Recipes - Modernist Cuisine

Recipes

Classic Pizza Sauce Recipe

We included many recipe variations in Modernist Cuisine at Home, because the team had so many great ideas. We couldn’t include each one as a full recipe, though, or the book would have been twice as big. Including many step-by-step photos was also important to us, so sometimes we had to balance how many variations […]

Neapolitan Pizza Dough Recipe

Gluten, the protein complex in wheat that becomes tangled into sticky, stretchy dough when you knead flour with water, is crucial to a great crust. Bread flours need a large fraction of high-quality gluten to act as a binder. The more gluten in the flour, the more elastic the dough, and the firmer the baked […]

Deep-Fried Brussels Sprouts

As soon as I brought home my copy of Modernist Cuisine, I was eager to try cooking from it. For one of my first attempts, I had a bunch of friends over for a barbecue and decided to try four or five recipes. The sort of precise cooking this book called for was still new […]

72-Hour Braised Short Ribs

Collagen determines, to a large extent, whether cooked meat ends up tender or tough. It is also the determining factor in how long you should cook a given cut of meat. Collagen fibers are the biological equivalent of steel cabling, forming a mesh that holds bundles of meat fibers together. Proper cooking unravels the cable-like […]

Lamb Skewers with Mint Yogurt

There’s something inherently fun about food on a stick. Skewered foods pop up in food culture all over the world: in yakitori bars in Japan; in the astounding variety of satay sold by Thai and Malaysian street vendors; in cotton candy, deep-fried ice cream, and corn dogs at the Minnesota State Fair; and in candy […]

Slow-Baked Chicken with Onions

Brining makes meat juicier and enhances its flavor, but salt diffuses through flesh very slowly. You can double or triple the rate of diffusion by injecting the brine deep into muscle tissue. This is very easy to do using a butcher’s syringe, also called a meat injector. Meat injectors usually include two large needles: one […]

P.B. & J. Gelato

When we developed the recipes for Modernist Cuisine at Home, we focused on using ingredients that we felt were fairly accessible and affordable. So when we reengineered our Pistachio Gelato recipe from Modernist Cuisine, we replaced the carrageenan with tapioca starch and xanthan gum. We tested it with corn starch and potato starch, but we […]

Mango Chili Leather

One of the great things Modernist cooking does for home cooks is allow them to make foods that they normally can only get in stores. Our recipe for fruit leather also lets home cooks play with flavors, like we have in our Mango Chili recipe below. This recipe is a variation of our Tomato Leather […]

Sous Vide Hollandaise

Consider hollandaise, that unctuous mixture of warm egg yolks and butter. The sauce is so fragile because butter congeals and separates as soon as it cools. And it’s all too easy to overheat the eggs and curdle the sauce. But we show you how to avoid these problems by cooking the eggs sous vide by […]

Barley Salad

I love pressure-cooking grains. Many of them, especially barley, don’t need to be soaked. That, combined with the short cooking time of a pressure cooker, means it’s a big time saver. The barley in this recipe takes only 20 minutes to cook. It works perfectly and has a wonderful texture.

Modernist Seven-Layer Dip

A seven-layer dip is part of the quintessential Super Bowl experience, especially as far as my wife, Rose, is concerned. So this recipe is for her. Johnny Zhu, Development Chef

Crispy Chicken Wings, Korean-Style

In our Korean Chicken Wing recipe, which calls for a blend of Wondra and potato starch, you could use just potato starch, but your wings might turn out cakey, and if you leave them out for your party guests to enjoy, they might get soggy over time. Wondra really increases their crispiness, so much so […]

Pressure-Cooked Carnitas

I love my pressure cooker. I love it so much that I’ve started taking it with me to friends’ houses, and once even to a cabin during a ski trip. It’s gotten to the point where when I ask my friends, “what do you want me to make when you come over this Saturday?” they […]

Sous Vide Salmon in the Kitchen Sink

This salmon recipe is a fun and simple way to begin enjoying the virtues of low-temperature cooking without investing in sous vide equipment. A pot of water preserves a constant temperature for up to 1 hour, far more time than is necessary to cook fish, and even enough time to cook some steaks (a picnic […]

Low-Temp Oven Steak

The reason we freeze the steaks in this recipe before cooking them is to make sure we don’t overcook them. It will work even if the steaks are frozen as solid as a brick, though it might take a little longer in the oven. That’s why this recipe works so well as both a weeknight […]

Microwaved Eggplant Parmesan

I decided to make our Microwaved Eggplant Parmesan the moment I tried it. I was at the lab, meeting with Maxime Bilet and our Managing Editor for Modernist Cuisine at Home, Tracy Cutchlow. Anjana Shanker, one of our Developmental Chefs, had prepared the eggplant Parmesan and brought it over for Max to taste test. She […]

Injection-Brining

At its best, roast chicken can be one of the world’s greatest culinary achievements. Brown, crispy skin covers tender, juicy meat: the combination of flavors and textures is simply amazing. Yet the perfect roast chicken is nearly impossible to achieve in practice. The temperature required to brown and crisp the skin is so high that […]

Instant Infusions

In this season of gift giving, one of the most thoughtful gifts you can give is food you made yourself. Using a whipping siphon, you can create flavorful infusions that taste like they’ve been aging for months, but actually only take a few seconds to make. Below are recipes for herb- and spice-infused olive oil, […]

Dairy-Free Potato Puree

The traditional approach to creamy, smooth potatoes is to add so much cream and butter that you can hardly taste the potatoes anymore. But, we’ve discovered how you can make velvety-smooth potatoes without adding any cream at all! The secret ingredient is diastatic malt powder, an ingredient available from specialty baking or brewing supply stores […]

Caramelized Carrot Soup – No Centrifuge Necessary!

The Caramelized Carrot Soup recipe from Modernist Cuisine is not only a favorite of ours, but is also the most popular among readers for its silky, sweet, intense carrot flavor.