Genius Recipes

The Secret to Your Next Easy Dinner is Your Kettle

Yes, simply buttered noodles or a packet of instant ramen can make for a nearly effortless dinner. And yes, my family has made it clear they generally prefer them to anything more complex that I can whip up. And sometimes, that’s exactly what we do. But, as the third party naysayer who always wants (but rarely has time for) much more, I latched onto this line in Lara Lee’s new cookbook, A Splash of Soy: Everyday Food from Asia, about Lara’s take on the iconic Jakarta noodle dish, ketoprak: “The kettle is your friend in this no-cook version.” Read More >> …

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This Genius Recipe Is Our All-Time Most Popular Egg Dish

Scrambled, poached, fried, or coddled: Every way of making eggs has a time and place. However, there’s only one egg that I could eat anytime, anywhere, with anything—and based on the recipe’s enduring popularity, I’d bet a lot of you feel the same way. I’m talking about none other than Momofuku’s Soy Sauce Eggs. From Korea’s mayak gyeran to Japan’s shoyu tamago, soy sauce-marinated eggs have long been a popular dish in many cuisines. Savory and salty, they’re typically made using the same general formula: The eggs are first medium- or hard-boiled, then marinated in soy sauce along with acid, sugar, and other aromatics, if desired. From there, you can add the eggs to pretty much anything (or eat them straight from the fridge, as I tend to do). Read More >> …

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A Genius Trick for Quicker, Creamier Oatmeal—With No Sticky Pot to Clean

The elevator pitch for the recipe is a really good one: With one little equipment swap, you can make a quicker, creamier bowl of oatmeal, and leave no stubborn pot soaking in the sink. This was how talented food stylist, author, and TV star Samantha Seneviratne hooked me at a Genius video shoot years ago. She’d picked up the trick in a test kitchen and really put it to use feeding her toddler son Artie. Ready for it? Grab a nonstick skillet for cozy oats that cook down quicker and creamier than in a deep pot (and clean up way easier). Read More >> …

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The 10 Most Popular Genius Recipes of 2022

Behold! The Food52 community’s Top 10 Genius Recipes of 2022. As I tend to report every year, cookies and cakes strutted to the top spots of the list, but there were plenty of surprises, too—the very best chicken Caesar, a duo of Hawaiian pupus, and crispy chickpeas as satisfyingly sticky and spicy as Korean fried chicken. Read More >> …

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The Fastest, Easiest Granola Skips One Very Key Ingredient

It’s not like granola was ever much trouble to make. In fact, as I wrote about the Food52’s community’s longtime favorite recipe back in 2012, “Making it at home requires pretty much only stirring.” Stir oats and goodies in a bowl, then stir a few times in the oven, then stir right on into your yogurt and mouth. Read More >> …

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This 5-Minute Tomato Sauce Has a Secret Star

This recipe is a sneak peek from our new Simply Genius cookbook—the third in the best-selling Genius family, with the simplest, most rule-breaking recipes yet. Five-minute tomato sauce sounds like it could very well be a cheat, a gimmick, or an outright lie. Read More >> …

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Epic Snickerdoodles in 20 Minutes Flat

For anyone who wants to go from zero to snickerdoodle in about 20 minutes—for any reason—this recipe is a boon. And it will be no standard snickerdoodle: This is a fancy bakery-style puddle of a cookie, with a rich belly and a sparkly chew at every edge. But for me and my ilk (a.k.a. parents of very small children), this recipe is nothing short of a miracle. Because I’ve learned I can make it with my 3-year-old by my side, from stirring to baking to blowing on cookies warm from the oven, all without ever losing her (or my) attention. Read More >> …

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Dorie Greenspan’s Magically Caramel-y Chocolate Chip Cookie

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Prolific doesn’t begin to cover Dorie Greenspan’s career. In the last 20 years, she’s written 14 cookbooks, a newspaper column, countless articles, and been in videos. In her latest cookbook Baking with Dorie, Ms. Greenspan has come up with yet another way to reinvent the chocolate chip cookie, taking it from traditional to terrific with one simple but effective baking tip. Read More >> …

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The Best Chicken Caesar Salad I’ve Ever Had

The miracle of this marinade would have been enough. Stir together a few ingredients, pour off half for a feisty Caesar dressing and save the rest to marinate your chicken? Brilliant. But then, don’t let that marinade sit for hours to soak in. Don’t even wipe any off. Just sizzle the chicken and its protective cloak in a nonstick skillet, till the oil breaks free from the marinade and the Parm and anchovy all frizzles and browns. This can only be described as Whoaaa. Read More >> …

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A Simple, Sparkly Summer Pound Cake

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Crunching through the snow in Tasmania on the cusp of spring, Thalia Ho looked down and saw a layer of green peeking through the ice. Her first thought: I shouldn’t have worn Doc Martens. Her second: Basil granita. Read More >> …

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This Chocolate Cake Makes Its Own Hot Fudge Sauce

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. I’m not looking for a dessert with sprinkles or sparkles or a well-meaning greeting piped on top. Not right now. Read More >> …

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Ultra-Crispy Roast Potatoes From a Secret Cooking Club in Indonesia

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Crispy potatoes steal attention wherever they go, and deservedly so. The contrast of hot, salty crunch to soft, steamy belly is as Pavlovian as it gets. No wonder we’ve been pre-heating our pans and fiddling with pH and chasing the singular best technique all this time. Read More >> …

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A Truly Stress-Free Pumpkin Pie for 2020

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Every Thanksgiving, somewhere around the time we realize we forgot the clincher step on the Judy Bird, my brother Billy and I also remember we need to get the pies in the oven—fast—before the turkey sets up shop. There are only five large eaters and now one small one, but that never stops Billy and me from making two pies. We need one for each set of crimping hands. Read More >> …

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The Story Behind Bryant Terry’s Marinade That Brings Vegetables to Life

The Genius Recipe Tapes is a weekly show from Food52’s new podcast network, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly Genius Recipes column and video series. This week, Kristen spoke with Bryant Terry about his Genius asparagus recipe. This week on The Genius Recipe Tapes, cookbook author, food activist, and chef Bryant Terry joins lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore. They discuss Bryant’s Atlanta (the TV show, not the city)-inspired lemon-pepper marinade, the musical pairings in Vegetable Kingdom, the technique of blanching then roasting vegetables, and how a silky tofu marinade-slash-sauce will breathe new life into any and all vegetables you may have forgotten in the crisper drawer. Read More >> …

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Genius Homemade Popcorn, the Smitten Kitchen Way

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Sometimes the real moments of genius in cooking come not from a plan well-executed, but from making good of the inedible mess in front of you. Read More >> …

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Your Top 10 Genius Recipes of 2019

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. These are the 10 Genius Recipes that stole your heart in 2019, over and over again. In some ways, the list is predictable (you really like pancakes). And in others, not so much (you also really like coconut water soup—and I’m very happy for you, because I do, too!). Read More >> …

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The Squash-Roasting Step Ottolenghi Always Skips

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. How many times have our recipes asked us to peel, halve, seed, hold our breath, and cube a butternut squash, as if the stiff hourglass were as easy to slide a knife through as a block of tofu (and we were all in a peak state to cube-ify at the end of a long day)? Read More >> …

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The Genius Chopped Salad Everyone’s (Still) Talking About

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Why does everyone keep talking about this chopped salad? Read More >> …

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The Genius No-Dairy Trick for Turning Vegetables Into Cream

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
Today: Here’s a light, bright, totally and completely vegan alternative to cream. Substitute it in every soup, sauce, side, and creamy-savory dish in your life.  Read More >> …

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This One-Ingredient Chocolate Mousse Is Pure Magic

With Genius Recipes correspondent Kristen off for a few months trying to raise a genius newborn, we’re revisiting the column’s Greatest Hits with brand-new videos—and hearing from a few special surprise guests. Wish her luck! (And keep sending those tips.)
This week, a completely forgiving, undemanding, and lovable chocolate mousse. Read More >> …

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The Internet Says This Will Be the Best Broccoli of Your Life

With Genius Recipes correspondent Kristen off for a few months trying to raise a genius newborn, we’re revisiting the column’s Greatest Hits with brand-new videos—and hearing from a few special surprise guests. Wish her luck! (And keep sending those tips.) In November 2008, Adam Roberts published a blog post with the headline “The Best Broccoli of Your Life”, about a recipe from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics. He promised that at least one person liked the broccoli more than steak. Read More >> …

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The Key to the Most Flavorful Braised Chicken on the Block

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Photo by Bobbi Lin I bet you’ve had this deflating feeling before. You get to the end of cooking and all the work and nuanced layers of flavor you thought you’d built—poof!—have gone missing. Suddenly all you taste is lemon (or cumin or rosemary), and somehow each bite tastes both too salty and not salty enough? Even teacherly insistence to taste as you go! can’t always save us from this feeling. Read More >> …

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This Feisty, Genius, 3-Ingredient Steak Sauce Is Living in Your Pantry

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook. Pretend a friend just gave you the best bottle of steak sauce you’ve ever tasted. You’d ration it, troll the internet for fancy shops that carry it, send subliminal angst to housemates who take too much or—the nerve—leave puddles behind on their plates. Read More >> …

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A New Genius Recipe for Wildly Juicy Roast Chicken—Without Preheating the Oven

My favorite roast chicken method will always be my first love, a merit badge in confident cooking. Its notoriously high oven temperature and crisp skin are the legacies of Barbara Kafka, the pioneering cooking expert who changed how we think about roasting and much more, and who sadly passed away last week at the age of 84. But I roast a lot of chickens, and Kafka never was one to take “enough” for an answer. For the first time since I latched onto her technique six years ago, I recently added another, very different roast chicken recipe to my any-old-night rotation (pre-requisites for any-old-night status: no advance prep required, an absolute minimum amount of fuss). Read More >> …

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