Go for the gold: Your New Favorite Sauce

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Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Your New Favorite Sauce

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Yotam Ottolenghi brought us a smart new recipe this week for a giant couscous cake with roasted pepper sauce (above). What’s great about it is, you can use that amazing sauce on anything you like. You could spoon it on pan-fried tofu, Yotam wrote, or pair it with leftover meatballs. You could eat it with eggs in the morning, or with a cheese sandwich at lunch.

What I’d like to do with it? Make pizza, no-recipe recipe style, topping the dough with the roasted pepper sauce along with some sliced onions, black olives and a handful of shredded mozzarella. Maybe smoked mozzarella, to accentuate the punch of the sauce? Maybe both? Can’t lose.

If you’re not up for making that sauce and pizza dough for dinner tonight, take a look at Ali Slagle’s recipe for crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter, which comes together quickly with store-bought gnocchi. It would be an ace thing to make and eat in advance of Melissa Clark’s new recipe for a maple-pecan galette with fresh ginger, a kind of deconstructed pie.

But don’t knock actual pie. My daughter and I collaborated on one recently, a school-night version of Melissa’s double apple pie in which I tried a new technique with the dough, putting the flour in an aluminum mixing bowl in the freezer for a half-hour before using a box grater to cut delicate little shavings of frozen butter into it. This technique resulted in the flakiest pie dough I’ve maybe ever made. Next up, this weekend, tourtière.

And how about spaghetti al limone some night soon? Or this chickpea stew with orzo and mustard greens?

I dig this spicy slow-roasted salmon with cucumbers and feta, as well as this sheet-pan paprika chicken with tomatoes and Parmesan.

Also these stir-fried green beans with pork and chiles, not to mention 90 percent of these 32 ways to eat eggs for dinner.

Thousands more recipes to cook right now await you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look at them and see what makes you hungry. Then save the recipes that appeal. Rate the ones you’ve cooked. And leave notes on them, if you’d like to, either for yourself or for the benefit of your fellow subscribers. (Yes, you need to be a subscriber to do that. Subscriptions support our work. They allow it to continue. If you haven’t already, I hope you will think about subscribing today.)

And we will be standing by to help if anything goes sideways with your cooking or our technology. Just write to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com and someone will get back to you. (You can always write to me at foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with cakes or ale, but here’s new fiction from Curtis Sittenfeld for you: “A for Alone,” in The New Yorker.

For The Paris Review, Katy Kelleher went deep on the color russet — “the color of November in Maine” — and it’s just great.

Finally, check out these photographs of the State of Massachusetts, in The Atlantic. Not one Dunkin’! I’ll be back on Friday.