bake bread and make gumbo and stew, I really think you ought to try to get one. This recipe will reward the effort amply. And you’ll have that Dutch oven for the rest of your life.) Attend to the browning carefully. You want a big, flavorful crust on the meat before you braise it with the onions, to enhance the taste of the sauce and provide a little texture at the end as well.
Set the seared chops on a platter. Throw away what oil is left in the pot, and wipe it out. Return the pot to the stove, and set over medium heat. Add some butter, and when it melts and foams, use it to sauté an enormous number of sliced onions, allowing them to wilt and soften and almost (but not quite) start to go brown. Sprinkle a scant handful of the leftover dredging flour over the onions, and stir it around, then keep cooking and stirring for a few minutes to dampen the rawness of the flour. Add about half an inch of chicken stock to the pot, if you have any, or water if you don’t, along with a bay leaf, perhaps, then stir to thicken and combine. If the sauce is too thick for your liking, add a little more liquid. Nestle the pork chops into the sauce, remove from heat, cover the pot and put it into a 350-degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour.
While the pork cooks, make the mashed potatoes. I like to peel and quarter them in this situation, but you may feel differently. Either way, boil them in salted water until they’re soft and cooked through. (Stab one with a fork to check.) Then crush them with a masher or whip them in a stand mixer if you have one of those — or use a sturdy fork if you don’t. Add hot milk and melted butter and plenty of salt. How much butter and milk? In some French restaurants, the ratio would almost be equal parts with the potatoes. You needn’t go that far. Then, to finish everything off, whisk enough lemon zest into the potatoes to give their taste a real brightness. Start with a teaspoon and work your way up, sampling as you go.
So: pork, gravy, potatoes. I like some hearty sautéed greens moistened with chicken stock to go along with them, and perked up with red-pepper flakes. Maybe a drizzle of red-wine vinegar too? You’ll know what to do when you get there. This is not a recipe. It’s your dinner. Make it however you like.
Recipe: Pork Chops With Onion Gravy
Adapted from “The New York Times Cooking: No-Recipe Recipes,” by Sam Sifton, to be published by Ten Speed Press on March 16.
Source : food
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