Latest news with #NYTCooking
Elle
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Elle
Storm Reid Just Found Your New Signature Scent
Coach's latest fragrance, Coach Gold Parfum, was celebrated in style last night at a glamorous event in New York City. Celebrity ambassador Storm Reid hosted a dinner alongside the brand's creative director Stuart Vevers. Notable attendees included Camila Morrone, Luka Sabbat, Jeremy O'Harris, and Tina Leung. 'Coach Gold is beautiful—it smells like vanilla and peppercorn,' Reid told ELLE exclusively. 'It really helps you be your authentic self. You put it on, and of course you'll get compliments, but I think it naturally makes you feel good, and that's what I'm always looking for.' The scent also has notes of apple, bergamot, almond blossom, rose water, and cedar. To properly fête the fragrance, the night began with cocktails at the Nine Orchard rooftop right at golden hour. It was the perfect tribute to the scent, as the campaign centers around golden light and warmth in New York City. '[The campaign] was so beautiful,' Reid added. 'We shut down a New York street. I think it really captured who I am and the transition that I'm making from a young adult to an adult.' In the accompanying photos, Reid is bathed in gilded light and wearing an all-gold ensemble. 'Storm, you truly embody the energy of Coach with your spirit, confidence, and authenticity,' Vevers shared in his opening remarks. Guests enjoyed a dinner that included hamachi crudo with yuzu and mandarin, a salad with za'atar and crispy quinoa, beef tenderloin with bordelaise sauce, and striped bass with garlic and lemon. Each place setting was adorned with a miniature bottle of Coach Gold. A decadent raspberry and buttercream cake was served for dessert, which evoked some of the sweetness found in the new scent. Click through the gallery below to see photos from inside the event. Katie Berohn is ELLE's beauty editor. Previously, she held the same title at Who What Wear, where she was promoted from associate beauty editor. She's written for publications like The Cut, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Mashable. Her interests include fragrance, vintage shopping, hot yoga, food, travel, music, books, and attempting to make every NYT Cooking recipe. She's on the endless hunt to find the perfect shade of red lipstick.
Eater
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Eater
On Instagram, Recipe-Sharing Automation Is Here to Stay
In December, the actress Sarah Snook, best known for playing the icy Shiv Roy on Succession , commented just one word on an Instagram post by NYT Cooking: 'Meatball.' And who could argue with that? Ali Slagle's Thai-inspired chicken meatball soup looked good, and getting the recipe required only that one leave the word 'meatball' in a comment. Do so, and a message from NYT Cooking pops into your inbox in seconds, offering a direct link to the recipe. This new format for engaging readers circumvents the clunky 'link in bio' maneuver, a workaround necessitated by the photo app's incompatibility with clickable links in captions and now considered the norm for publications and creators who use the platform to promote work that lives on other websites. Recently, a slew of new add-ons — including Manychat, which NYT Cooking uses — has allowed creators to automate messages and replies in this way. Food52 uses them too, as do recipe developers with unwieldy follower counts, like Yumna Jawad of Feel Good Foodie (4.7 million) and Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen (1.8 million). Influencers and creators have taken advantage of automation like this for a while, whether it's to send followers recipes or to share shoppable affiliate links. The effect is twofold, saving individuals from the tedious act of manually responding thousands of times and guaranteeing higher engagement since it prompts people to leave comments. These tools have become common enough to have instilled a habit: Some people now attempt to trigger chatbots even when a creator doesn't use them or instructs other steps for getting recipes. 'It doesn't actually matter as a content creator/pusher whether you use the bot thing — it's so standard now that people assume you do,' Perelman of Smitten Kitchen told me in a DM. For viewers, these tools are easier and less confusing than asking people to click the link in her bio. 'The actual conversation I had with myself was, 'Am I going to ignore hundreds of comments a day like this, or am I going to cough up $100/month(!) to give people what they want? With social media, the latter is my default — just make it easy; meet people where they are.' It's true: Recipe developers and creators use these tools because Instagram isn't the best place to share their recipes. Dropping instructions and measurements into a caption is easiest for viewers, but for creators, that means losing the potential revenue and the boosts to their engagement statistics that come from someone clicking through to their blog or signing up for their newsletter. However, since it isn't in Instagram's best interest to direct people to leave the app — or empower them to do so easily — the workarounds for highlighting off-platform content are annoying. Today, many people still don't understand their way around a 'link in bio,' even though the strategy has been in use since around 2018. Thus, recipe-sharing chatbots have emerged and taken hold. Do creators like them? Not necessarily. Do users? Begrudgingly. For the people who use them, these automation tools are a new necessary evil, just like being beholden to the whims of an algorithm. At best, these tools ensure that creator and commenter both get what they want. For one, that's a click; for the other, a recipe. At worst, they undermine the social nature of social media and depersonalize the experience of sharing food online. I went to Instagram — where I post pictures of food, pointedly without recipes — to ask food creators for their thoughts on these tools. The responses were overwhelmingly negative. 'Yes I hate it if that's strong enough of a sentiment,' said one. 'HATEEEEE,' said another. 'I HATE IT,' said yet another. Non-creators felt strongly enough that they had to write in too. Words that came up often were 'scammy' and 'desperate,' and some people resented them for being too obvious a play for engagement. Indeed, in one ad, which claims 'No Follow. No Freebies,' Manychat promotes that it allows creators to 'request a follow' before they 'give away content.' A common throughline was the idea of transactionality. 'On a deeper level, as a content creator who puts a lot of thought into how I create my recipes and corresponding content, I don't want people to simply think of me as a robotic recipe mill, constantly churning out recipes for consumption,' Lisa Lin, who runs the blog Healthy Nibbles, told me. 'An automated tool seems antithetical to that sentiment,' she added. This has long been the situation with food on social media. Get enough eyes on a picture of food online and you'll certainly become familiar with the 'recipe?' commenter. Not all pictures of food warrant a recipe, and not all people who post food are recipe developers; sometimes, the point is just to be proud of a nice lunch. Yet the 'recipe?' commenter sees no distinction between the professionalism of a published recipe meticulously shot and developed, and the individual's personhood, preserved and savored. At best, it's a well-meaning follower's detour into modest annoyance; at worst, it's the prelude to a total internet stranger becoming put out when a poster doesn't provide on-demand service, tailored to every need. In 2022, The New York Times 's Tejal Rao wrote of this phenomenon, coining it the 'endless torment of the 'recipe?' guy.' The core intentions of the ''recipe?' guy' are rarely bad: Isn't a desire to imitate a compliment? Yet their assumptions speak to a sense of entitlement around recipes and theto cooks for providing them. With one word, that request turns a shared appreciation of food into a transaction, regardless of whether its creator intended for it to be or if they even benefit at all financially. 'It's a way of treating the people who share their cooking online entirely as products. But I think it's also a way of becoming a bit less human,' Rao wrote. Indeed, this use of chatbots and automation tools only accelerates the normalization of treating people who share food online like robots themselves. Automation tools reward this behavior. They make it normal to drop a one-word comment to a stranger, like a caveman grunting a demand, without any effort toward etiquette or building a rapport. They reinforce the notion that creators must always provide, as well as the problematic sentiment that whatever we see on our screens should also be available for us to have. 'I've worked so hard to build a community,' said recipe developer and creator Erin Clarkson, known as @cloudykitchen. She chooses not to use automation tools, in part because she feels they detract from the conversational vibe she works to foster on her platforms. 'A chatbot destroys comment sections,' Clarkson said. That sentiment was echoed in the responses I got on Instagram, especially from non-creators. It used to be funny or helpful to read the comments, where people made jokes, shared their candid reactions and experiences, or asked clarifying questions. Now, as people seek to trigger auto-response tools, it's useless. We might see this as yet another example of enshittification: a once-social space optimized in favor of efficiency, but ultimately resulting in a worse experience for the people using the product. To Clarkson, these tools have also made readers 'even more lazy.' Clarkson says she regularly sees readers' assumptions that she uses them, even though she doesn't. She sees those presumptive comments another way: If these people can't bother to read the captions to figure that out, then they likely won't fare well with the level of detail on her blog . Everyone wants things instantly and easily, and recipes are no exception. Still, these tools remain a 'stopgap,' Lin said. Despite her ideological hesitation to tools that encourage robotic behavior from both creators and their audiences, the reality for her and most other recipe developers and food creators is that she 'primarily earns a living on a website outside of Instagram. At the end of the day, I need eyeballs on my website,' she said. Having now subscribed to one of these tools for several months, Lin has found that they're useful in getting people to visit her website. (Even when it comes to the established link-in-bio system, 'many, many people can't be bothered.') 'If Instagram would simply allow us to embed clickable links in our captions, we would not need this ridiculous workaround to deliver links to our audience,' Lin said. 'This automated recipe-sharing ecosystem wouldn't even need to exist. But I don't see Instagram developers changing their ways any time soon, so we're all stuck in this situation.' After hearing the malaise of social media users on all sides of the issue, I returned to the prompt that started it all. Committed to testing it out, I, like Snook, commented on that NYT Cooking post. Immediately, it felt silly — not just to comment 'meatball' publicly, but also to add to the mindless cacophony of requests and to masquerade as yet another someone who didn't bother to Google or search NYT Cooking. Afterward, I felt weirdly embarrassed: What friction was I really removing from my life by commenting? Sure, the recipe ended up in my inbox immediately, but then again, my mess of DMs is where useful information goes to die. The instant access didn't make me any more likely to make the recipe, and in fact, it would take me an awkwardly long time just to find the link in my inbox if I were in need of it while planning out dinner. I thought about all the recipes that have piled up in my saves on Instagram and in my screenshots folder. So many of them came to me so easily, offered up by way of too-knowing algorithms, and yet, I've never made most of them either. We now have access to so much information that we take its abundance — and the work that went into creating it — for granted. We see recipes as commodities that we are owed by virtue of us simply having seen them, even when we don't have any intention of following through. I thought about the technique that always works better for me anyway: just googling ingredients I have and then seeing how other people have already put them together. It makes me think a little more, of course, but especially in the age of AI, the most humanizing thing is to do a little of the work yourself — to have to think through a problem. I end up with something that's all mine; not something anyone willing to just comment 'meatball' can reproduce. The freshest news from the food world every day
New York Times
27-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
4 Ways to Make Better Soup Fast
Cook smarter, not harder. These soups take only 40 minutes or less to prepare, but you wouldn't know it from their robust flavor. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. By Ali Slagle Ali Slagle is a recipe developer and regular contributor to NYT Cooking who specializes in low-effort, high-reward recipes. She is also the author of the cookbook 'I Dream of Dinner (so You Don't Have To).' Published Feb. 27, 2025 Updated Feb. 27, 2025 The steam, smells and stirs of a long-simmered soup can be therapeutic, sure, but so can a warm bowl of soup that's on the table as soon as possible. Making soup doesn't need to take hours to be soothing and fortifying, as these recipes for classic soups, stews and other brothy numbers prove. Each employs a smart trick that delivers deep flavors in fewer than 40 minutes. You'll still cozy up to something delicious and fill your house with good aromas. It'll just be sooner rather than later. Sizzling sturdy vegetables and blooming spices in fat creates an aromatic before any liquid hits the pot. David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. To build a sturdy foundation, sizzle big-impact ingredients like chopped vegetables, cured meats, dried spices or pastes in fat before adding any liquid. This step rids the ingredients of flavorless liquid, wakes up slumbering spices and intensifies the savoriness of vegetables and proteins. For example, in this vegan chili, Jocelyn Ramirez builds an intense base by browning chopped mushrooms, onion, hot and sweet peppers, and garlic. Then, she adds a mix of dried spices and chiles. In the jar, their scent is muted. But after they bloom in the hot oil, it fills the room. That mix's full might puts the chile in this chili. Bloom a few choice ingredients to not muddy the waters. This version of shiro, a silky chickpea stew beloved in Ethiopia and Eritrea, starts by simmering 10 cloves of garlic, an onion and two whole tablespoons of berbere, a red chile-based spice blend, in a shallow pool of oil. That fat then becomes infused with their flavors and carries them through the broth. Remember that the fat contributes flavor, too. Butter or olive oil are often go-tos, but to create the toasty nuttiness essential to panang curry, Naz Deravian warms Thai red curry paste, chopped peanuts and spices in thick coconut cream. Once the liquid from the cream evaporates, the aromatics sizzle in the remaining coconut oil, staining it bright red. The fat then carries their essence throughout the curry, much farther than they could have traveled on their own. Black Bean Chili With Mushrooms | Shiro (Ground-Chickpea Stew) | Panang Curry You need only water to start your journey to soup. But staples like broth or stock, brines, dairy and other flavorful liquids get you to bolder soups, faster. Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Samin Nosrat, the chef and author of 'Salt Acid Fat Heat,' wrote that 'if you have water around, you can have soup.' Water is essential, but pantry and fridge staples like broths, stocks, dairy, wine, pickle brines and canned tomatoes offer far more flavor — and faster. Broth and stock can be the backbone to any soup. Keep frozen homemade broth, store-bought box broth or bouillon on hand. Chicken, beef and mushroom are all great, as is dashi, either homemade from seaweed and bonito flakes or from instant granules. It contributes enough savoriness to keep a breakfast udon soup satisfying but not so rich that you'll want to crawl back under the covers. Milk of the dairy or coconut variety can add silkiness without heft. Milk provides a sweet backdrop to the cheese, eggs and bread in Colombian changua. Moqueca, a Brazilian seafood stew, is buoyant thanks to juicy tomatoes and peppers and the sea spray that seeps from cod and prawns, while coconut milk gives it lusciousness and a floral undertone. Breakfast Udon | Changua (Colombian Bread and Egg Soup) | Moqueca (Brazilian Seafood Stew) In lieu of more time, ingredients like potatoes, rice, bread and beans can add body to broths. Evan Sung for The New York Times A soup that hasn't simmered long enough might be so thin, it drips and dribbles like water. For one that's just thick enough, you could reduce the liquid for longer. Or, quicker yet, pick a recipe that incorporates a starchy ingredient, such as bread, potatoes, pasta, beans, lentils, nuts, tortillas or rice. As they cook, they'll add body to the soup. Rice is an especially gentle addition. The tender grains will fray at the edges, releasing starch as in Melissa Clark's avgolemono-inspired lemony egg soup with escarole, which is so creamy, you might think it has cream. But it's so light that it couldn't. Red lentils are another good choice, since their starches easily and quickly dislodge into their cooking liquid. That's why Priya Krishna's everyday dal turns stony red lentils, turmeric and just the right amount of water into a soothing porridge in only eight minutes. And two starches are better than one. In this sopa de fideo y frijoles, thin noodles and puréed beans simmer with chicken broth, canned tomatoes, crisp chorizo and other aromatics for just 12 minutes, but the result has the stewy consistency and deep flavor of a much longer game. Lemony Egg Soup With Escarole | Everyday Dal | Sopa de Fideo y Frijoles con Chorizo (Fideo and Bean Soup With Chorizo) The difference between a good soup and a great soup often lies in a final hit of acid, be that with a squeeze of lemon, a dollop or sour cream or a splash of vinegar. David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. A finishing squeeze of lemon or lime, dribble of vinegar, dollop of sour cream or yogurt, or scatter of pickled onions or jalapeños teases out the nuances you so diligently, if expeditiously, created in the pot. Acid also balances richness and enhances the overall flavor. Its addition might even win you a chili cook-off. Lemon or lime juice beams sunshine onto everything it touches, sweetly lifting and lightening. Millie Peartree's fish curry leans heavily on Jamaican curry powder, which is filled with grounding spices like turmeric and allspice. Wake up those earthy flavors with a final squeeze of lime, as well as fresh scallions and cilantro. A teaspoon of vinegar can transform a ho-hum soup into so much more. Intensifying chicken broth for wonton soup, for example, might just take a few drops of vinegar, soy sauce and chile oil. Top bowls with tangy garnishes. While sour cream and Cheddar add creaminess to baked potato soup, they're also sneaky sources of acidity, cutting through the richness of the potatoes, milk and bacon for more balanced bites. Coconut Fish Curry | Wonton Soup | Baked Potato Soup
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
It's Little Treat O'Clock
These homemade sweets are ready in 25 minutes or less. Make yourself a sticky toffee pudding in no time at all with this easy microwave recipe. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. By Ali Slagle Ali Slagle is a recipe developer and regular contributor to NYT Cooking who specializes in low-effort, high-reward recipes. She is also the author of the cookbook 'I Dream of Dinner (so You Don't Have To).' Published Feb. 13, 2025 Updated Feb. 13, 2025 That familiar feeling hits: the craving for a little something sweet. But it's late, or the emergency chocolate stash went poof, or you're really 'not a baker.' It's going to be OK because you probably already have the ingredients you need to rustle together one of these homemade treats. You can make yourself a warm cake faster than it takes an oven to heat, a joyful bite of Funfetti (sort of) when there seems little reason to blow out candles, a jammy fruit crisp when summer is far, far away, and a chewy chocolate-chip cookie without creaming butter or sifting flour — and without butter or flour, period. The four recipes below are far from projects; they serve just one or two people, take five minutes to half an hour, and skip the mixer in favor of a bowl and spoon. They're gentle, lazy, and, much like petting dogs, doing the crossword and saying thank you, small ways to sweeten any day. Beloved in Australia and New Zealand, fairy bread can be a Funfetti-like sweet treat. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Triangles of untoasted white bread covered with margarine or butter and 'hundreds and thousands' (those are sprinkles stateside), fairy bread is a much-loved treat often served at children's birthday parties in Australia or New Zealand. Even if you didn't grow up with it, fairy bread might still taste familiar because the sugary-waxy sprinkles, tender crumb, butter and vanilla are reminiscent of Funfetti cake. These simple cookies are rich with nut butter and miso paste for a perfect salty-sweet balance. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Forget what you thought you knew about making a great chocolate-chip cookie. This two-step recipe delivers crisp edges, gooey middles and rich salted-caramel flavor with any nut or seed butter, brown sugar, miso paste and an egg. These may be dairy- and gluten-free, but they're not lacking in any way. Microwaving the topping while the filling simmers on the stovetop balances this crisp's texture. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Sink into this berry crisp any night of the week, no matter the season. The topping clumps and crisps in the microwave, and fresh or frozen berries simmer on the stovetop until jammy. Because the two elements are cooked separately, the topping won't get soggy, delivering a brown sugary crunch to every bite. Ice cream, sour cream or whipped cream are all great on top of this gooey cake. Kelly Marshall for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Feel the warmth of this ready-in-10-minutes take on sticky toffee pudding cake as soon as you spoon out a bite. You don't have to top the soft, date-flecked cake with vanilla ice cream, sour cream or whipped cream, but the cold dairy swirling with the warm, glistening toffee sauce is something special. Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram , Facebook , YouTube , TikTok and Pinterest . Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice .
New York Times
10-02-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
The Best Steak Dinner Is One You Make at Home
Choose the right cut of meat and follow these easy tips to prepare steak au poivre for two. Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Brett Regot. By Alexa Weibel Alexa Weibel is a senior staff editor and recipe developer at NYT Cooking, and she was previously an editor at Rachael Ray magazine and a restaurant line cook. Born in Paris, she's inclined to add extra butter, but she also enjoys exploring the challenges of vegan, budget and weeknight cooking. Published Feb. 10, 2025 Updated Feb. 10, 2025 Like many treasured French dishes, steak au poivre abides by certain tenets: It begins with a piece of beef that is crusted in crushed peppercorns and ends with a glossy, peppery pan sauce. But otherwise, it's shaped by the choices of its cook. Depending on where you dine out, you might envision steak au poivre as a cozy bistro meal or a steakhouse splurge — but it's also the kind of restaurant dish that you can achieve at home (for a fraction of the price). Whether you're cooking to impress a Valentine or to treat yourself, this thoughtful recipe will ensure a perfect, stress-free dinner. Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Brett Regot. Selecting a richly marbled cut of beef is its own insurance against subpar steak — it's more forgiving if it's slightly overcooked. Lean filet mignon was once favored for its tenderness, but a boneless rib-eye or strip steak, marbled with fat, has infinitely more flavor, and a higher surface area to hold more toasted peppercorns. Cooking one large rib-eye to share looks more lavish on the plate — and it's easier to cook one steak perfectly than two. It's hard to say whether a fattier cut of beef even strays from tradition — Anthony Bourdain favored a pavé, while Jacques Pépin suggests a shell steak. Even the origins of the dish are unclear. 'Since it's a flashy dish, with Cognac flambé, it feels more Parisian than Norman to me and more 1920s Paris to be specific,' said Maryann Tebben, the author of 'Savoir-Faire: A History of Food in France.' 'But this may be one of those dishes that is very hard to pin down, since pepper sauces have been popular in French cooking since the Middle Ages.' Crushing peppercorns is a tedious task; there's simply no way around it. But, as the central flavor of steak au poivre (which translates to pepper steak), it deserves care. A mortar and pestle do a solid job of containing the pesky errant pieces — peppercorns pop like popcorn when crushed — but pulverize them unevenly. For uniformly cracked pieces, place the peppercorns in a large rimmed sheet pan and crush small clusters with the flat side of a chef's knife. Black peppercorns are traditional, though you could certainly swap in a portion of white, green or pink peppercorns, or even whole Sichuan pepper. All varieties must be freshly crushed, as store-bought cracked pepper tastes dull and dusty by comparison. After the peppercorn-crusted steak is seared, a simple pan sauce is created by softening shallots in the pan's fat, then adding a splash of alcohol for verve. (Cognac is preferred, but brandy tastes just as good.) Julia Child famously feared flambé, but you can bypass any potential flames by simply deglazing the pan off the heat, allowing the Cognac to dislodge any browned bits with the burner off. The difference between a loose sauce that runs on the plate and one that glazes your meat is strictly time: Add some stock and allow it to reduce until the sauce becomes nappante, or thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. A spoonful of butter adds a silkiness that balances the pepper's bite, and heavy cream binds it into a satiny sauce so that doesn't break or separate. Lastly, plating matters: Fanning your sliced steak on top of the sauce feels more modern — and looks more refined — than dousing the meat in sauce. The technique for steak au poivre is relatively simple, the results elegant. With the right cut of meat, and some modest tweaks, the classic dish feels timeless.
