Keto

Lamb shoulder is a bony cut of meat that easily can be turned into a boneless roast by any butcher, including those who work in supermarkets. The result is a round, tied piece of meat with lovely crevices into which you can stick a simple seasoning mixture like garlic and parsley. This is a traditional combination for lamb, and rightly so, because the flavors marry so well. If you have them on hand, add two tablespoons of crushed coriander seeds (put them in a plastic bag and pound gently with a rolling pin, rubber mallet, or like object) to the parsley: they add a distinctive and alluring floral note to the dish.

There may be no meat better for grilling than boneless leg of lamb. It cooks reasonably quickly, usually in less than half an hour, but still develops an irresistibly crunchy crust. Even better, that crust can be flavored in minutes before it is cooked with any of a dozen combinations of seasonings. Marinating is unnecessary, as the meat itself has exquisite flavor and really needs no more than salt. The leg’s irregular shape virtually guarantees that every eater will be happy—lamb is the only meat good at every stage of doneness. When the thickest parts have cooked to rare, the ends will be well done, the parts in between medium. Boneless legs sold at supermarkets are sometimes wrapped in an elastic net to form them into a round roast. For grilling, remove this so the meat lies flat. If the larger end of the meat is three or more inches thick, you might cut a flap to make that lobe thinner and flatter so that it cooks more evenly. Using a sharp, thin-bladed knife and working from the side of the lobe that faces the rest of the meat, make a horizontal cut about halfway down from top to bottom, most of the way through, and fold the meat out; in essence, you are butterflying the butterfly.

Rack of lamb—a row of unseparated rib chops—has been a restaurant feature for so long that many people assume there is some trick to cooking it. But there is not. You trim the rack of excess fat and roast it at high heat. Salt and pepper are good seasonings, there are a number of quick tricks for adding flavor to the exterior, and you can of course make a quick reduction sauce before serving. But these are options and by my standards unnecessary: the distinctive flavor of true lamb is an uncommonly fine treat. Getting true lamb is part of the problem; the mild flavor of baby lamb has a more universal appeal than the gamier flavor of older meat. Be sure to tell the butcher you want a rack that weighs less than two pounds. Because many restaurants offer a whole rack as a serving (six to eight ribs!), many people believe that to be a standard serving size. But there are almost no circumstances where even a small rack will not serve two people; a larger rack can accommodate three and sometimes four. To serve more, just cook two racks at a time; they will fit comfortably side by side in most roasting pans. I like to cut each rack in half before roasting. This makes for slightly more uniform cooking and also relieves you from separating each rack into individual ribs before serving. The roasting itself is child’s play. Your oven should be hot (it should also be well insulated, because high heat produces smoke). Cut the rack most of the way down between the ribs so that more meat is exposed to intense heat and therefore becomes crisp. (“Frenching” the ribs—scraping the meat off the bones to leave them naked and neater in appearance—is counterproductive; the crisp meat on the bones is one of the joys of rack of lamb.) Unless you’re highly experienced, the most reliable method of judging doneness is with an instant-read thermometer; 125°F in the center will give you medium-rare meat.

Chimichurri is a simple Argentinean steak sauce made almost entirely from parsley, with huge amounts of chopped garlic and red pepper. In spirit, it’s not unlike pesto, but because everything is hand-chopped rather than ground or mashed, it has a bit more chew to it. And its powerful ingredients set it apart, making it the perfect complement for mild-tasting but meaty tenderloin.

Serve the meat with a variety of garnishes, which you and your guests can combine any way you like.

Wrapping one food with another is familiar, especially if meat, cheese, or vegetables make up the filling—think of ravioli, stuffed cabbage, or egg rolls. Making meat the wrapping is a nice role reversal, a neat twist that is extraordinary enough to allow a simple preparation to wow a crowd. Such is the case with the Japanese negima, in which beef is wrapped around chives or scallions, then brushed with soy sauce and grilled.

The easiest way to make compound butter is to mince all the flavorings and then cream them and the butter together with a fork, just as you would butter and sugar in making a cake. But if your butter is ice-cold (or frozen), use a small food processor to combine all the ingredients quickly; there will be some waste here, as you’ll never get all the butter out of the container and blade, but the process will take just seconds. Skirt steak, the long, thin band of wonderfully marbled muscle (actually the cow’s diaphragm), was not easy to get even a couple of years ago but is now almost ubiquitous. It ranges as high as ten dollars a pound, but can often be found for well under half that, especially at supermarkets. It’s a moist, juicy steak, but not exactly tender—a little chewier than good strip steak—and does not respond well to overcooking. If someone insists on having it cooked beyond medium-rare, take no responsibility.

Flank steak, more than most others, is tolerant of medium doneness, but in any case it must be thinly sliced. Slicing meat against the grain is especially important for tougher cuts like flank and skirt: it cuts the long, tough muscles into shorter, easier-to-chew pieces, giving the impression of tenderness. If you have a garden or a windowsill, both rosemary and lavender are easy to grow and maintain (and the small investment you will make in those plants will save you from paying the king’s ransom supermarkets charge for fresh herbs). If you can’t find any lavender, up the rosemary to 2 tablespoons. In any case, do not substitute dried herbs for fresh in this recipe: they will rob it of its charm.

I had something like this on a visit to Bangkok, chicken with a creamy but spicy lime sauce. At first I thought the rich texture had come from a pan reduction or even a béchamel-like sauce, but I detected the faint taste of coconut and realized it was little more than coconut milk spiked with lime. With canned coconut milk, it can be made in less than a half hour.

This is just one of several great poultry dishes from the area around Lyon, a region whose famous poulet de Bresse was long considered by many to be the best chicken in the world. Chef Paul Bocuse learned poulet au vinaigre as a youth and, some years later, showed considerable audacity by putting what is essentially a peasant dish on the menu of his Michelin three-star restaurant just outside of Lyon. He insisted that it was neither how much work nor the cost of ingredients that determined the worthiness of a dish, but how it tasted. Bravo.

Here’s a method that takes less than an hour and results in a crisp bird from which nearly all of the fat has been rendered. It’s accomplished by the simple procedure of cutting up the duck, then cooking it, covered, on top of the stove. Served hot or at room temperature, the bird is crisp, tender, and far more flavorful than any chicken.

Sauteed chicken should be crisp, moist, and flavorful, and you can accomplish this easily. Use a large skillet, or two smaller ones, because crowding the chicken pieces prevents them from browning. There should be sufficient room in the skillet so that the pieces barely touch each other, and they should certainly not overlap. This recipe contains no added fat—the bird provides plenty of its own—so the skillet should be nonstick, or at least well seasoned.

Chicken Al Mattone as it’s rightfully called, is the simplest and best method for producing crisp, delicious skin and wonderfully moist meat. All you need is a split chicken and two ovenproof skillets or a skillet and a couple of bricks or rocks. (The weight serves two purposes: it partially covers the chicken, which helps it retain moisture, and it ensures that the flesh of the chicken remains in contact with the skillet, which encourages browning.) Once covered, the chicken is transferred to a very hot oven to finish cooking. Handling the hot, heavy pan takes two hands—be careful.

Branches of rosemary are ideal for this dish, especially if you live in a Mediterranean climate where rosemary grows in shrubs. You can slide the food right onto them (in the direction of the needles, so as not to dislodge them), and they flavor it brilliantly; but so does some rosemary tucked in among the chunks of food. If you skewer on wood or metal skewers, turning will be made easier if you use two sticks in parallel for each skewer, separating them by about a half inch; you can also buy two-pronged metal skewers that do the trick nicely.

Properly grilled chicken is a pleasure, even when you dress it with nothing but lemon juice—or even salt. But if you make this Ligurian-inspired full-flavored dipping sauce based on anchovies, you can turn the simple grilled chicken into something really special. And the sauce can be used for whatever else you’re serving at the same time. When you’re grilling the chicken, don’t build too hot a fire and keep part of the grill cool—don’t put any fuel under it at all—so you can move the pieces over to it in the (likely) event of flare-ups. And you can broil it if you prefer: adjust the broiling rack so that it is about four to six inches from the heat source and turn the meat as it browns.

Once in martinique I ate at a restaurant that was so simple that almost all of the food—chicken, tuna, quail, pork, and veal kidneys—was grilled. Not only that; it was all served with the same thin, powerful sauce, made of lime, scallion, chile, and garlic, with loads of allspice. It was the allspice that made the sauce unusual, but there was more to it than that: the garlic and scallion looked uncooked but had lost their harshness and become easily digestible. Furthermore, the base of the sauce was not oil, but water. With the help of a friend who was born on Martinique, I was able to duplicate the sauce at home. It’s called sauce au chien, which means “dog sauce” (a fact I chose not to research too aggressively). And it’s great with almost anything grilled.

Small turkey breasts of about three pounds are perfectly adequate for a party of four or so, and larger ones—they’re available in sizes of six pounds and even more—can be counted on to serve about ten, especially if you make a few side dishes. The greatest advantage of roasting a turkey breast in lieu of a whole bird is that you can produce white meat that is truly moist—as opposed to the dried-out white meat that is the nearly inevitable result of roasting a whole turkey until the legs are cooked through. Perfectly cooked white meat (all you need is an instant-read thermometer) does not require tons of gravy to become edible, although you may like to serve it with a light sauce.

Roast chicken is one of the most basic dishes of home cooking, but there are a couple of challenges: You need high heat to brown the skin, but ultra-high heat may burn it. You need to cook the legs through before the more delicate breast dries out. And, if you’re interested in minimalist cooking, you must accomplish these things without a lot of fuss, such as turning the chicken over three times, searing it on top of the stove before roasting, or constantly adjusting the oven temperature. Plus, you want to do it all as fast as possible. Well, here it is: fast, nearly foolproof roast chicken.

What turns people off to roasting duck—its thick layer of subcutaneous fat—is actually its best feature, one that makes it a nearly foolproof dish. The fat keeps the meat juicy even when it’s well done—a distinct advantage because the breast is best medium-rare, but the legs must be cooked through, or nearly so, to be palatable. In fact, duck is so difficult to roast badly that all experienced cooks seem to claim their procedure is the best. Having tried many methods, I can say that the results are all about the same. So I usually rely on the one presented here, which I believe is the easiest way to guarantee a succulent but beautifully browned bird. One challenge: a roast duck can easily be finished by two people. If you want to serve four, roast two or plan on a lot of side dishes.

Cooking in packages requires a small leap of faith to determine that the food is done, because once you open the packages you want to serve them. This method works well.