Good morning! Today we have for you:
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A very compelling reason to save your pickle brine
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And, tuna melts that aren’t shy
Good morning. Make any recipe four or five times and you’ll start to change it, make it your own, make it fundamentally different if somehow the same.
A number of years ago, for instance, my pal Alexa Weibel came up with a banger of a recipe for pickle-brined fried chicken sandwiches (above). I’ve made it as written probably a half-dozen times and it earns its five-star rating handily: a shatteringly crisp, deeply moist and flavorful puck of chicken thigh topped with sliced cabbage, red onion and pickle mayonnaise, on a buttered brioche bun, with plenty of hot sauce.
Featured Recipe
Pickle-Brined Fried Chicken Sandwich
I enjoyed it so much that I got to saving pickle brine in my fridge, jars of the liquid golden green left over when spears and coins have been consumed. If the muse demanded, I wanted to be ready to brine.
But I didn’t always want to fry. In high summer, particularly, I don’t thrill to the heat of that business, to the mess of it. I looked at Lex’s recipe and wondered how I could reduce it to its essence, to cook it outside, on the grill.
And so I ditched the batter. In fact, I ditched the notion of frying, and sandwiches, entirely. I put some chicken thighs — bone-in, skin-on — into a bowl of pickle brine and let them hang out for an hour or so while I got my grill going, chopped my cabbage, sliced my onion and made Lex’s pickle mayonnaise.
That’s Sunday’s plan right there, then: When I’m ready to cook, I’ll dump out the brine, pat the chicken thighs dry with a towel, oil them, and get them on the cooler side of the grill to render and crisp. I turn them often, carefully, letting them go golden, then a shade or two darker than that, before serving the thighs drizzled with the mayonnaise, and the cabbage and onion on the side, with plenty of hot sauce.
Pickle-brined grilled chicken! It’s Lex’s recipe and now kind of mine. (Goes great with mojitos.)
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
Man, is there a lot of zucchini around. Hetty Lui McKinnon brought us an ace new recipe to use it up, a zucchini butter pasta that pairs grated squash with vegetable stock so that it gets creamy and sweet before you add butter and Parmesan to make it rich and velvety. Don’t stint on the seasonings: zucchini loves salt, black pepper and plenty of lemon juice to draw out its earthy, mellow flavor.
Tuesday
Eric Kim delivered a lovely new recipe for seared scallops with tomato salad that’s just right on a work night, the tomatoes rich with umami against the simple sweetness of a perfectly seared scallop. (For which, cook a little longer than you think on one side and then hardly at all on the other.)
Wednesday
Here’s a terrific recipe for a chicken galbi noodle salad from Kay Chun, inspired by Korean galbi but made with ground chicken instead, in a sauce fragrant with garlic, ginger, scallions and sesame oil. Tossed with bell peppers, basil and noodles, it’s an easy, inexpensive weeknight feed.
Thursday
I love Ali Slagle’s recipe for horseradish-Cheddar tuna melts both for the intense rowdiness of its flavors and for the fact that I can make it in a toaster oven instead of firing up the gas one. If you can find Bays English muffins in the store instead of the Thomas’ variety, great. (Better yet, make your own.)
Friday
And then you can head into the weekend with an excellent recipe from Kenji López-Alt, for moo shu mushrooms. Kenji calls for a little bit of pork for flavor in the dish, two ounces, slivered, against more than a half-pound of mushrooms. I double that, myself, but you could easily omit the meat entirely.
There are thousands more recipes to cook this week awaiting you at New York Times Cooking. Go explore them!
And do reach out for help if you find yourself in a jam with our technology or at cross-purposes with your account. We’re at [email protected]. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write to me if you want to register a complaint or offer a compliment. I’m at [email protected]. I can’t respond to every letter. But I read each one I get.
Now, it’s a far cry from anything to do with cakes and ale, but I’ve gotten started on C.J. Box’s Highway Quartet series, starting with “Back of Beyond.” It’s nice to be out West this time of year, even if just in my imagination.
Another whodunit: “The Great French Fry Mystery” from Harley Rustad in Toronto Life.
Do read Sam Roberts’s obituary for the legendary book editor Starling Lawrence, who died last week at 82. He discovered both Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” and Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker” in the slush pile at W.W. Norton & Company.
Finally, it’s Glenn Tilbrook’s birthday. He’s 68. Here’s “Black Coffee in Bed.” I’ll be back next week.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
The post Here’s My Favorite Fried Chicken Sandwich appeared first on New York Times.
